Many petitioned for their freedom the instant they set foot in the country. The king’s position was to set free slaves seeking freedom within the country throughout the seventeenth century. This practice collided with the 1685 royal decree known as the Code Noir (Black Code), a law that regulated slavery in the colonies and served as a resounding renewal of colonial policies that condemned Africans to a lifetime of servitude. This inevitably led to ever more Africans seeking a taste of the vaunted but elusive French freedom that was being denied them in the overseas territories.10
Bernier was well aware of the tenuous political situation that slavery posed. He had a personal relationship with Colbert. Moreover, since his return to Paris, Bernier had become a member of Madame de la Sablière’s salon, which was peopled with Louis XIV’s courtiers and other nobles. One of the topics commonly up for debate was whether some groups of mankind were a different species than Europeans and thus natural slaves.11 This was not the first time Bernier would have encountered the question of whether “natural slaves” existed. These claims can be traced to the origin story crafted by Isaac la Peyrère, who in the 1650s conjectured that Gentiles were pre-Adamites, born before and somehow superior to the Jews, who descended from the biblical Adam. Peyrère’s theory was deemed heretical by many in the 1650s, but in the context of the rising slave trade and the profits it generated, many Frenchmen were to soften on this position.
Scholars disagree as to whether Bernier himself was a polygenist, a believer that the human races are of different origins.12 But what is evident is that his travels made him appear to others on the intellectual circuit as an expert on the topic of “alien” peoples. These attitudes, along with Bernier’s studies in physiology, ignited an idea. He resolved to develop his own theory of humanity, one that could encompass and explain the tremendous biodiversity he had encountered on his travels. And in line with his medical training, his theory would be the first to achieve this goal by identifying fundamental physiological differences among swatches of humankind.
In 1684 Bernier sketched out his theory in a letter to Madame de la Sablière that bore the rather grand title “A New Division of the Earth.” In this three-page manifesto, he explained his rationale for developing this new model of humankind: “Hitherto, geographers have divided the Earth only into different countries or regions therein; but my own observations … have given me the idea of dividing it another way.”13 The problem with the traditional, geographic dissection of the globe, he concluded, was that it failed to acknowledge the tremendous physical distinctions found between peoples living in diverse parts of the world. In Bernier’s estimation, “Men are almost all distinct from one another as far as the external form of their bodies is concerned, especially their faces, according to the different areas of the world they live in.”14 And while globe-trotting men such as himself could “often distinguish unerringly one nation from another,” he nevertheless found that common unities of physical form across national boundaries warranted a new system for classifying mankind, a system he called “Types of Race.”15
As noted, Bernier had not coined the term “race.” But with his “New Division of the Earth,” he had fundamentally changed what it meant. In his reimagination of the term, race did not apply only to the lowly “Jewish” or “Moorish” subjects of the crown or to the high-borns within the kingdom. Rather, all of the world’s peoples had a race, one that could be identified both by where they lived and their external physical features.
Curiously, despite Bernier’s certainty that everyone had a physically identifiable race, he nonetheless wavered on how many races there were in all, stating that there were “four or five.”16 The first race included people from three different continents, comprising “the whole of Europe in general except for part of Muscovy, … Africa, namely that between the kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, … and likewise a large part of Asia.”17 Into the second race he placed nearly the entire continent of Africa, excluding the northern coastal areas already ascribed to the first race.
The third race, covering the nations of China, Japan, and much of east Asia, also included “Usbekistan [sic], … a small part of Muscovy, the little Tartars, and the Turkomans.”18 In the fourth race, standing conspicuously alone, were the Lapps, or the indigenous people of Scandinavia. The almost-fifth race would have been reserved for the indigenous people of the Americas. But upon further consideration, he placed them too into the first type.19
Skin color was the major consideration used to sort people into racial groups. In Bernier’s view, the first race had “white” or sun-tinged “olive skin.” By contrast, black Africans, the so-called second race, had black skin that was the result of their “sperm and blood.”20 This simple one-liner, stated almost as if in passing, was of critical importance. Madame de la Sablière, hostess of his salon, had been an active participant in debates about the role of men’s semen and women’s eggs in the physical features of their offspring.21 She therefore would likely have been invested in questions about the role of sperm in physical appearance. More to the point, this statement revealed Bernier’s position on the biological basis of the physical distinctions among the so-called races. While it is unclear whether he was a proponent of the polygenetic argument, he nevertheless believed that white people were innately and physiologically distinct from black people. This fundamental biological divergence was, he suggested, the basis of the observed external physical differences.22
In his modest treatise, Bernier did not come out in favor of African chattel slavery. Yet, in the context of debates about the appropriateness of enslaving black persons, his assertion that white skin placed one in a biologically distinct “first race” while black skin placed a person in a “second race” carried the connotation of a social ladder of humanity with whites justifiably at the top. These ideas were to be read and expanded upon by subsequent scientists and philosophers, several of whom were deeply invested in maintaining or extending the slave trade.
If Bernier created racial categories for the express purpose of segregating groups of humanity based on their physical appearance, an important part of his project was to detail the particular aesthetic charms (or lack thereof) of the women of each race. Previous scholars have dismissed this aspect of Bernier’s text as some form of bizarre fluff, evidence of his prurient fascination with women’s looks.23 But Bernier was building on a practice of learned men waxing intellectual about women’s beauty that had existed since the Renaissance. Moreover, the section on female charms takes up nearly half of Bernier’s brief manifesto. Under the circumstances, Bernier’s estimation of women was not off-color, nor was it novel.24 It simply used a new language, that of “race,” to make judgments about feminine loveliness.
Bernier entered the discussion about race-specific female attractiveness with a note about the so-called Hottentot.25 “Hottentot” was a derogatory name created by Dutch settlers. In theory, it applied to the Khoikhoi living in the area encompassing the Cape of Good Hope and extending to Cape Town in South Africa. In practice, however, it was often applied to all Khoisan, meaning both the Khoikhoi and the Bushmen of South Africa.26 “Blacks of the Cape of Good Hope,” Bernier wrote, “seem to constitute a different type from those of the rest of Africa. They are usually smaller, thinner, with uglier faces.”27 His estimation of the Hottentot is noticeably similar to the common view of Africans in England and Holland during the period as “little, low, and foul.” Bernier was, in fact, attuned to existing stereotypes of the Hottentot, which he exposes by stating, “Some Dutchmen say they speak Turkey-Cock.”28
What distinguished Bernier from the Dutch and English, however, was his assessment that the small, thin, and unappealing Hottentot were an aberration among blacks, a “different type,” albeit relegated to the same race. The Hottentot, in his view, may have been short, meager, and unattractive, but this said nothing of the appearance of blacks generally, and especially black women. On the contrary, Bernier wrote, he had encountered black women who were among the most beautiful in the world:
What I have observed as regards the beauty of women is no less differentiated. Certainly, there are lovely ones, ugly ones to be found everywhere. I have
