our lower bellies, ever filled by a ceaseless voracity, bulge out overloaded, our legs are nerveless, and our arms show the signs.85
The strapping Peter Paul would have none of this “flabbiness” for himself. He was known to rise at 4:00 a.m. and eat little throughout the day so that his stomach and its digestion would not get in the way of his intellectual and artistic endeavors.
The affectations of these artists, philosophers, and scientists may not have represented those of the average seventeenth-century man, but they slowly came to represent those of the typical intellectual. By the mid-eighteenth century, the archetype of the thin and refined male student and thinker was widespread, particularly in England. Still, sentiments about male slimness were divided. While some people continued to believe that a lean physique was a laudable display of a man’s ambition and dedication to higher pursuits, others claimed that it represented a moribund seriousness and a complete abandonment of healthy living.86 Thus, during the seventeenth century, when fatness began its slow decline into disrepute, it was concerns over ascetics and not aesthetics that drove the distaste for fat male bodies.
* * *
At the tail end of the seventeenth century came another important innovation by a French intellectual: racial categorization. François Bernier developed the first racial classification scheme in the Western world. Like the ideas of Descartes, the ideas of Bernier were taken up swiftly and with relish among English intellectuals.
The creation of a racial classification system had a palpable impact on conceptions of whiteness and blackness. For while intellectual men had reserved for themselves the vaunted capacity of reason, the new and rapidly spreading ideas about race suggested that rationality was, in fact, an inherent quality of white persons. This rationality was now to apply to all aspects of life, including aesthetic ideals.
As we will see, it was from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century that the inception and specification of ideas about white and black “races” changed yet again the understanding of the relative appearance of white and black women. For if black women were transformed from voluptuous bodily exemplars in the sixteenth century to little, low, and foul in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century their presumed racial proclivities (including that of irrational and unrestrained eating) would transform them into the unsightly—even “monstrously”—fat.
PART II
Race, Weight, God, and Country
3
The Rise of the Big Black Woman
François Bernier was the salt of the earth. His parents were tillers of the soil in a small farming town in northwestern France. From these humble origins, he would go on to make a significant contribution to Western intellectual history. He would be the first person in the world to create a system of human classification based on “race.”
The field of what is today known as “race science” took off during the long eighteenth century, a period that encompasses the High Enlightenment and the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.1 France and England were cultural and colonial powerhouses during the era. Learned men from these two nations generated a significant portion of the racial scientific theories.
Though Bernier was first to market, scholars have typically overlooked or diminished the significance of his racial theories. But Bernier’s intervention in the field of race science was consequential. His work reveals the centrality of concerns about feminine aesthetics to race-making projects since their inception. That is, integral to Bernier’s and many subsequent racial classification systems was the attempt to pin down fundamental physical differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, with an intense focus on the women in various categories. These differences were to serve as proof of European superiority. In this way, whereas women’s physicality had been largely outside the social distinctions that were made between Europeans and Africans in the Renaissance, by the eighteenth century it was treated as foundational to them. The racialized female body became legible, a form of “text”2 from which racial superiority and inferiority were read.
Bernier was born in 1625 in a small town in Anjou, France. Upon the death of his parents he came under the guardianship of his uncle, a priest.3 At the age of fifteen, he moved to Paris to attend the Collège de Clermont, and it was there that this son of a farmer encountered the high gloss of the French elite, inhabiting the same adolescent social world as the celebrated French playwright Molière. At the Collège, Bernier became most closely acquainted with the notorious opponent of Descartes, the priest and philosopher Pierre Gassendi.4 In the throbbing Parisian metropolis, Bernier trained under Gassendi in philosophy and physiology. Together, the two traveled to the south of France, where Bernier earned a medical degree from the University of Montpellier in just three months. The degree, however, carried the somewhat suspect stipulation that his fast-tracked medical knowledge was not to be exercised in the French commonwealth.
Bernier then set out for different pastures. In late 1658, by then in his early thirties, he landed in India, where he would remain for the next twelve years, serving as the private physician first for Prince Dara Shikoh and then for Dara’s brother and rival for the throne, Aurangzeb. The intimate details of these events and his role as a foreign witness are described in Bernier’s book Travels in the Mogul Empire.5 His travelogue mirrors the narratives written by earlier Europeans on their treks beyond the continent. What distinguished Bernier’s account, however, was that he chose not just to describe men and women from various locales in India but to sort them based on their skin color. According to Bernier, for example, “To be a Mogol it is enough that a foreigner have a white face and profess Mahometanism.” This group was compared to the Franguis, or white Christians from Europe, and to the Indous, “whose complexion is brown.”6
Bernier did not see himself as having invented these distinctions. In fact, he imagines himself an astute interpreter of existing social categories in India, in which he sees skin color as integral. In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, he marvels at the supposed Indian and Mogul fixation on biological purity and color, using the term “race” to mark distinctions between the various subgroups.7
Bernier had not invented the term “race,” which had been in use since the Middle Ages.8 But he was using it in a decidedly different fashion from those who came before. Bernier used the word to designate the clusters of people he encountered who varied by religion, region, and especially hue. The centrality of skin color in his early conception of race signaled a divergence from the ideas of theorists who preceded him. Still, in terms of Bernier’s racial theorizing, this was only the beginning.
In the 1670s Bernier left India and returned to Paris, finding himself in a city embroiled in debates and demonstrations about one of the most pressing issues of his day: slavery. France had entered the transatlantic slave trade nearly a century after England, due in large part to religious infighting between the Catholic establishment and the Protestant Huguenots. The French slave trade was formally authorized by the monarchy in 1648. In 1664 Louis XIV granted Jean-Baptiste Colbert, along with his French West India Company, the sole rights to the transport of slaves from Africa to the French colonies in the Americas.9
The French slave trade was only a few years old by the time Bernier returned to his homeland, and it was experiencing considerable growing pains. Since 1315, the country had maintained what was known as a Freedom Principle, which stipulated that no person could be held as a forced laborer on French soil. This decree, however, said nothing about the practice of slavery in the French colonies, which the monarchy willingly allowed. The king thus found himself in the dubious position of denouncing slavery in the kingdom while issuing royal decrees sanctioning its practice in his colonies. The Janus-faced nature of these polices proved untenable. By the late seventeenth century,
