Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle -- The Science of Decline (2)

All these were reinforced  in the second  half of thecentury  by Darwinian  notions of biological preselection . It was not simply that  men were unequal,  but  that  inequalities  were  hereditary.  Not meritocracy but predetermined elitism traced the destinies of men and societies. So what  was the  use of effort? Degeneration lay in wait for the predestined, and the social problem confirmed  the personal threat.  Revulsion and  fear:  of  masses "democratized  and  syphilitic,"29   of  democracy, assimilated  to  mediocrity,  to  mongrelization, and eventually  to "degeneration."30  They  run  into  each other   as  through   a set  of  communicating vessels.

The  1840s  had seen the  popularization of social studies  that documented  and dramatized widespread  misery and its pathological  causes: malady and crime.  Like malformation and  mortality,  delinquency  and madness became high priorities of public debate,  the more challenging for  being  treated  as contagious illnesses for which  there had to be a cure.  What  Roger  Williams  calls the  medical  wellsprings  of  despair could  affect more  than  his exceptional  heroes.  The  guilt  and  anxiety they produced had social consequences, symbolized  by the new professorial  chairs  set  up  to  study  insanity  ( 1878)   and  the diseases of  the nervous  system  ( 1882) and  reaffirmed  by the data  which,  beginning with the 1880s, compulsory primary schooling forced on the attention of the public.31   Hordes  of "abnormal" children,  revealed by new surveys and statistics,  testified to an abnormal  society, about  to  be overwhelmed  by its misfits, and condemned it as degenerate.  Nor did the unexpected scale of physical disgrace  revealed by the bustling  activity in the  realm of  public  education  and  hygiene  affect the disinherited alone.

The  confusion was  natural  and easy between that hysteria  of  the lower classes studied and  publicized by

Professor Charcot  of the Faculty of Medicine . . . and  more  fashionable  neuroses.  One  reinforced the  other.   In  1880   an  American  medical  man,  Dr.  George   Miller . Beard, had published a paper on "Nervous  Exhaustion (neurasthenia)," which, supplemented by additional  chapters  on American Nervousness (New  York,  1881), was  soon  translated   into  French  (1882).  This "nerve  weakness,"  to  which  housewives and young  adults  appeared particularly  prone,  manifested  itself in physical and  mental  lassitude, listlessness, lack of  energy  and  enthusiasm, and  a  general  sense  of weariness.  What  the  naive and  the  uninstructed  might  take  for  the familiar lineaments  of boredom  were being  promoted  into  a neurosis appropriate to the  better-off, and one  whose symptoms  admirably  fit the pathology  of the decade.