in Rome—with aquiline nose, small mouth, coral lips, ivory teeth, large bright eyes, gentle features and a bosom and everything else of utter perfection. At Moka, I saw several of them completely naked, waiting to be sold, and I can tell you, there could be nothing lovelier in the world to see.29
Bernier affirms racial differences in beauty by claiming that, like physical features in general, “the beauty of women is no less differentiated.”30 Nevertheless, he certifies black women’s attractiveness by using the existing standard for white women: “aquiline nose, small mouth, coral lips, ivory teeth, large bright eyes, gentle features.”31 In this way, the black women who were good-looking could lay claim to that title only because of their similarity to the neoclassical ideal of Venus. Indeed, these women appear to be beating the Venus at her own game. Although Bernier was influenced by the trail of black denigration left by the Dutch and the English, he did not let their perspective of black women contradict what he had seen with his own eyes.
His discussion of the attractiveness of (some) black women was only the starting point of his extended treatment of racially specific enticements. Bernier also included sections on the women he encountered in India, Turkey, and Persia. His work reveals the centrality of concerns about aesthetics, especially women’s appearance, in the articulation of racial theories. That is, to the extent that “sperm and blood” determined race and appearance, beautiful women could serve as proof of a certain type of inherent racial superiority, or inferiority.
The long-term impact of Bernier’s theories has been debated.32 But as a progenitor of racial theories, Bernier was often cited by subsequent race theorists. Later race theorists would routinely use race as a justification for the colonial condition, and as a way to determine the attractiveness of women around the world. In the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the context of the Enlightenment and the peak of the slave trade, the science of race-making took flight. Then, as at its inception, philosophers underscored the purported racial distinctions in facial features, body type, and attractiveness between black women and white women.
Bernier’s notion of race had touched a nerve. His letter to Madame de la Sablière was eventually published in the esteemed Journal des Scavans for the broader scientific community to mull over. Still, the evidence of its impact was not to be witnessed for another sixty years. As it turned out, many French scientists and philosophers at the time of his writing were preoccupied with either toeing the intellectual line or fleeing the country in the face of renewed religious persecution.
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A variety of freedoms were restricted by Louis XIV in the 1680s. The king had long been begrudging at best when it came to the rights of Protestants. But in the watershed year of 1685, alongside the Code Noir, the king also issued the Edict of Fontainebleau. This order unraveled the Edict of Nantes, which had offered Protestant Huguenots a modicum of freedom in a Catholic nation, thereby effectively outlawing Protestantism in the territory. At the outset, rather than fight another bloody religious war, many Protestants chose to flee, repairing to various parts of England, the Dutch Republic, and Prussia.33 But by the turn of the eighteenth century, many of the remaining Protestants, calling themselves the Camisards, took up arms in a new war. The reinvigorated religious battle competed with the war of Spanish succession for the king’s attention and the crown’s resources until Louis XIV’s death in 1715.
The king’s death had a ripple effect, triggering several important developments that would allow the national intelligentsia to return to honing their ideas of race. For one, Louis XIV’s policies had prevented widespread slavery in the French territories. His passing gave functionaries an opportunity to push for new legislation enabling slave owners to safely travel to their homeland with their human assets in tow, without fear of these assets being liberated on arrival.
The Edict of October, issued in 1716, intended to quell these fears by introducing new regulations that would allow slave holders to keep their slaves as long as the slaves were registered at the courthouse; unregistered slaves could be set free. Louis XV himself issued the next key piece of legislation, the Declaration of 1738, stipulating that unregistered slaves, rather than being freed, would be seized and sent back to the colonies, where they would presumably find themselves slaves to a new master.34 Importantly, these codes were to be specifically applied to nègres, or African slaves. This meant that persons coming before the court demanding their freedom could be set free if they could successfully prove that they were not African. Such “proof” was generally found in their physical traits, those having been elaborated by Bernier and a host of non-French European authors since the fifteenth century. Beginning in the 1740s, the intensely controversial nature of these laws and their requisite practice prompted a variety of intellectuals to revisit the question of potential fundamental differences within humankind.
In addition, the late king’s death created the space for intellectual liberty that would allow the Enlightenment to flourish in France. The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement that had actually begun in the mid-seventeenth century. Kindled by Descartes’s 1637 Discourse on Method and its infamous postulate, “I think, therefore I am,” a whole new era of inquiry developed in which reason was regarded as the primary source and arbiter of knowledge. These new adventures in what was called “rationalism” had been taking place largely outside the French commonwealth—in England, Scotland, and the Dutch Republic—since, in Descartes’s home country, his ideas been deemed heretical by the monarchy. The death of Louis XIV loosened the monarchy’s stranglehold on the dissemination of nontraditional ideas, officially launching the French Age of Reason. It was within this cultural and political environment that many of the most renowned thinkers of the French Enlightenment felt compelled to return their attention to the judiciously applied “fundamental differences” that exist within humanity. And quite promptly, Enlightenment luminaries like Georges-Louis Leclerc picked up where Bernier had left off.
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