Eric T. Jennings is Associate Professor of History and a member of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Vichy in the Tropics: PÉtain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 and a coeditor, with Jacques Cantier, of L’Empire colonial sous Vichy.

Curing the Colonizers

HYDROTHERAPY, CLIMATOLOGY, AND FRENCH COLONIAL SPASBy Eric T. Jennings

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3808-6

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments………………………………………………..1Introduction……………………………………………………………..81. Acclimatization, Climatology, and the Possibility of Empire…………………402. Colonial Hydrotherapy…………………………………………………..643. Highland Hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe………………………………………904. The Spas of Runion Island: Antechambers to the Tropics…………………….1185. Leisure and Power at the Spa of Antsirabe, Madagascar………………………1546. Korbous, Tunisia: Negating the Hammam…………………………………….1787. Vichy: Taking the Waters Back Home……………………………………….211Conclusion……………………………………………………………….215Archival Abbreviations…………………………………………………….217Notes……………………………………………………………………247Bibliography……………………………………………………………..263

Chapter One

Acclimatization, Climatology, and the Possibility of Empire

HOW DID FRENCH SCIENCE COME TO PRESCRIBE water and altitude cures to combat the influence of the tropics? The answer lies in some of the epistemological foundations of French overseas hygiene and medicine. Geographers, historians of science, and others have traced the emergence of moral climatology, tropical geography, and taxonomies of climes over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, a number of studies have examined how the tropics were constructed as a “putrid” and “unhealthy” space, or more generally how European science understood disease as climatically determined. The connection between these “sciences” and the sensibilities and practices of the colonizers, however, has yet to be thoroughly investigated. By focusing on debates over human acclimatization, this chapter traces the link between the production and practice of colonial knowledge in the field of tropical hygiene.

If altitude and water cures came to be seen as essential to detoxify, recalibrate, or otherwise heal the constitutions, organs, even the blood composition of French people who had spent time in “hot climes,” then the said climes must indeed have been considered highly noxious. Nowhere is the anxiety over colonial settlement and over the inherent toxicity of the tropics more apparent than in the interminable debates over human acclimatization, which weighed considerably on modes of European behavior in the colonies.

To Acclimatize or Not to Acclimatize?

It is difficult to reconstruct the importance of climate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourse. Many Enlightenment philosophes operated within a framework of climatic determinism, descended from Hippocrates. Indeed, the Hippocratic legacy, centered as it was on “Airs, Waters and Places,” lies at the root of three sciences treated in this book: climatology, hydrotherapy, and msologie. In his monumental study of the idea of nature in eighteenth-century France, Jean Ehrard notes the philosophical complicity between geographical and climatic determinism and the Enlightenment: each married the sensual with the material while providing an experimental confirmation of Spinozism. Admittedly, climate occupied a more central place for some philosophes than for others: it appears virtually insignificant to David Hume, for example, while being paramount to J. G. Herder.

Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopdie (1777) reveals that tropical weather was believed to render indigenous women oversexed, to thepointthatmentravelingtotheseclimeswereadvisedtowearchastitybelts. Similarly, Baron de Montesquieu asserted, the only reason European women need not have been “locked up” was because northern climes guaranteed “good mores.” These widely held ideas were reiterated by Count Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon in his famous eighteenth-century Histoire naturelle. In a stereotype descended from antiquity, nymphomania was time and again associated with the tropics.

Climate did more than affect the humors and sexuality. It was thought to lie at the very origin of behavioral and cultural differences-themselves grossly distorted to legitimize European dominance. Montesquieu, in particular, expounded upon the tyranny of climate. His De l’Esprit des Lois (1748) imputed sati in India, daughter selling in China, and even the decline of ancient Rome to differences of temperature. In fact, to Montesquieu the main difference between Europeans and “savages” resided in the fact that the latter “were almost entirely dominated by climate and nature.” The degree and novelty of Montesquieu’s climatic determinism have been called into question, however. Some deem it perhaps the least original aspect of his oeuvre. While conceding that climatic determinism was so widespread at the time as to be unavoidable, others view Montesquieu as breaking from the more cautious appraisal Abb Franois-Ignace d’Espiard articulated in his Essais sur le gnie et le caractre des nations (1743), which treated climate as onevariable among countless others. The harshest interpretation holds that for Montesquieu “climate explains vice and virtue, industry and indolence, sobriety and drunkenness, ‘monachism’ and [even] the British constitution.”

Still, none of the philosophes questioned the possibility or the desirability of Europeans traveling to the tropics or settling there. If anything, the eighteenth-century settlement objective involved achieving a state of acclimatization-seasoning Europeans, so that they might best withstand the local environment and hence disease. It follows, therefore, that many a prescriptive guide written in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth dispensed advice on how to win the battle against climate. Some suggested sexual abstinence, others recommended frequent baths. Some counseled the consumption of wine, others warned against the dangers of alcohol. There was no shortage of advice on how to soften the transition to living in the colonies.

Montesquieu concluded that Europeans were intensely vulnerable in faraway lands: “Those who wish to settle [in tropical colonies] cannot take on the local lifestyle under such different climes; they are forced to bring all the commodities of everyday life from the country whence they came.” Here, medicine and commodity culture met the practice of everyday colonial life. Colonizers, Montesquieu argued, would have to re-create Europe in the tropics in order to prosper. This was considered one front in a titanic war against the overriding impact of climate. In the words of the historian Anthony Pagden, “Tryas they might to remain Frenchmen or English or Spaniards in the tropics, sooner or later the environment would reclaim its empire, and re-establish things in their properorder.” The emergence of a Creole identity, however, ultimately belied this belief. For French scientists, the process of becoming Creole seemed double-edged: it signaled a gradual loss of Europeanness but might hold the promise of acclimatization. Acclimatization, in turn, might prove medically invaluable for those contemplating long stays or even permanent moves to the tropics.

In the nineteenth century, acclimatization and creolity underwent profound reassessments in France. A century prior, the philosophes had certainly stressed the dominance of climate over constitutions. But most also recognized that acclimatizing and becoming Creole were necessary steps toward living elsewhere. In the nineteenth century this cosmopolitan view was first called into question and then utterly rejected by a growing number of scientists, who would reinvent creolity and acclimatization into pathologies. The trajectory to making acclimatization deviant was by no means straightforward. A host of early influences shaped the process. The physician Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis’s Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802) established the connection between climate-defined as the “totality of physical circumstances attached to each locality”-and morality and mental capacities. Cabanis’s school, known as the Ideologues for their science of ideas, was not alone in auguring an initial shift circa 1800. Around the same time, the famous naturalist Georges Cuvier was likewise charting a course toward a “deterministic, physicalist interpretation of the capacities and potentials of the diverse races.” Although they anticipated the later nineteenth-century hardening of determinisms, these sources displayed nowhere near the same rigidity.

Martin Staum has shown how races were not yet considered fixed in the second half of the eighteenth century: the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper even speculated that after a thousand years, whites in the tropics could turn black-precisely the opposite of what the German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow would assert a century later, namely that whites could not even survive in the tropics, let alone morphologically adapt to them. And William Cohen has observed how an avowed racist like the medical doctor Julien Joseph Virey, writing in 1801, still allowed for the possibility that environment could trump race. Race, in other words, was not yet immutable, the way it would soon become for hard-line “scientific racists” later in the nineteenth century. Most important, pathologies were not heavily racialized, as they would so markedly become in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1888, Joseph Onsime Orgeas, who had served at a colonial hospital in Cayenne (Guyana), concluded from clinical evidence that “human races differ no less in their pathological characteristics than in their physical ones … Pathological differences, themselves derived from physical variations, have vast and profound consequences: a race lives and prospers where another dwindles and goes extinct.”

I would argue that such determinism itself, be it climatic, environmental, hereditarian, or racial, would reach its zenith in the second half of the nineteenth century, when strands of European science would posit, without regard for paradox, the fixity of race, the immutability of national cultures, and the impossibility of migration. Indeed, each of these threads soon became intertwined with the theories of so-called scientific racists, which asserted that climate conditioned racial degeneration, fragility, or supremacy. Interestingly, fragility and supremacy frequently ended up inscribed in the same equation-even within the same variable of a given equation. One contradiction in particular lay at the heart of the anti-acclimatization position. Humankind and other organisms were believed to rapidly transform-or degenerate-in the tropics. But this transformation could only work in one direction and resulted in a fixed, immutable outcome.

According to Mark Harrison, the second half of the nineteenth century marked the rejection of the very possibility of European acclimatization and settlement in the so-called torrid zones-an obvious irony if one thinks of this era as the zenith of European overseas expansion. Whereas it had been held in the eighteenth century that Europeans “could adapt physiologically to their new environments,” the very idea of acclimatization was now called into question by some racial doctrines: “This new [nineteenth-century] conception of difference stressed heredity and the innate, unalterable characteristics of the ‘races’ of Mankind.” Anne-Marie Moulin has been even more chronologically specific, situating the shift in the 1860s. She writes,

All the naturalists raised the crucial question of the survival of French people in the tropics. Transformative logic provided the theoretical axis for a very pragmatic line of questioning. Schematically speaking, until the 1860s, doctors were optimistic, guided by theories of acclimatization. Different races or variants of a single species (monogenism) could easily adapt to new climes. This optimism was maintained in spite of the terrifying morbidity of the French in Algeria [after 1830] … But, in a second phase, pessimism emerged vis–vis the colonization of Africa and Asia. Doctors, more than naturalists, henceforth weighed in with considerations of “race.” [In this view] natives had a natural advantage, being hereditarily adapted to their milieu.

Although the precise timing of the shift can be debated-I would suggest that pessimism toward acclimatization was already on the rise in the 1830s, and that in any event the battles over acclimatization played themselves out over several decades-Moulin’s model provides an extremely helpful map of changing French views of “warm climes” in the nineteenth century.

There can be no doubt that the growing rigidity of racial models over the course of the nineteenth century both enabled and sharpened beliefs in immutable essences, whether racial, regional, or climatic. Karl Linnaeus or the Enlightenment more generally should not be saddled with the transformations popularized later by the likes of Arthur de Gobineau and Hippolyte Taine. Neither can they be held accountable for the increasing rejection of the very possibility of productive hybridity and mixity. As Moulin suggests, this trend accompanied the intensification of the debate over the unity of humankind: monogenists, like promoters of acclimatization, found themselves very much on the defensive by the mid-nineteenth century (American polygenist ethnographers like Samuel George Morton weighed in heavily on this conflict). The polygenism versus monogenism debate was inextricably connected to that over acclimatization. In 1861, the French anthropologist Eugne Dally drew a direct line between the two: “It seems tome that if it were demonstrated that mankind is not cosmopolitan, that our European races, for example, cannot acclimate to other lands where other races thrive, that would provide strong proof in favor of the multiplicity of human species.”

In this sense, although climate had admittedly played an important role in framing and delineating the non-European “other” since ancient times, it was in the nineteenth century that battle lines were drawn overclimate’s teleological impact on race. In the nineteenth century, French scientists thus recast the primacy of climate in a crucial question: should Europeans even attempt to acclimate to the tropics? In other words, should the uphill struggle against climate even be waged? Such anxieties were widely shared. The same internal debate was occurring simultaneously at the heart of the world’s other colonial superpower. Alan Bewell has remarked, “[The nineteenth-century British] medical literature on tropical invalidism was intrinsically a reflection on the feasibility of empire.” In France, two schools of thought battled over the viability of migration and empire over the course of the nineteenth century: one was increasingly racially and climatically deterministic, while the other found itself defending the very possibility of acclimatization, even over the longterm. At stake were quite simply the cosmopolitanism and oneness of humankind and the feasibility of empire.

Which Tropics?

The notion of the tropics itself came under intense scrutiny in the nineteenth century. The tropics, to borrow the geographer David Livingstone’s expression, fell victim to “negative environmental stereotyping” on a pan-European scale. This had not always been the case, and some significant exceptions remained. These included paradisical islands, in the Pacific and Indian oceans most notably, where tropical influences were said to be attenuated by breezes or other factors. The image of tropical Edens, emblematized in its romantic version by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, proved resilient even as the tropics were being pathologized. In Derek Gregory’s analysis, the tropical nature of excrescence coexisted-and actually became entangled with-that of tropical nature as abundance. This helps in part to explain the stubborn quest for a salubrious tropical microclimate within the increasingly demonized tropical zone. It also accounts for the generally positive outlook cast on the isle of Runion, which I will come to in chapter 4.

Still, as environmental determinists coded the tropics as increasingly dangerous sites, tropical Edens were gradually confined to the realm of the exceptional. Indeed, the stain associated with the tropics spread to warm, nontropical climes. Algeria and Tunisia illustrate this point. The heavy losses incurred during and after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 cast serious doubts on the region’s healthfulness to Europeans, doubts that endured for the remainder of the century. In 1841, a French general, Franciades-Fleurus Duvivier, famously pronounced, “Cemeteries … are the only flourishing colonies in Algeria.” Two decades later, one Dr. Vital, a physician posted in the Constantinois region of Algeria reported, “European children are mercilessly leveled [by the local climate].” In 1863, the anthropologist Jean Boudin related the story of some twelve northern French peasants who had emigrated to a purportedly healthful part of Algeria: even there, only one survived his new climes. During the conquest of Tunisia in 1881, a quarter of the French expeditionary force was felled by disease (typhoid fever in this case). I will return shortly to the conviction that climate, rather than disease, killed. Here I wish to stress that Algeria and Tunisia, like sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, had established murderous reputations in nineteenth-century France. If anything, far from being circumscribed as the nineteenth century progressed, the “tropical menace” was seen as spreading over onto liminal climates. Indeed, French scientists most often referred to a generalized peril of pays chauds (“warm climes”), lumping together all French colonies save Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

The Acclimatization Camp and the Feasibility of Empire

The historian Michael Osborne has described acclimatation as “the essential science of [French] colonization.” Certainly the popularity of French acclimatization societies, zoos, and gardens tends to confirm this view (though these institutions were largely concerned with animal and botanic rather than human acclimatization). Acclimatation, the amorphous concept popularized by the naturalist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) and influenced by Jean-Baptiste de Monnet Chevalier de Lamarck’s (1744-1829) theories of physiological adaptability, transformation, and subsequent transmission, was gaining broad currency in the early nineteenth century. Its gist has been broadly defined as “a rationally forced adaptation to new environments.” While certainly ascribing a dominant role to environment, at its very core acclimatization involved facilitating, rather than hindering, the settlement of people or indeed species from one climate to another. Beneath its naturalistic surface lay some deep universalistic and cosmopolitan currents. Warwick Anderson has observed that acclimatization theories seem to have gained greater favor in France than elsewhere, Britain particularly. Even though they drew considerable criticism from some quarters after 1830, “human acclimatization” theories would continue to shape French colonial policy and practices long after. As for the anti-acclimatization turn launched in earnest in France in the 1830s, it would arguably prove all the more virulent in France than elsewhere, precisely because it first needed to loosen acclimatization’s grip.

(Continues…)

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