This address benefited from the comments on earlier drafts and the replies to scholarly questions provided by Kathleen Conzen, Lorraine Daston, Suzanne Marchand, AHR Editor Rob Schneider, and Bill Sewell. My thanks to all of them.

1. Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Fall 1971): 529–562, here 537–545, quotations from 542, 544. 1

2. Didier Fassin, “Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals,” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4 (December 2008): 333–344, here 333, 339.

3. The book-length version of this project will address more fully the relationship between the failure of the 1848 Revolution and the flourishing of racial theory in France.

4. For Tocqueville’s comments, see Tocqueville to Francisque de Corcelle, June 10, 1854, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, ed. J.-P. Mayer, 18 vols. (Paris, 1951–2003) [hereafter OC], 15, pt. 2: 104–105. For the publication in question, see Paul de Rémusat, “Des races humaines,” Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1854, 783–804.

5. Charles de Rémusat, “De la civilisation moderne,” review of History of Civilization in England by H. T. Buckle, Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1, 1858, 5–44, quotations from 38.

6. Alfred Sudre, “D’une nouvelle philosophie de l’histoire: La doctrine des races,” Revue européenne 4 (1859): 383–404, 621–639, 827–848, here 383, 388. Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, in Gobineau, Oeuvres, 3 vols., ed. Jean Gaulmier (Paris, 1983–1987) [hereafter Essai], 1: 133–1174 (text), 1216–1471 (critical notes), here 347–348; Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris, 1855; 2nd ed., 1858; 3rd ed., 1863) [hereafter Histoire générale].

7. See Jean Boissel, “Notice” on the Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, in Gobineau, Oeuvres, 1: 1216–1278, here 1249ff. and, for a succinct statement, 1258. The Essai was originally published by the highly respected publishing house Firmin-Didot in four volumes; the first two appeared in 1853, the second two in 1855; ibid., 1225–1229. A major conduit between Gobineau’s ideas and Nazi ideology was Ludwig Schemann, who kept Gobineau’s flame alive in both France and Germany, translated the Essai into German (1898–1901), and was professor of literature at the University of Fribourg, one of the interwar centers of the development of what would become Nazi racial theory. See Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Heidegger et la question de la race,” Les Temps modernes 63, no. 650 (July–October 2008): 290–305, here 291–292, 292 n. 2.

8. Edouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d’histoire contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886). Volume 1 begins with a long discussion of the Aryan-Semite dichotomy (5ff.), including a citation from Renan’s Histoire générale (12) and further references to Renan (14–15).

9. See Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris, 1988), chap. 3, here 123–133. For what may be the earliest use of racisme in French, here paired with traditionnalisme as basically descriptive terms, see Albert Maybon, “Félibrige et nationalisme,” Revue blanche 29 (September–December 1902): 139–148, here 146–147.

10. Tocqueville received the Essai—probably its first two volumes—sometime in late October or early November of 1853; see Tocqueville to Gobineau, November 17, 1853, OC, 9, 201.

11. Tocqueville to Gustave de Beaumont, November 3, 1853, OC, 8, pt. 3: 164; Tocqueville to Adolphe de Circourt, October 16, 1853, OC, 18: 110; Tocqueville to Francisque de Corcelle, June 10, 1854, OC, 15, pt. 2: 105.

12. On this last point, see Tocqueville to Gobineau, December 20, 1853, OC, 9: 206. Rémusat père seemed to obey the same unwritten code of behavior. After several years of snubbing Gobineau when the latter sought his help in publicizing the Essai, he relented by including a moderately positive comment about the book in his review of Buckle for Revue des Deux Mondes (38). For the letters that tell this story, see Gobineau to Rémusat, April 23, 1854, May 16, 1854, May 19, 1854, July 9, 1854, and November 24, 1858, in Jean Gaulmier, ed., “Charles de Rémusat et Arthur de Gobineau,” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature publiés par le Centre de Philologie et Littérature romanes de l’Université de Strasbourg 2, no. 1 (1964): 67–113, here 76–79, 83.

13. See Adolphe Franck, “Rapport sur un ouvrage de M. Ernest Renan intitulé: Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques,” Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 38 (1856): 363–382, here 377–378, 380, and for the critique, 382; and 39 (1857): 51–75, quotations from 75. The essay was reprinted in slightly revised form in Franck’s Études orientales (Paris, 1861), 381–426.

14. Gobineau to Franck, July 15, 1864, in “Lettres du comte de Gobineau à M. Adolphe Franck,” Revue internationale de sociologie 24 (August–September 1916): 404–437, quotation from 407.

15. See Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10, no. 1 (1995): 3–24, here 18–23; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York, 2007), which stresses the novelty of objectivity when it emerged as a scientific ideal in the mid-nineteenth century before ca. 1860 (17, 27).

16. I have treated Cousin’s philosophical initiative in Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), here chaps. 4–5.

17. The full text of the debate can be found, admixed with some extraneous material, in Bulletin de la Société ethnologique de Paris (1847), sessions of April 23 to July 9, 63–244 [hereafter BSEP]; see p. 64 for the title. This was the last year that the Bulletin was published.

18. References to the requirements of “science” punctuate the debate; see, e.g., BSEP, 97, 173, 212, 221.

19. For d’Eichthal’s representation of the debate as “preparing the solution of perhaps the most important problem that the science of ethnology can propose,” see BSEP, 219. In 1847 the society was formally composed of three sections—physical study of peoples, historical and linguistic study, and moral and political questions—though these divisions seem not to have been reflected in its mode of operation. See Martin S. Staum, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1848 (Montreal, 2003), 132.

20. BSEP, 65, 67.

21. See Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” 12–15.

22. On accuracy, see BSEP, 121. On cherry-picking, see the accusations of Courtet de l’Isle against Schoelcher, 186, 197.

23. D’Eichthal, BSEP, 223, and see 212 for his wish that “the Society had specimens of the major African races at its disposal” (emphasis in the original).

24. Pierre Dumoutier, BSEP, 174, 180, 213. On the odd scientific career of this proponent of phrenology who had gathered skulls while accompanying an official voyage to the South Seas in the 1820s, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 270–271, 279.

25. BSEP, 68ff., 218ff.

26. BSEP, 151, 153–154, 156–157, 160, 164, 173.

27. BSEP, 182, 186, 191, 202, 204–206.

28. BSEP, 68–69, 228, 239.

29. BSEP, 69–70, 77, 205 (for Courtet’s remark), 240.

30. The spokesman for this position was the zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards, who was joined by the geographer of Africa M.-A.-P. d’Avezac; see BSEP, 97–98.

31. BSEP, 96.

32. BSEP, 220–221.

33. BSEP, 88 (for the racial knowledge of Americans), 126–127 (for “race”), 236–237 (for “civilization”).

34. On the dwindling attendance at the society and its definitive cessation in 1850, see Staum, Labeling People, 150–151, which also notes that Schoelcher aided the abolition effort in his capacity as a Naval Ministry official in the provisional government of 1848.

35. Paul Broca, “Histoire des progrès des études anthropologiques depuis la fondation de la Société: Compte rendu décennal (1859–1869),” Mémoires de la Société anthropologique de Paris 3 (1868–1869): cv–cxxv, quotations from cx–cxii. On the characteristics of Broca’s anthropology, see also Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2013), chap. 1.

36. This conclusion coincides with that of John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago, 2012), here 302–311.

37. For “positive results,” see the printed prospectus for the first volume of the Essai conserved in Arthur de Gobineau: Carrière littéraire, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAF 14390, fols. 66–67; for “means of demonstration,” see Gobineau to Tocqueville, October 15, 1854, OC, 9: 221.

38. Gobineau to Jules Delpit, November 16, 1853, Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux [hereafter BMB], ms. 1779.

39. The unacknowledged influence of Courtet de l’Isle on Gobineau is the thesis of Jean Boissel, Victor Courtet (1813–1867): Premier théoricien de la hiérarchie des races (Paris, 1972). For a recent study that seeks to situate Gobineau in his own time and milieu, rather than treating him as an anomalous sport, see Steven Kale, “Gobineau, Racism, and Legitimism: A Royalist Heretic in Nineteenth-Century France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 1 (2010): 33–61.

40. Gobineau, Essai, 347–348. Gobineau’s emphasis on the Aryan variant of the white race emerged forcefully only in the second installment of the Essai, published in 1855. See his vivid metaphor of human history as a “vast canvas” to which the black and yellow races supply the “coarse background” of cotton and wool, the white race the “softening” touch of silk, and the Aryans the “ornaments” of gold and silver thread applied to the surface; ibid., 1143.

41. See BSEP, 184, where Courtet speaks of “the Aryan colonies to which Oriental civilization owes its first blossoming”—i.e., he not only used the term but anticipated Gobineau’s later thesis that the Aryans are the unique source of human civilization. For the origin and dissemination of the term “Aryan,” see n. 68 below.

42. For Gobineau’s statements to this effect and his pessimistic belief that in human affairs every gain entails a loss, see Essai, 297, 343–346.

43. See BMB, ms. 1779, “Lettres du Comte Arthur de Gobineau à Jules Delpit.” The letters start in 1850, with Gobineau alternately hectoring Delpit to work more diligently on the task and bribing him with promises of manuscripts for the Bordeaux archives. There are more than two hundred letters, continuing into the late 1870s.

44. Gobineau to Tocqueville, September 8, 1843, OC, 9: 50; Tocqueville to Gobineau, October 2, 1843, ibid., 57–58. Gobineau alluded ironically to this amorality when writing to Charles de Rémusat, who seems to have introduced him to Tocqueville and recommended him as a research assistant for the latter’s (never completed) project on the morality of the nineteenth century. “You recommend me for [Tocqueville’s assignment] on morality, sir! Alas! Recommend me for anything else, for I am beginning no longer to see clearly amidst all the principles, precepts, dogmas, obligations, etc. that I have the honor of labeling. I fear becoming the most immoderately virtuous man in France.” Gobineau to Rémusat, November 26, 1843, in Gaulmier, “Charles de Rémusat et Arthur de Gobineau,” 72.

45. On Tocqueville’s role in the 1839 commission on slavery, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 2001), xxix. Tocqueville’s report, “Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée d’examiner la proposition de M. de Tracy, relative aux esclaves des colonies,” can be found in OC, 3, pt. 1: 41–78. For references to that report in the 1847 ethnologists’ debate, see, e.g., BSEP, 89–90.

46. See Tocqueville’s statement of 1848: “I hate all those absolute systems that make all the events of history depend on great first causes linked together by the chain of fate and thus succeed . . . in banishing men from the history of the human race. Their boasted breadth seems to me narrow, and their mathematical exactness false.” In Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. G. Lawrence (New York, 1971), 78. For a recent treatment of this issue, see Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics Revisited: A Few Lessons for Contemporary Political Scientists,” May 2014, http://oll.libertyfund .org/pages/tocqueville-s-new-science-of-politics. The sociologist Raymond Boudon sensitively teases out Tocqueville’s mostly tacit methodological principles in “L’exigence de Tocqueville: La ’science politique nouvelle,’” The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville 27, no. 2 (2006): 13–34.

47. The book, in French translation, was August von Haxthausen, Études sur la situation intérieure de la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1847). It is first mentioned in Tocqueville to Beaumont, October 27, 1853, OC, 8, pt. 3: 159, and characterized as boring but worthwhile in Tocqueville to Beaumont, November 3, 1853, ibid., 163–164. In the latter, Tocqueville speaks of Gobineau’s book as well, saying, “I believe nothing in it,” but noting that he does believe in something “tenacious” and “permanent” in each nation that derives from “the education of the centuries” rather than from “race” in Gobineau’s sense. The illumination of Haxthausen’s book for Tocqueville is its picture of “a people still in the swaddling clothes of serfdom and common property and nonetheless enjoying some of the institutions and even sharing in some regards the spirit of the democratic and civilized times in which we live.”

48. For Cousin’s intellectual and institutional project and the historical reasons for its success, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, here chaps. 4–5.

49. Tocqueville to Gobineau, November 17, 1853, OC, 9: 202; December 20, 1853, ibid., 205; October 11, 1853, ibid., 199; November 17, 1853, ibid., 201–203.

50. Louis Alloury, Journal des débats, February 24, 1854; the review occupies almost four columns of a large five-column newsprint page.

51. On these points, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 193–194, 273.

52. Ibid., 254–260.

53. See the anecdotes recounted by Jules Simon, Quatre portraits (Paris, 1896), 194, 216–217; and in Ernest Renan to Alain Renan, November 3, 1845, in Ernest Renan, Ernest Renan, 1843 à 1857: Lettres à son frère Alain (Paris, 1925), 28, 31–32.

54. Ernest Renan to his mother, November 6, 1843, in Renan, Lettres du séminaire, 1838–46 (Paris, [1902]), 225–233, quotation from 229; Renan to his mother, February 6, 1844, in Renan, Correspondance générale, ed. Jean Balcou, 3 vols. to date (Paris, 1995–), 1: 466–469, quotation from 468.

55. Renan quotes the letter without naming its recipient in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, in Ernst Renan, Oeuvres completes, ed. Henriette Psichari, 10 vols. (Paris, 1947–1961) [hereafter OC], 2: 863–864. For the entire letter, see Ernest Renan to Franc¸ois Liart, March 29, 1844, in Renan, Correspondance générale, 1: 476–482, quotation from 479.

56. Jean-Pierre van Deth, Ernest Renan (Paris, 2012), 64–65. The results have been published in Ernest Renan, Travaux de jeunesse, 1843–44, ed. Jean Pommier (Paris, 1931), 123–258.

57. Renan, “Cahiers de jeunesse, 1845–46,” entry 40, OC, 9: 285.

58. Ernest Renan to his mother, October 20, 1844, in Renan, Correspondance générale, 1: 539; Ernest Renan to Alain Renan, January 10, 1845, ibid., 555. Renan’s mentor at Saint-Sulpice was the abbé Arthur-Marie Le Hir.

59. Ernest Renan to his mother, May 2, 1845, in Renan, Correspondance générale, 1: 589.

60. See Ernest Renan to his sister Henriette, July 21, 1845, and Henriette Renan to Ernest Renan, September 12, 1845, in Ernest and Henriette Renan, Lettres intimes, 1842–1845 (Paris, 1896), 244, 275.

61. Michael Graetz, Les juifs en France au XIXe siècle: De la Révolution franc¸aise à l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Salomon Malka (Paris, 1989; original Hebrew ed. 1982), 296–297.

62. See his personal testimony to this effect in Ernest Renan, “Le judaı¨sme comme race et comme religion,” OC, 1: 925–944, here 941. On Renan’s appointment at the Bibliothèque nationale, see van Deth, Ernest Renan, 155–156.

63. Renan’s long and affectionate relationship with the Lévy brothers and their publishing house is detailed in Jean-Yves Mollier, ed., Lettres inédites d’Ernest Renan à ses éditeurs Michel et Calmann Lévy (Paris, 1986).

64. Graetz, Les juifs en France au XIXe siècle, 310.

65. Renan tells the story, dating from 1845 or 1846, of his tearful response to the German Jewish émigré in his personal journal; see “Cahiers de jeunesse,” entry 84, OC, 9: 340–341.

66. On this point, see Franck, “Rapport sur un ouvrage de M. Ernest Renan,” 364.

67. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), 76.

68. This complex disciplinary development is treated with precision in Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), here 61–65, 124– 130. Marchand notes that in the 1820s and 1830s, some contemporaries protested the putative cultural proximity between India and Europe (125), and that, contrary to the retrospectively “heartbreaking” segregation of Semitic from Indo-European languages (126), many German philologists tried in the first half of the nineteenth century to maintain the biblical tradition by which all languages had a single common ancestor. According to Marchand, the term “Aryan” was probably coined in the second half of the eighteenth century by A. H. Anquetil-Duperron, a French orientalist who traveled to India; it was disseminated in European philology beginning in the 1820s (128). According to Maurice Olender, the name “Semitic” was applied to the second language family as early as the 1780s by both J. G. Herder and A. L. von Schlo¨zer; see Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992; original French ed. 1989), 11, 152 n. 52.

69. Renan, Histoire générale. See p. 4 of all the editions for the quotation, 4–5 n. 1 for the footnote. The book in question is Indische Altertumskunde by the Norwegian-born German-educated Christian Lassen.

70. Because I am interested in the development of Renan’s views, I give all citations to the Histoire générale from both the 1855 and 1863 editions: 1855 ed., vii; 1863 ed., xv.

71. The unpublished manuscript, “Essai historique et théorique sur les langues sémitiques en gé- nérale, et sur la langue hébraı¨que en particulier,” is at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut (Paris), ms. 2209; see ms. pp. 1–3 for the seeming interchangeability of these keywords. The manuscript won the prix Volney and served as a skeletal draft of the Histoire générale ; see van Deth, Ernest Renan, 96–97, 181.

72. Histoire générale, 1855 ed., iii, 1, 3; 1863 ed., xi, 1, 3. For Renan’s unstable terminology for the first language group, see, e.g., in both editions, p. 2, para. 1 for “Indo-European,” para. 2 for “Aryan.”

73. Ibid., 1855 ed., iv–v, 3–7, 11; 1863 ed., xii–xiii, 3–7, 11, capitalization and emphasis as in the original. By the end of the book, he characterizes the Semitic languages as “languages of steel, exempt from all alteration” (1855 ed., 424; 1863 ed., 450).

74. See van Deth, Ernest Renan, 184; Laudyce Rétat, L’Israël de Renan (Bern, 2005), 36–37, though Rétat also stresses that Renan judges Hebrew “despotically” from the vantage point of ancient Greek (38); Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Renan et l’histoire des langues sémitiques,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 23, no. 2 (2001): 59–75, here pt. 3. Both van Deth and Rétat make a point of distinguishing Renan’s use of “race” from that of Gobineau.

75. Simon-Nahum, “Renan et l’histoire des langues sémitiques,” 68, quotation from 70.

76. I was alerted to the importance of the term “mold” for Renan by Maurice Olender, Race sans histoire (Paris, 2009), 47. In addition to the early usages discussed here, later ones abound. In an 1878 lecture, Renan said that “language is the very mold from which all mythologies emerge”; “Des services rendus aux sciences historiques par la philologie,” OC, 8: 1213–1232, quotation from 1229. In the 1890 preface to L’avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848, evolutionary thought in France “was expelled by the ordinary habits of language and by the mold of well-made sentences”; OC, 3: 715–732, quotation from 719.

77. Ernest Renan, “De l’origine du langage,” La Liberté de penser 2 (June–November 1848): 368–380, here 375–376, 379–380; and 3 (December 1848–May 1849): 64–83. Renan’s formulation about spontaneity in 1848 loses its populist edge in the Histoire générale, written during the Second Empire: “Languages emerge complete from the human mind [esprit] acting spontaneously,” 1855 ed., 443; 1863 ed., 470.

78. Histoire générale, 1855 ed., 17, 432; 1863 ed., 18, 458.

79. See Olender’s second definition of “race sans histoire” in Race sans histoire, Avertissement, n.p.: “Or the word ’race’ can be defined by what does not change, the hallmark of a community frozen in ’its mentality’ . . . stationary in a universe without transformation, ’without history.’”

80. Franck, “Rapport sur un ouvrage de M. Ernest Renan,” 375–376, 378. On Franck as an active member of Cousin’s so-called regiment, see Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 193, 208, 224–228.

81. “M. Cousin,” in Ernest Renan, Essais de morale et de critique (Paris, 1859), 51–101, quotation from 63. Renan initially published the article as “De l’influence spiritualiste de M. Victor Cousin” in Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 1858.

82. Simon, Quatre portraits, 176, 193.

83. Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848, OC, 3: 717–1121, here 839, 847, emphasis in the original. As the subtitle suggests, the text was written in 1848. Renan delayed publishing it until 1890, and then did so leaving the text unchanged; only the preface dates from 1890.

84. Ernest Renan, “Des services rendus aux sciences historiques par la philologie,” quotations from 1214–1215.

85. Renan, L’avenir de la science, 847–849. Renan deplores the narrowness that led Comte to declare “that one need only study Europe to determine the law of the human mind” (849). On Renan’s earliest reading of Comte, recorded in his Cahiers de jeunesse, see Laudyce Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse: Leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l’oeuvre d’Ernest Renan (Paris, 1977), 274.

86. Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse, 280.

87. Renan, “Des services rendus par la philologie,” 1230.

88. See the first lesson of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive in Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, ed. Gertrud Lenzer (New York, 1975), 71–86, here 71–72, and for the analogy of individual intellectual development to that of the human species, 73.

89. See the title of chapter 2 of the introductory section of Cours de philosophie positive in Auguste Comte and Positivism: “View of the Hierarchy of the Positive Sciences” (the French original is “Considérations générales sur la hiérarchie des sciences positives”); ibid., 87. Comte makes clear his disdain for the (non-hierarchical) classification of the sciences used in the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, as well as all previous such classifications (87).

90. Histoire générale, 1855 ed., 443, 448–449; 1863 ed., 468, 474–475.

91. Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, OC, 4: 99.

92. Ernest Renan, “Nouvelles considerations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme,” Journal asiatique, 5th series, 13 (January–June 1859): 214–282, 415–450. An introductory footnote (214 n. 1) explicitly identified the purpose of the paper as “respond[ing] to the diverse objections that have been addressed to the first chapter” of the Histoire générale.

93. Ibid., 443–444, 446. For Renan’s earlier statement of the Semites’ cession of leadership to the Aryans, see Histoire générale, 1855 ed., 475; 1863 ed., 503.

94. Renan, “Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques,” 445–448.

95. Most notable is his lecture at the Sorbonne of March 29, 1883, “L’Islamisme et la science,” OC, 1: 945–965.

96. Renan, “Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques,” 448.

97. Van Deth, Ernest Renan, 428, lists these events and suggests that Renan believed that his research on the Semites had helped fuel them. Whether or not the latter is strictly the case, and whether or not these particular events were the decisive ones, Renan’s awareness of the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment must have affected the content of his public lectures of 1882 and 1883.

98. Ernest Renan, Le judaïsme comme race et comme religion: Conférence faite au Cercle St-Simon, le 27 janvier 1883, OC, 1: 925–944, here 927–929, 933–938, 940–941. The Cercle St-Simon has no connection to the Saint-Simonian doctrine discussed earlier in this essay in connection with Gustave d’Eichthal and other members of the Paris Ethnological Society.

99. Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882,” OC, 1: 887– 906, here 887–888, 899–900, 903–904.

100. Renan, preface to L’avenir de la science, 723. Renan is here surveying the work he wrote in 1848 and published for the first time in 1890. Commenting on his youthful self as revealed in these half-century- old pages, he notes: “I did not have a sufficiently clear idea of the inequality of the races.”