‘War of the spirits’ AD 1870

Wartime mobilisation did not fail to affect the most prominent scholars. Markus Völkel describes the head-to-head clashes between historians – David Friedrich Strauß and Ernest Renan, Theodor Mommsen and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges – which served as a point of reference for leading intellectuals in both nations.⁸ The transformation of Germany – its militarisation and, as many observers surmised, perfect organisation – evoked both censure and approbation, and even a desire to emulate the German model. This contradiction was evident in Renan’s appreciation of the racial energy of the Germans, commanded as they were by the desire for world domination. Even so, both for him and for other French intellectuals, the adaptation of the German model of education and social service in France seemed a means to rejuvenate the country and recoup the lost provinces.⁹ Efficiency and barbarism thus seemed to be two sides of the same coin. This association was exemplified in the way the war was conducted, particularly the artillery barrage of Paris.

To deny the existence of German civilisation beyond the technical sphere completely contradicted the German auto-stereotype and the imagined social profile of the nation’s army. In spite of statistics and common sense, the latter was commonly associated with the universities, as if students and graduates of colleges constituted the majority, or even a sizeable proportion of the armed forces. Meanwhile, the enemy army on the opposite side of the front was seen as far inferior, often equated with a treacherous armed mob, or – worse – with Black soldiers from the colonies. As early as August 1870, Robert von Mohl, a law professor, called the use of African troops France’s disgrace. The country “thus places itself morally on a far lower level than its intellectual standing would suggest.”¹⁰ Professors from Göttingen reacted to French charges of barbarism with an address that stated with horror: “Even our institution, which takes pride in its German character, has sent hundreds of German youth to serve under the nation’s banners, disregarding the unequal situation which forces us to fight half-savage Africans or the assembled mob of Garibaldian troublemakers.”¹¹

A wave of patriotic fervour swept across all German universities. Over 25% of the nearly 14,000 students enrolled for the summer semester 1870 joined the military. Professors delivered speeches in which they encouraged students to take action and analysed the war from the perspective of their native sciences. For instance, the constitutionalist and pro-rector of the University of Heidelberg, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, proposed the introduction of a legal prohibition against further deployment in Europe of ‘barbarian’ troops from Africa.¹² Speeches by other intellectuals referenced the idea of a Franco-German conflict of national character. The literary scholar Karl Hillebrand, who had worked in France until the outbreak of the war, invoked the typical contrast between the ‘masculine’ attributes of the Germans and the ‘feminine’ aspect of the French:

To see how the role of women in French society coincides with the national character, one only needs to remember that the extent of their influence does not seem to have changed throughout the history of France … Even today, the Frenchwoman rules in the salon, in ministers’ offices, in the family, and even in trade, as she did before at court … The Frenchwoman truly merits this power, since she does indeed surpass the Frenchman both morally and spiritually.¹³

Alexander Ecker, an anthropologist from Freiburg im Breisgau, supplemented the comparisons between the two nations by invoking the idea of the struggle for survival, based on the assumption that the triumphs of German armies had to have a biological cause. The superiority of the German element was supposedly evident even in the higher birth rate, observable as well in those departments of France that in Ecker’s view were ethnically German.¹⁴ Furthermore, Germans constituted a superior anthropological material – a point illustrated with statistics on French conscripts, of whom fewer were deemed unsuited for military service in the east than in the west. Health and proper physical development were paired with intellectual achievements attested by the superiority of German medicine over its French equivalent. Such observations, along with examples from the press of the war being conducted immorally by the French, convinced Ecker that

it was the civilised nation that triumphed over the less civilised one … According to what the laws of nature had taught us about the struggle for survival, we were destined to win, and that is why we did win. And that’s not all: we can expect that in future, more peaceful competitions as well … we shall continue to win, and the Germanic race will play a decisive part in shaping the history of Europe, which is its birthright.¹⁵

The introduction of the concept of race into wartime thinking about the national character of the French and the Germans almost automatically mobilised mechanisms akin to those that accompanied the later “war of the spirits.” The belief in fundamental psychological distinctions between nations led to the search for their causes in different racial backgrounds. An appalled Hillebrand described the alleged cruelties of the French, concluding that such deeds could never have been the responsibility of Teutonic Germanic or Latin ethnic components, rather: “they were due to the periodic return of the Celt to his proper nature: Grattez le Français, et vou trouverez l’Irlandais!”¹⁶ Ludwig Friedländer, a classical philologist from Königsberg, expanded on this claim:

Among the surprising insights into French national character that this war has brought to light, quite likely the most shocking has been the discovery of the profundity of the nation’s involvement with its Celtic past … Grattez le Français, et vou trouverez le Celte! … After all, as early as two thousand years ago, Cato characterised the Celts were above all by their profound attachment to esprit and gloire … Gallica credulitas was proverbial already for the ancient Romans … ¹⁷

Many motifs typical for characterological reflection of the World War I period had already emerged during the previous Franco-German clash. The extent of mobilisation among intellectuals was lower, the means of affecting public opinion weaker, but the mechanisms of the ‘war of the spirits’ remained largely identical. For instance, heated debates took place concerning suggestions that scholars from northern Germany be expelled from the Academie Française. Louis Pasteur voiced his protest by sending back the honorary diploma he received from the university in Bonn.¹⁸ Phenomena akin to the ‘war of the spirits’ of a few decades later can also be observed in disciplines that were then only emerging, but would be completely engrossed in the war effort during the Great War. Members of the Anthropological Society of Berlin (Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte), established only a year before the start of the Franco-Prussian War, perceived the presence of Black soldiers on the front not only as a threat to civilisation itself, but also as an opportunity to expand scientific knowledge. The founder of the society, Rudolf Virchow, addressed his colleagues in October 1870 with a plea that matched nearly verbatim the one delivered by Georg Buschan 45 years later, exhorting them to exploit the opportunity and make photographic images of turcos found in German field hospitals.¹⁹ The editors of the Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte exhorted German amateur anthropologists to do their best to “collect skulls, and especially brains of the various African peoples that France has been so kind to send us.”²⁰ The difference between the liberal paradigm of anthropology that still held sway in the 1870s and the later developments in the discipline was illustrated in Virchow’s pleas for scientists to be quick to study living African prisoners of war before they became Germanised and civilised due to being kept in German surroundings. Stalling could lead to a situation in which “establishing their savageness would prove complicated.”²¹

Scholars who subscribed to the later ‘war of the spirits’ generally did not invoke their predecessors from a few decades before. Among the exceptions was a remark by Ernst Hess published in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin in 1915.²² Hess commented upon the German debates over a French psychological disorder identified by Leopold Loewenfeld: psychopatia gallica. As he pointed out, participants in the debates failed to note the fact that Loewenfeld was by far not the first German psychiatrist to identify the pathology. That honour belonged to Carl Stark, who had observed the phenomenon as early as 1871. According to Hess, the only difference between the two authors was one of terminology: “What in 1871 merited the name of degeneracy, today is called psychopathy.” The figure of Stark, who practised in Alsace following the Franco-Prussian War, also served as a warning to Loewenfeld and his cohorts. According to Hess, soon after the war, the German physician distanced himself from his earlier convictions and continued to voice regrets over them until the end of his life.²³

Carl Stark’s work was indeed reminiscent in many parts of the later study by Leopold Loewenfeld. The two authors were even motivated by the same thing: irritation with the critical statements of their French colleagues.²⁴ Both likewise professed the best of intentions, perceiving their role as that of physicians observing a shameful illness and thus enabling its cure. Stark observed that the French – a nation at the end of its tether – had fallen prey to a condition similar to senile dementia. It was not by accident that French physicians became the first to diagnose cerebral softening. According to Stark, this was a result of the particularly high incidence of the condition in France:

Moving on, could it be merely an accident, and not by some feature of French national character, that this form of mental disease has reached such horrible levels in Paris, such that in Charenton over 50% of the admitted patients suffer from progressive dementia, while in our country they account for at best 12%?²⁵

War losses and excessive consumption of absinthe exacerbated the condition of the national psyche, leading to progressive paralysis, which was manifest in the completely unrealistic, maniacal conviction in the nation’s capabilities and in their savage brutality towards the German wounded (Stark supplied a long list of supposed French war atrocities). The disease explained why, instead of accepting German superiority as the only cause of their defeat, the French sought out traitors, wishing to pin the blame on them. “These facts,” wrote the German psychiatrist, “allow me to draw a parallel between the French nation and a madman who told me he could fly.” Asked for evidence to his opinion, the lunatic had jumped out of a ground floor window, falling into the bushes. He explained the fall in the following terms: “Naturally, I can fly, but my neighbour has secretly magnetised me in order to prevent me from doing so.”²⁶ The insane were typically said to be incapable of assessing their own actions objectively. That was the reason why the French persisted for months in not feeling any remorse for shooting at the enemy from Parisian fortifications, but when the enemy finally retaliated with a bombardment of the city, they reacted with the utmost indignation and accusations of barbarism. According to Stark, French hypocrisy, spy paranoia, cynicism, and immorality also resulted from medical conditions, deriving partly from the syphilis common among French troops.²⁷ In the conclusion to his brochure, the German psychiatrist somewhat mitigated his diagnosis, while affirming its main points:

Thus, we see that it would be hard to obtain a greater convergence of the symptoms [between individual and mass psychological pathology – MG]. And even if it would be folly to maintain, on the basis of the evidence collected, that the French nation suffers from progressive dementia or the folie raisonnante, we can surely observe symptoms of a psychological disorder in the mental condition of the French nation and identify it as pathological and degenerative. No physician who found the above symptoms in a single patient would hesitate to diagnose him as insane and mentally ill.²⁸

Commenting on the German-French intellectual conflicts, Rudolf Virchow, though usually not given to chauvinism, found in Stark’s study a series of relevant observations. In his view, the dramatic political events in France, the civil war, and the recurring spy hysteria testified to the deplorable mental condition of the French. He was particularly discouraged by the involvement of scholars in the nationalist campaign.²⁹ In this regard, he condemned the political involvement of both the French and the Germans, such as Alexander Ecker, the author of a Darwinian interpretation of the war.³⁰ For him, these men had failed in their duties as scholars: “Politics divide, while sciences bind nations together, and woe betide those who cut these bonds apart.”³¹

The Prussian Race

Of the scholars criticised by Virchow, one occupied a special position, and not only because of his high rank and similar scholarly interests. Jean-Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810–1892), a French anthropologist and zoologist, was the co-founder (along with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Pierre Paul Broca) of the Paris Anthropological Society (Société d’Anthropologie), and an unrelenting propagator of science, with memberships in a number of French and foreign scholarly associations.³² He studied in Strasbourg, where he later lectured in chemistry, physics, and – after completing his education – medicine. From 1833 on, he practised as a physician in Toulouse, where he founded the Journal de Médicine et de Chirurgie de Toulouse. After moving to Paris in 1840, he focused exclusively on studing problems of anthropology. An opponent of Darwin’s theory, he was – as his Polish translator stressed – “one of the very few … whose criticism of [Darwin’s] theory was purely scientific.”³³ A member of different academies of sciences and – after 1879 – of the Royal Society of London, he was also awarded membership in the Légion d’Honneur. Towards the end of his life, he presided over the Société de Géographie, of which he had been a member since 1856.

For the Parisian anthropologist, as for many other French intellectuals, the defeat came as a shock, and the Prussian bombardment of Paris appeared intolerably barbarous. Among the targets hit by the barrage was the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, which held rich anthropological collections. Behind the actions of the Prussians, Quatrefages perceived a methodical plan in the destruction of the exceptional collections for the sole purpose of degrading French science. His reaction was swift and sharp. In a separate pamphlet appended to the Revue de Deux Mondes and reproduced in English translation a few months later, he offered a study of the ‘Prussian race’.³⁴ His findings amounted to the exclusion of Prussians from among the Aryan nations and their inclusion among the Finno-Turanian peoples (and thus – in accordance with the beliefs of the period – Mongolians). It was this publication that ensured Quatrefages a place in scholarship on the history of racism in Europe.³⁵

Quatrefages opens his study with assurances of his own scientific objectivity, stating the incidentally quite justifiable belief that “Every political subdivision, founded on ethnology, immediately leads to absurdity.”³⁶ Heeding his own warnings, he very cautiously proceeds to outline the main topic. In the introduction, he analyses the outward appearance of representatives of the Turanian race, with his main concession being that the example provided is not the Prussians, who were, after all, the subject of the pamphlet, but Estonians. As is well known, states the anthropologist, the latter speak a non-Aryan language similar to Finnish. Even their physical appearance bears out this similarity: “Their bust is long; their legs short, and the region of the pelvis large in proportion to that of the shoulders… The eyes … are generally deeply set; the nose, straight and but little rounded, is often too small for the width of the cheeks, and the space separating it from the mouth is too short.”³⁷ Having discussed the appearance of Estonians, the author moves on to Latvians, who, in contrast to their northern neighbours, do speak an Aryan tongue. However, in anthropological terms, they should count among “the group of races named by turn Tchudes, Mongolians, Turanians, and North Ouralians.”³⁸ Only having thus established a solid backdrop for his considerations does Quatrefages invoke the observation of another member of the Anthropological Society, Charles Rochet, who described the appearance of Prussian soldiers from Pomerania.³⁹ In the eyes of both Frenchmen, despite a slightly greater height from Latvians or Estonians, Pomeranians generally shared a far-reaching similarity to both nations.⁴⁰ The lack of the right proportions of the body was portrayed as a result of the fact that Finns descended from the most primordial, and thus the most primitive population of Europe: the palaeolithic hunters.

Finns were distinguished from the Aryan peoples by their physical appearance as well as psychology – being peaceful, bound to tradition, but also distrustful. “Unhappily all the good in this picture is marred by a quality which seems to be thoroughly national. The Fin [sic] never pardons a real or supposed offence, avenges it on the first opportunity, and is not fastidious in his choice of means. Thus is explained the frequency of assassination in Finland amongst the peasants.”⁴¹ Those features of the primordial inhabitants of Prussia were then supplemented with the worst attributes of the Slavs who conquered them: a desire for conquest and a tendency to treason. Germans, who were the next to conquer Prussians, absorbed the old Prussian elites in particular. In Quatrefages’ view, the last stratum partaking in this process brought the most benefits to Prussians. They were the French Huguenots, who predominated among the elites of the state and were the only culture-making stratum of the whole country.

The fact that Quatrefages saw Prussians as a mixture of four nationalities and two races – the Finno-Turanian primordial Prussians and the Aryan Slavs, Germans, and French – did not mean that their attributes constituted an amalgam of the psychological features of each of the types involved. On the contrary: the two ‘primordial’ groups proved capable of dominating the newcomers: “The German and the Frenchman would naturally turn into a Slave or a Fin.”⁴² The phenomenon supposedly reached its most striking form in the case of the French, still bound to their former fatherland by the tongue they used, but in racial terms already ‘Prussianised’:

Men were to be found only too easily in all ranks of the Prussian population and army who spoke French purely and without a German accent. These had no difficulty in passing themselves off as Frenchmen, in slipping in everywhere, in surprising and betraying what it was most important for us to conceal, and in preaching undiscipline and insurrection.⁴³

The loss of Huguenot families was as tragic for them as for France. Quatrefages, himself a Protestant, lamented the event with particular bitterness. For France, it had brought on defeat. For the descendants of the French Protestants, on the other hand, it meant the loss of racial maturity, which their brethren of the old country came to possess. Meanwhile, the Prussian race was still experiencing growing pains, taking form while locked in a state of barbarism.

The relationship between the Prussian race and the Germans constitutes an interesting aspect of Quatrefages’ considerations. The French anthropologist concluded that Prussians were completely distinct from Germans in racial terms. The fact that Germany accepted Prussian leadership was a misunderstanding, an ‘anthropological error’, since in reality, “Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over, through the plea of a (pretended) unity of race.”⁴⁴ The conclusion of the French anthropologist’s work takes the shape of an appeal to European public opinion. After France’s defeat, he writes, dark clouds were gathering over Europe, as Prussian pan-Germanism was capable of rousing the spectre of Russian pan-Slavism.

In the possible conflicts caused by these pretensions, what will Prussia do? Will she turn her cannon against her formidable neighbour? Or will she invoking [sic] then the affinity of race, as she now invokes the affinity of language, rivet the bonds which already exist? Will the Slavo-Finnic races wish to reign altogether, over Germans and Latins? And would the world, thus shared, submit in silence?⁴⁵

Quatrefages’ pamphlet met with a lively response both in his homeland and in the Reich. In France, he found a sizeable group of followers who were proving, like Louis Figuier, that the primordial Finnish cruelty had come back to life in contemporary Prussians.⁴⁶ Racial theories became one of the more interesting strains of French nationalism.⁴⁷ On the other hand, authorities in the Reich invoked similar arguments to stress the bonds between the annexed provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) and Germany.⁴⁸

On 14 October 1871, during a meeting of the German Anthropological Society, geographer and cartographer Heinrich Kiepert presented Quartefages’ main theses. The audience did not try to conceal their indignation at what they heard.⁴⁹ Rudolf Virchow’s reaction was more subdued, but at the same time more practical. During one of the subsequent meetings of the Society he relayed to the members the assurances he had received from a Swedish anthropologist in Helsingfors (Helsinki), Otto Hjelt, who, while confirming the Frenchman’s thesis about the vengeful nature of the (true) Finns, also denied that they showed a propensity for treason or cruelty.⁵⁰ In September 1873 Virchow informed the Society of plans for taking anthropological measurements of German students (the Prussian army, he reported with dismay, had refused his proposal to measure German recruits), whose numbers eventually reached several millions.⁵¹ At the same time, he sent an official request to Russian authorities to permit him to carry out similar research in Finland. Both these large research projects, as he explained, were to serve the purpose of verifying Quatrefages’s theses:

Gentlemen, you know that the French conflict gave rise to the conviction that Central Europe is inhabited by two categories of people, namely, the ancient primordial population of the area, characterised by slight build, dark eyes, dark hair, and somewhat darker skin, and said to belong to the Finnic or Estonian race … and the Aryan newcomers … believed to be tall, even very much so, blue-eyed, pale, and tough. Thus, in the eyes of our western colleagues, the distinction between Celts, Germans, and Slavs is rendered null and void. All Aryans are believed to be blue-eyed, blond, tall, strong, and of pale complexion.⁵²

The anthropological survey yielded results that entirely disproved Quatrefages’ claims. The measurements conducted on students testified to the fact that the anthropological traits attributed to Aryans were most commonly found in inhabitants of Prussia, particularly in Pomerania. In 1874, upon his return from Finland, Virchow stated that in that country – just as in the rest of Europe – one could find both long- and short-skulled types. Moreover, he speculated that in anthropological terms the population of Finland differed little from that of Russia, and thus, “If pan-Slavism is relying on anthropology for legitimacy, its strategy is flawed.”⁵³ His exposition concluded with a statement that, in his view, put an end to the entire debate: “We are without a doubt unable to unambiguously decide whether any tribe of Central Europe is Indo-Germanic or Finnish.”⁵⁴

Adolf Bastian also engaged in a polemic with Quatrefages in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. He disputed the identification of ancient Prussians as a Turanian people on grounds of the former’s kinship with the Indo-Germanic Lithuanians. Furthermore, as a result of the Teutonic Knights’ conscious policy, Prussia had for hundreds of years drawn in settlers from all regions of Germany, to the extent that they now represented the ethnic quintessence of the country. Like other Germanic peoples (and unlike ‘Latin-Celtic’ ones), Prussians were the avant-garde of global progress, having achieved scientific, cultural, and economic supremacy. The French, on the other hand, consistently overstated their influence on the development of civilisation, claiming as their own discoveries and inventions made by others. Beyond that, they had provided Europe with bloody spectacles of unthinkable barbarism for centuries, culminating in the battles with the Paris Commune.⁵⁵ The theories put forward by the Frenchman Quatrefages also affected anthropologists from other nations he chose to include among the Turanian peoples. Pál Hunfálvy, for example, did not conceal his indignation, while scholars from Finland and the Baltic provinces of Russia joined Virchow’s research team.⁵⁶

The dispute between Quatrefages and Virchow foreshadowed the battles that European anthropologists were to wage against one another a few decades later. It took place on one of the major fronts of the “war of the spirits,” between France and Germany. Traces of a continuity of attitudes and strategies of argumentation between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I are quite easy to find, even if later authors were not particularly keen to take note of them. Even in 1870, France and the German states provided in many respects a suitable terrain for waging a modern propaganda war. Analogies between the two conflicts confirm the role of Quatrefages’ oeuvre in historical analyses of racism. In the aforementioned studies, the dispute over the Prussian race is perceived as anticipating the later nationalisation of racial anthropology.

Transfer: A Microhistory

It is not my intention to question the relationship between the ‘war of the spirits’ of 1870–1871 and its younger sibling. However, one should consider whether 1871, the year Quatrefages published the first version of his treatise, does indeed open a new chapter in the history of the younger disciplines of the human sciences. Surrounded by doubts concerning the originality of his contribution to the history of the political involvement of science, he was as original as he was little known.

Franciszek Henryk Duchiński’s life did not follow the pattern typical for a scholar.⁵⁷ Duchiński himself took pains to add colour to his life story in autobiographical notes that pepper his works. He was born in the Ukraine to a family of petty nobility. His father died when he was young, and his mother Zofia (née Bojarska) supported herself and her two sons by working as a governess in the house of Count Tyszkiewicz. After her death in 1829, Duchiński attended a Basilian school in Humań and later worked at a school for girls in Niemirów. In 1834, he moved to Kiev where – by his own account – he entered the Historico-Philological Faculty of the local university. For a time he earned a living as a private tutor; he claims to have been active in the student organisation of the Association of the Polish People (Związek Ludu Polskiego). Duchiński avoided persecution after the arrest of Szymon Konarski, and he remained in Kiev until the mid–1840s. In 1846, he escaped to Turkey via Odessa and then he moved to Paris, where he cooperated with the Polish emigré journal Trzeci Maj. In 1848, he participated in propaganda activities for the Polish Legion in Italy, then served as a Polish representative to the Istanbul legation of the Hungarian insurrectionary government. Following the defeat of the Hungarian Uprising, he served as Prince Adam Czartoryski’s agent in the Balkan region, while publishing his early amateur studies in the ethnography and anthropology of Russia and Ukraine. Relieved from duty on the eve of the Crimean War, Duchiński remained in the Balkans, publishing articles in the Journal de Constantinople. In 1855, he entered the English service, officially to supervise railway workers, but actually for the purpose of delivering propaganda speeches to British, French, and Turkish soldiers. On his return to Paris in 1856, he found employment in the Polish School for Higher Learning. At the same time he gave public lectures for French audiences and published profusely. Invited to join the French Ethnographic Society, he rose to the position of vice-chairman in 1871. He also co-edited Actes de la Société d’Ethnographie and, in 1865, joined the Parisian Geographical Society. This period saw him achieve two major triumphs in his public activities. First, he succeeded in effecting a change in the name of the Chair of Slavic Literature at the Collège de France to ‘Chair of Slavic Literatures’.⁵⁸ Second, with the support of journalist and deputy Casimir Delamarre and the famous historian Henri Martin, Duchiński managed to change the curriculum in the history of Eastern and Central Europe at French schools. Early in the 1870s, after a short stay in Galicia, Germany, and Austria, he became the curator at the Polish National Museum in Rapperswil. Several attempts to obtain a chair at the Jagiellonian University came to nought, but Duchiński continued to publish in Polish and Ukrainian journals, publicising his anthropological theories, and even founded the ephemeral Przegląd Etnograficzny (Ethnographical Review) in Cracow. In 1878, he was involved in the organisation of the Polish stand at the Universal Exposition in Paris. In 1885, he celebrated the twenty-five years of his career as a scholar in L’viv. His death, a year after that of Quatrefages, was noted in the Ethnographic Society’s newsletter, among other venues.⁵⁹

In Polish historiography, Franciszek Duchiński remains a marginal figure. His ethnographic views are associated with de Gobineau’s theories and placed in the context of the liberal Russophobia of the mid-nineteenth century.⁶⁰ The Ukrainian scholar Ivan L. Rudnytsky, however, offers a different assessment, acknowledging the role Duchiński played in the development of the Ukrainian national idea.⁶¹ An analysis of Duchiński’s numerous works shows that criticisms by scholars were entirely justified. His references to existing scholarship, his research apparatus, and active participation in scientific societies all served to advance a theory with a clearly political resonance. The belief that Russians were of non-Slavic origin was his idée fixe; he claimed that “it is a grave and sadly very common error to perceive relations between Slavic nations from a linguistic standpoint, based only on the analysis of select words, in the manner proposed by Dubrowski.”⁶² Duchiński averred that “where ethnographic studies are impossible to carry out, logographical analysis … can be of help, but even that cannot provide foolproof data, as nations can change languages.”⁶³ Anthropology, or ethnography, as Duchiński preferred to call it, was a far more suitable method of investigation. According to Duchiński, the white race was divided into Aryans and Turanians. The former, comprising Slavs, Germans, and Latins, inhabited Europe as far as the Dnieper river and were settled, farming, and culture-making peoples. The latter, made up of Turks, Finns, and Mongols, inhabited territories east and south of Ukraine, and were still nomadic peoples or had retained nomadic characteristics under a thin veneer of civilisation. Duchiński explained:

The features of the Aryan people reflect … their main pursuit: freedom. Bound to their fatherland, they love agriculture for its own sake and not for the trading opportunities it provides. Their provincial life is highly developed; their sense of individual self-reliance deeply inculcated; property rights are respected and family names greatly venerated. A deep love for their country leads them to make the greatest sacrifices. Their emotional attitude is in harmony with their level-headedness, as they are blessed with perseverance and enormous creative powers, which they exhibit in a myriad of ways … Women are held in great regard in their societies.⁶⁴

Turanians, by contrast,

[are] psychologically disposed … to passivity, and have displayed no originality of mind; their ability to imitate compensates for this shortcoming, blind fanaticism replacing religious fervour … In Turanian society, which is based on military discipline, the woman ranks low, something that can be seen very clearly among the Turks, for example … Centuries have passed. With the advance of civilisation, the last vestiges of nomadism have disappeared in Europe, and yet, the descendants of the old nomads still exhibit the proclivities of their forefathers.⁶⁵

Duchiński was interested in one branch of the Turanian race in particular: the Muscovites. He rejected their claims of a Slavic origin. While Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian) influences were bound up with the civilising influence of the Kievan Rus’, they were unable to transform the essential character of the Finno-Mongol nomads. This belief led Duchiński to formulate his unique views on Russia’s history and geography. He disputed the Ural Mountains as a boundary between Europe and Asia, claiming that both sides of the range were populated by the same people. He also held that from the perspective of Muscovite history, the Tatar invasion should be treated as a blessing:

The invasions of Mongols and Tatars did not lead to the separation of Moscow from the Rus’, as there had never been a bond of moral unity between the two … on the contrary, the invasions did a great service to the laws of race of the Muscovites by merging the peoples of Suzdal, Ves’, Merya, Murom, and Chuvash-Vietke (Viatka Tatars) with the Muscovites who settled beyond the Oka river as well as in Kazan, and were ruled by national khans … Thus, the conquest of the Suzdal Muscovites by Genghis Khan was beneficial rather than harmful to them … since it served to engender laws of tribal purity which is craved even more forcefully by tribes of shepherds and tradesmen than by Indo-European nations.⁶⁶

In Duchiński’s opinion, racial differences were permanent. While he claimed that he wished to see Moscow free and Catholic, he added that “even free and Catholic Russians differ from Indo-Europeans in the mission they have been entrusted to fulfil here on earth, and they will be different forever.”⁶⁷ The Europeanisation of Russia for him was a pipe dream.

Claims of the Muscovites’ racial distinction were justified with the supposedly obvious (according to Duchiński) differences in physical and characterological features between Muscovites on the one hand, and Europeans and especially ‘true’ Ruthenians on the other. Indo-European peoples, as Duchiński claimed in one of his works,

are physically more refined, while the Turanian people constitute an unformed mass, raw, undeveloped meat. The head of a Turanian is indistinct from his neck, it has not yet fully set itself apart from the torso, and his legs barely sprout out from the loins … The most striking feature of the Muscovite, the katsap [Ruskie], is neither his face nor head, but his neck! The neck is simply the essence of the Muscovite … With the neck out of proportion to the head, and generally to the entire physiognomy, their noses are as upturned as to render the hair inside clearly visible.⁶⁸

Therefore, it should not be surprising that “these two human types, the Muscovite and the Ruthenian, need only to cast a glance at each other to know that they have nothing in common.”⁶⁹

According to Duchiński, the society of the Muscovites, too, was repulsive. The term ‘morality’ was foreign to them: “Generally in Moscow, and especially in relation to women, there is no other morality than that engendered by the criminal code, with police officers as its custodians.”⁷⁰ The Kiev-bred scholar compared Russian women to ‘emancipated Muslim women’, doubting their intellectual and legal autonomy and deploring their supposed “indifference to ownership of land, lack of any uplifting fables from the history of their own sex.”⁷¹ Moscow differed from Europe in almost everything: the density and type of population, the landscape, the climate.

This line of reasoning rested on a particular selection of data. Duchiński included in several of his books ethnographic maps prepared by Alfred Ciszkiewicz, secretary to L’École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. The maps, showed a mosaic of ‘Turanian’ peoples east of the Dnieper River, while the category ‘Russians’ was entirely absent. One of the maps was prepared for an anthropological section of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878. Henryk Sienkiewicz, who visited the exhibition, noted it approvingly, though without going into details: “Ciszkiewicz’s ethnographic map gives a precise account of the tribes that inhabit our parts and can be of use in resolving scholarly disputes.”⁷² Duchiński invoked the dynamically developing discipline of craniology, claiming that skull measurements, too, lent credence to his theory.⁷³ He illustrated his arguments about the social pathologies of Tsarist Russia with statistical tables.⁷⁴ As will be discussed below, Duchiński placed great importance on maintaining contact with the international scholarly community. On the eve of the January Uprising of 1863, he unsuccessfully courted financial support for the “Revue, published in French and devoted to the dissemination of my principles.”⁷⁵ All his efforts testified to his belief that “It is science, bad as much as good, that rules the world.”⁷⁶

In an article on the history of French ‘Turanism’, Marléne Laurelle somewhat anxiously notes how a teacher from the Polish lyceum in Paris had managed to impose his theories on a number of celebrated and prominent figures of French public life: Henri Martin, Albert Réville, August Vicquesnel, Charles de Steinbach, Casimir Delamarre, Édouard Talbot, Emmanuel Henri Victurnien marquise de Noailles, Élias Regnault, and others.⁷⁷ As she observes, the ‘Turanian’ thesis became one of the centrepieces of French Russophobia in the 1860s.⁷⁸ Its impact can be traced in the developments in the thought of perhaps the most distinguished of the French advocates of Duchiński’s theories, Henri Martin. In spite of his pro-Polish leanings illustrated in numerous publications from the period of the January Uprising, Martin initially treated the Kievan scholar’s theories with scepticism.⁷⁹ However, affected by the Pole’s lectures, he changed his mind, informing Duchiński of that fact by mail (and Duchiński did not fail to publish fragments of the letter): “Muscovites, Turanian by race and spirit, are not a part of the European community; they sow confusion and disorder; they will never become an element of harmony.”⁸⁰ Two years later, Martin published La Russie et l’Europe, in which he reprised Duchiński’s claims almost in full.⁸¹ In the conclusion to that work, he wrote: “The Muscovite [is] alien to the European family.”⁸² Other French advocates of Duchiński’s theory also developed a habit of repeating the scholar’s views, sometimes to the extent of nearly plagiarising his works (and often without citing them). His thesis that Nestor was a Polish chronicler was repeatedly invoked. French authors also quoted – without citation – from Duchiński’s translation of excerpts of Nikolai Karamzin’s works, which had not yet been published in French. Similar practices were also applied to maps showing the extent of Indo-European settlement.⁸³ The only exception to this rule was Élias Regnault’s treatise, in which the author skilfully systematised Duchiński’s arguments, dividing them into those pertaining to geology, hydrography, ethnography, the character of the soil, and customs and social norms, while also responding to critiques levelled against these claims by scholars from Russia or Russian scholarly institutions. Duchiński’s name was mentioned on multiple occasions in the study.⁸⁴ Clearly, the ‘politics of history’ pursued by the Hôtel Lambert faction of the Polish political emigration played an interesting, albeit secondary, role in the French reception of Duchiński’s work. The Kievan scholar relied on the financial support of the Czartoryski family from time to time. Some of his French publications appeared thanks to subsidies received from the Treasury Office. The same support was offered as well to at least some of his supporters, including Regnault.⁸⁵

There were several reasons for Duchiński’s presence in French publications based on his theories. The first, and perhaps the most important, was Duchiński’s own attitude to the truths (or perhaps single Truth) that he preached. He considered their dissemination both a quasi-religious duty and a patriotic contribution to the liberation of Ruthenia, in its everlasting union with Poland. In his address to the insurrectionary government of 1863, he explained: “We are going to take part of the Muscovites’ power away from them by employing their own methods of fighting, that is: by exercising our right to name them, by having Muscovites be called Muscovites instead of allowing them names that they appropriated for themselves and used to legitimise their purported rights to a major part of Poland, Ruthenia.”⁸⁶ Motivated by his sense of mission, he was untroubled by questions of authorship or the originality of his French followers. The Polish ethnographer was apparently content with being an unnamed accomplice. His wife, post-January Uprising émigrée Seweryna Duchińska, reminisced about his willingness not only to inspire, but even co-author other people’s studies. Before the publication of Martin’s work on Poland and Russia, “the post office would deliver whole packets of pages every day to Rue Montparnasse, where the French historian lived.”⁸⁷ The changes in French school curriculum were preceded by a close cooperation between Duchiński and Casimir Delamarre.⁸⁸ Duchiński provided the authors he befriended with statistical data and analyses he himself had compiled, which – one may assume – they copied and published under their own names.

The second reason for Duchiński’s unjustly low standing in French ‘Turanian’ works was his fear of a hostile reaction from the Russian authorities. His suspicion that he was being followed incidentally turned out to be true.⁸⁹ Seweryna Duchińska states that in 1865 an intervention of the Russian embassy forced her husband to stop speaking publicly and he thereafter concentrated on writing out of necessity.⁹⁰ The support of his principles was also said to have affected the careers of his French friends. Duchińska recalls that

the collaboration with Vicquesnel was the source of considerable vexation for my husband, especially from Vicquesnel’s wife. That proud and willful woman grumbled bitterly that her husband, in spite of all his achievements, had not yet been awarded the cross of the Légion d’Honneur. This snub … was the deed of … the too-cautious Bonapartists and other doctrinaires who were afraid to offend the Muscovites, outraged at being excluded from the Slavic world.⁹¹

Duchiński may also have played a much greater role in preparing the anthropological exhibition of 1878 than was officially acknowledged – out of fear of the ‘northern winds’ from St. Petersburg.⁹²

Duchiński’s theories also evoked a rather strong response in German-speaking countries. Casimir Delamarre’s pamphlet was published in German (in a translation by another of Duchiński’s acquaintances, Charlier de Steinbach) concurrently with the imperial decree on the change in the name of the Chair of Slavic Literatures at the Collège de France.⁹³ In his pamphlet, Delamarre expressed his amazement at the ease with which scholars as solid as the Germans were allowed themselves to be deceived by Russian propaganda. The French author put part of the blame on non-scientific factors: “However, we owe these reforms to a Slavic scholar, Mr. Duchiński of Kiev, which may be one reason why some German historians view them with distrust.”⁹⁴ Contrary to this opinion, Duchiński’s ideas did meet with the approval of several German scholars who, unlike some of their French colleagues, fully recognised his role in proving Russia’s true Turanian identity. The theory attracted the attention of Karl Marx, among others.⁹⁵ Gottfried Kinkel, an archaeologist and historian at the polytechnic in Zurich (and a revolutionary in his younger days), expressed an even deeper interest, devoting two extensive texts to the subject.⁹⁶ He also wrote enthusiastic reviews of Duchiński’s Swiss lectures for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna.⁹⁷ A German translation of one of Émile Hervet’s pamphlets was also published in Vienna.⁹⁸ More importantly for the scholarly reception of Duchiński’s oeuvre, the Turanian theory received acknowledgement from Austrian ethnographers, not as an act of faith or an expression of personal animosity toward Russia, but as an objective – though minor – fact useful for the analysis of the ethnogenesis of Ruthenians inhabiting the Austrian monarchy.⁹⁹

Among Poles, Duchiński was seen as a controversial thinker. There was no shortage either of committed believers in his dogmas or of persons openly denying them any scientific value, both at home and in émigré circles. Przegląd Rzeczy Polskich [Review of Polish Affairs] discussed Duchiński’s theses in a polemic with Herzen and Ogarev.¹⁰⁰ Henryk Kamieński offered critical commentaries on the same topic.¹⁰¹ In Galicia, Stefan Buszczyński propagated Duchiński’s ideas very actively, publishing anti-Russian tirades, sometimes under the rather ironic pseudonym ‘S. Bezstronny’ (‘S. Impartial’).¹⁰² Duchiński gained considerable popularity in the period preceding the outbreak of the January Uprising of 1863, when his works passed through censorship with greater ease. The entry on Duchiński in Samuel Orgelbrand’s encyclopedia, written by Julian Bartoszewicz, captures the general feeling about the thinker at the time: “Duchiński … in all honesty, repeated long-held opinions which the uneducated gentry of the Commonwealth used to understand far better than do the educated people of today.”¹⁰³

The same reasons that made the Turanian thesis so popular in pre-Insurrectionary Warsaw also shaped the Russian reception of Duchiński’s concepts. As with Duchiński’s French followers, his Russian commentators rarely acknowledged his intellectual primacy. In 1863, Mikhail Pogodin devoted a lengthy polemic against Duchiński’s theses.¹⁰⁴ Characteristically, it was addressed to the editor-in-chief of Revue des Deux Mondes, Adolphe d’Avril, rather than to Duchiński himself. Avril summed up the Polish-Russian dispute over the Slavic origin of the Russians, tending towards Duchiński’s view that Muscovites were clearly anthropologically distinct from Ruthenians.¹⁰⁵ Meanwhile, Pogodin decided that there was no point in debating the Pole’s claims, since they merely expressed a disposition typical of his nation. However, he did voice his outrage at the fact that such claims could find favour with serious scholarly journals in the West.¹⁰⁶ Although both Pogodin and Viktor S. Poroshin, another Russian critic of Duchiński, ostentatiously revered the Finns, they also firmly emphasised that any similarities in physical or cultural character between Finns and Russians were merely the effect of similar environmental conditions.¹⁰⁷ Duchiński was also relegated to a secondary role in an essay by the French geographer and expert on Russia Jean-Henri Schnitzler.¹⁰⁸ Schnitzler garbled the name of the Kievan scholar (rendered as ‘Duszinski’), despite not having applied the same mistreatment to either the French or the Russian authors he cited. Duchiński’s views were summed up in a single rhetorical question: What was he trying to prove? “That the true Ruthenia should belong to Poland?”¹⁰⁹

At the beginning of the 1880s in Poland, Franciszek Duchiński was the object both of the highest praise and of criticism far more vehement than that of the Russian authors. In September 1885, he was awarded a commemorative medal designed by Karol Młodnicki, depicting “on the one side … a portrait, and on the other – ethnographic maps clearly distinguishing Turanian Moscow from Atlantic Europe. In a circle, an engraved sentence: ‘For the defender of historical truth, in recognition of half a century of national service.’”¹¹⁰ Four years earlier, Wacław Nałkowski published a pamphlet titled On the geographical errors that serve as a basis for Professor Duchiński’s opinions, in which he attacked one of the pillars of Duchiński’s theory: the geographical and anthropological boundary of the Dnieper river.¹¹¹ Nałkowski treated the Kiev-born scholar’s worldview with contempt, dubbing it ‘duchinizm’ (‘Duchinism’) and ‘duchiniczność’ (‘Duchinity’; however, a more popular term in the 1880’s was ‘duchińszczyzna’ - ‘Duchinoiserie’).¹¹² During the 1885 jubilee, Duchiński was attacked by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in the journal Kraj (Country), and then again in an expanded version of the same piece published separately (in Russian as well). The linguist fundamentally opposed the very idea of using science for political purposes, whether by Russian Slavophiles or by Duchiński. He wrote:

Our ethnographer preaches a gospel of love between all Aryan nations, and at best an indifference, if not hatred, towards the Turanian world. However, since the Aryan world extends to all European nations living west of the Dnieper river and the ‘streams of Finland’, to put matters into the simplest of terms, we are dealing with a call for a confederacy of all ‘Europe’, including Aryan Poland, for the purpose of pushing Turanian ‘Moscow’ further east.¹¹³

Duchiński must have felt even more deeply hurt by the critique he faced from his countryman Mykhailo Drahomanov, who rejected Duchiński’s theories completely, focusing particularly on the scholar’s views regarding the Turanian origin of the Cossacks.¹¹⁴

By the time of Duchiński’s death, the main currents of the reception of his oeuvre had already crystallised. Both Polish and Ukrainian authors turned to Duchiński for ethnographic and anthropological arguments for excluding Russians from Europe – just as they did during the period of his greatest scholarly triumphs, after 1863. In the twentieth century, the same was done by scholars who have already made their appearance in this study, such as Lonhyn Tsehelskyi, who claimed in 1915 that “In terms of race, Russians are not Slavs at all, but rather Slavicised Finns.”¹¹⁵ Even before that, Duchiński had been referenced by a German emigrant in London, the old-school revolutionary Karl Blind. On the pages of the North American Review, he spoke against the interpreting the Russo-Japanese War as a struggle against the ‘yellow peril’. In his view, Turanian Russia had no right to call for Aryan unity, since it itself was an Asiatic country.¹¹⁶ An even more interesting example of the late reception of Duchiński’s works was the Russian ideology of Eurasianism. Pyotr Struve stressed that

it restates in an intriguingly objective manner the teachings of a Slav who hated Russia, a certain Pole named Duchiński, who, over fifty years ago, claimed that Muscovites were an eastern Turanian race that came into an only superficial contact with the culture of western Slavs and adopted the Scandinavian name ‘Rus’ along with the Slavic tongue.¹¹⁷

As has already been mentioned, historians generally hold a critical opinion of Duchiński writings, best expressed in the title of an article about him written by Andrzej Feliks Grabski: “In the blind alleys of historical thought …” (“Na manowcach myśli historycznej …”). From this angle, the Kievan scholar appears as a perversion of the entire current of nineteenth-century Polish historical thinking, a reductio ad absurdum of motifs found in the works of Adam Mickiewicz, Joachim Lelewel and Maurycy Mochnacki.¹¹⁸ The approval with which Duchiński’s theories met in the West must, in turn, be viewed in the context of the Russophobic nature of Western liberalism – a point noted by Hans Henning Hahn, among others.¹¹⁹

There are so many similarities between Quatrefages’ theory of Prussian racial specificity and Duchiński’s ‘truth’, that it seems reasonable to ask to what extent the one of them influenced the other. The issue is even more interesting in light of the fact that Duchiński published his revelations – also in French – well before Quatrefages’ La race prussienne appeared. The two authors knew each other personally. The Kievan met his future wife in May 1864 while attending lectures delivered by the French anthropologist in the Paris botanical garden.¹²⁰ Both men were members of the Geographical Society. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Duchiński and his wife were visiting a spa in Bohemia and were prevented from returning to Paris until March 1872 due to the ongoing war (and subsequently due to the fear of increasing Russian influences in France). Their eventual return left a lasting mark on the memory of Seweryna Duchińska: “One evening, we went to a meeting of the Geographical Society. The scene we witnessed there was truly horrifying! Every scholar had aged by at least ten years. Quatrefages’ head was as grey as a pigeon’s back.”¹²¹

La race prussienne includes several references to Duchiński’s works, particularly concerning the anthropological similarities between the Baltic nations and other ‘primordial’ inhabitants of Europe. Quatrefages quotes Duchiński’s opinion about the physical likeness between the Lithuanians and the Bretons. For the French anthropologist, this observation proved that the common features of both nationalities derived from a common Finnish component – combined with the Aryan traits of the Slavs in the case of Lithuanians, and with the Aryan traits of Celts in the case of Bretons.¹²² However, fragments borrowed without being cited are far more numerous. The point of departure for both authors was a theory popular in the nineteenth century that, based on certain remarks found in Tacitus’ Germania, identified the Finns (Fenni) as the primordial, savage population of northern Europe antedating the advent of the Aryan people.¹²³ In describing the physical traits of the Turanian race, both authors drew attention to the fact that Turanians were not built proportionally. In producing his description of a ‘Muscovite’, Duchiński may have been thinking of a figure similar to Quatrefages’ ‘Estonian’, ‘Latvian’, or ‘Pomeranian’. Clear similarities can also be found in their psychological characterisations. Both Turanian tribes were said to be guided in their social life by a reverence for power and a desire for conquest. Differences were marginal and sometimes only superficial: While Duchiński claimed that the Muscovites were prone to renouncing their own traditions, Quatrefages argued that the Finns were deeply attached to theirs. However, a closer look at the two analyses reveals that the Polish scholar had taken note of the resilience of basic components of the Turanian psyche and culture, in spite of the ease with which the race opened itself to foreign (typically more developed) influences. His French colleague, in turn, observed in the two ‘autochthonous’ Prussian races a tendency to embrace foreign models.¹²⁴ Both visions depended on the popular belief of the times that humankind was divided into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ races, or, as stated in the works of Gustav Klemm, into ‘male’ and ‘female’ peoples.¹²⁵ The most important, somewhat ‘practical’ conclusion to be drawn from the works of the two scholars concerns the mechanism of exclusion from the European family of nations. Both Quatrefages and Duchiński implemented the same procedure of separating racially foreign elements from those they consider racially related. Duchiński’s purpose was to maintain the separation of Ruthenia from Moscow. Quatrefages was extending a hand to the Aryan Germans of the west and south.

For significant differences between the two theories, one must look not so much at their structures, as at their narrative styles. Armand de Quatrefages invoked values such as scholarly objectivity and common sense. Accepting the inequality of the races, he criticised the supposedly Prussian theory of the inevitability of Prussian hostility. In his works, the scholarly apparatus is in harmony with an ideologically fraught, but logically sound, content. Duchiński was a talented amateur in comparison. While he invoked the authority of science and maintained formal coherence, he made no attempt to conceal his primary purpose, which is that of contributing not to the development of science, but to the liberation of Poland and Ukraine-Ruthenia. Science was merely a means to achieve this goal, and hardly the most important at that. During the grand jubilee of 1885, the Duchiński made a statement that Quatrefages was unlikely to have ever agreed with:

We have raised five great armies to face our enemies … The first of our armies is the trust we put in God that He will never allow falsehood to prevail. Our second army: ethnography; the third: geography, in the broadest possible sense; the fourth: statistics; the fifth: philosophy. These are the armies that we lead into the field, deploying them at times individually, at times all at once.¹²⁶

A curious document of this religious perspective, which was shared by both Duchiński and his wife, is the copy of La Science de la religion by Max Müller, a linguist and one of the authors of the ‘Aryan myth’, held in the National Library in Warsaw, which includes handwritten notes by Seweryna Duchińska.¹²⁷ Among other themes, Müller considers the correct method of classifying religions, concluding that “the only truly efficient and effective classification of religions is the same as the classification of languages.” Duchińska’s commentary testifies to her different worldview: “Here, God’s law manifests itself: God speaks through material laws …”¹²⁸

Unlike other French authors writing about Turanians, Quatrefages wrote his pamphlet alone. The similarity between his claims and those put forth in French by Duchiński for two decades did not result from mere imitation. During a brief stay in Paris in the spring of 1872, the Kievan scholar tried to maintain and strengthen this area of Quatrefages’s thinking, which he believed to be of the greatest significance. At a meeting of the Geographical Society held on 19 April 1872, Duchiński delivered a lecture in which he developed and modified the line of reasoning followed by Quatrefages in the conclusion of his work on the Prussian race. Pan-Slavism, he argued, is an exact copy of pan-Germanism, that is, a tool for legitimising ruthless conquest. At the same time, he reiterated the belief – contrary to Quatrefages – that inhabitants of areas east of the Dnieper River were not a Finnic-Slavic mixture, but rather a purely Asian, Turanian race.¹²⁹ Indeed, for proponents of Duchiński’s theories any suggestion of bonds between Slavs and Finns was inadmissible. The fact that Quatrefages continued to view the former as Aryans must have been scant consolation.

The similarities between the two racial theories grew out of the nearly identical psychological disposition of their authors and the scientific discourse they both participated in. Direct references concerned secondary issues rather than the general problem. Characteristically, Quatrefages removed several mentions of Duchiński when preparing his article for the Revue des Deux Mondes for publication as a separate pamphlet. In its original version, his paper included a reference to ethnographic maps prepared by Duchiński and used by Viquesnel in a passage concerning Slavs.¹³⁰ Later editions of La race prusienne no longer include this citation. One may presume that, with the changing power relations in Europe, the prospect of invoking the findings of an anti-Russian émigré was no longer appealing. Besides, in the 1870s Duchiński’s influence – unlike that of Quatrefages – had peaked, and his theories were beginning to lose popularity. French Polonophilia also waned considerably, particularly in conservative and liberal circles horrified by the threat of a repeat of the Commune, who associated the Polish question with political and social radicalism.¹³¹ The conceptual affinities between the two anthropologists became less noticeable as familiarity with Duchiński declined. However, this did not mean that Quatrefages’ intellectual debt to the Polish scholar went entirely unnoticed. In an editorial from early 1873, the liberal Pall Mall Gazette of London maliciously commented on a projected expedition to search for the ten lost tribes of Israel, invoking Duchiński’s thesis that the Moscow Turanians were a Semitic people. According to this logic, the author ironically observed, the expedition should set out for Russia. For the benefit of readers whose familiarity with the Polish anthropologist was insufficient, the editor added a short explanatory note: “Duchiński, the polemical ethnologist of Russia and Poland (from whose arsenal that inferior warrior M. Quatrefages has borrowed the weapons he employs against ‘la race Prussienne’).”¹³²

…

As we can see, the European ‘war of the spirits’ that began in 1912 had precedents. The Franco-Prussian War saw the appearance of strikingly similar phenomena. German and French intellectuals issued critical statements on the national character of their opponents, mutually excluding each other’s nations from the civilised community; and they demonstratively removed ‘hostile’ colleagues from national scientific institutions or renounced their own membership in them. These similarities were tied to the character of these wars, both of which involved not just the armed forces and the inhabitants of the areas on which the war was waged, but entire societies. Increasing access to the press helped spread the “war of the spirits.” Both in 1870–1871 and during the Great War, characterological reflections were symptomatically delivered under the guise of the human sciences. In the previous chapters, I discussed the involvement of geographers, anthropologists, and psychiatrists in the war being conducted within their respective disciplines. Of course, any of these academicians could have – and some in fact did – become involved in the public debate to express their confidence in the ethnopsychological circumstances of their own country’s victory and the inevitable defeat of the enemy. What strikes me as most interesting, however, are the statements they made that – formally at least – retain the rigours of academic work. Armand de Quatrefages and Carl Stark, despite having written their works several decades earlier, belong to the same group of professionals who imported the “war of the spirits,” in the case of the former to racial anthropology, and in that of the latter to psychiatry.

The fact that Quatrefages plagiarised theories devised several decades before by a Polish-Ukrainian immigrant shakes up the coherence of this image. In some ways, the Franco-Prussian War was a modern conflict; newer research on the Crimean War – which saw a certain rise in Duchiński’s popularity – locate it at the mid-point on the road to global conflicts.¹³³ But Duchiński’s anthropological theory was born in earlier times, in a context far removed from that of the Crimean War.

Franciszek Duchiński perceived the Polish-Russian conflict in religious terms. His ‘truth’ was his weapon, and academic disciplines his armies. At stake in this struggle was the freedom of Ukraine. In Duchiński’s eyes, Polish irredentism was a struggle with no holds barred. French intellectuals applied the same reasoning to the conflict with Prussia. In the years of the Great War, this perspective became universal. Structural similarities between ideological constructions separated in every case by several decades seem to derive precisely from an analogous perception of the conflicts. An ultimate struggle warranted the mobilisation of every ‘army’. Defeated on the field of battle, one could continue one’s struggle in the sphere of ideas.

It would be logical to conclude the comparison of particular “wars of the spirits” by eschewing a strictly diachronic perspective, according to which the political involvement of the human sciences passes through a sequence of hierarchical stages. Indeed, the numerous analogies do suggest the possibility of tracing the development of distinct ideas, but rather than vanishing completely, the latter tend to smoulder on, thanks to the efforts of desperate amateurs such as Franciszek Duchiński. Pushed to the margins of scientific life and public discourse, they can often play no role at all for decades. At best, some of the arguments they put forward are included in the discourse of national characterology, adding new terminologies and contributing to its scientific legitimation. Thus, there are more reasons for considering this phenomenon as an irregular cycle of eruptions of nationalism in science, in each case connected to a separate traumatic experience of war, defeat, and violence. To relate to examples cited above, it is not necessary to prove a continuity of ideological development between Quatrefages and, say, Edgar Bérillon. To explain the similarities between the ways in which they portrayed Germans, one only needs to know the atmosphere in which they produced their works. The deadly – in their view – threat to their homeland justified a nationalist engagement not outside the realm of science, but precisely within its confines. Thus, the fact that Quatrefages was inspired by Duchiński more than he was willing to admit does not in itself prove the Kievan scholar’s primacy among European scientific racists. It is quite likely that, were it not for the Prussian bombing of Paris, this Polish-French transfer of ideas would not have occurred. In each instance, it was the political situation that conditioned such conduct.