Racializing Scripture in Eighteenth-Century France

Europeans had long sought an explanation for human diversity in Noah's sons, with Ham eventually identified with Africa and its peoples.  An alternative, if less widespread, tradition existed of identifying Cain, accursed murderer of his brother Abel, as the progenitor of Africans.  In the 1760s, an anonymous biblical exegete turned to this tradition to refute the Prae-Adamites, who asserted that there had been people before Adam and, thus, that human beings had multiple origins.  To some, this polygenist alternative more adequately accounted for what were becoming perceived as "racial" differences between the world's peoples.  This paper explores how the French author, appalled by miscegenation and compelled to defend the Bible against the polygenist threat, reworked the thesis of a heretical English divine into a response redolent of the French Caribbean experience and reflecting the greater familiarity with non-Europeans brought about by increased contact through commerce and voyages of discovery.  The resulting treatise documents a convergence, despite confessional difference, of strands of radical English and French thought in clandestine literature.  In the process, the author rejected one of the most time-honored and still competitive explanations of human diversity, the effects of climate, which Buffon was folding into his theories of the genesis of human diversity.  By advocating contemporary understandings of the Flood and rationalizing Moses' accounts, he also wandered into heterodoxy.  The resulting treatise paradoxically, perhaps mischievously, even perversely, suggests the power of the biblical narrative to accommodate new "facts."