Chapter XII

The central zone, a study in reemergence

1. Introduction

With the present chapter we enter upon the last west-east drive in our effort to deal systematically with the racial geography of living white peoples. We enter at the same time upon the most complex and, from the biological standpoint, the most difficult aspect of the white racial problem. The history of Europe north of the Pyrenees and south of the Baltic and of the Arctic fringe has been largely a matter of the penetration of food-producing Mediterranean peoples into territory held by food-gatherers of Mesolithic cultural tradition, the retreat and sub­mergence of the food-gatherers, and their subsequent racial reemergence. We have already witnessed the same process in the north, and in Britain, especially Ireland. We have also witnessed a similar process in Morocco and the Canary Islands.

In northern Europe and in Ireland, the reemergence was of full-sized, unaltered Briinn and Borreby men; in North Africa of both reduced and unreduced Afalou survivors. One suspects, in studying individual living Irish, that the presence of occasional individuals of Alpine appearance may be due to a minor tendency toward size reduction in the Briinn stock, parallel to the reduction evident in some Riffians.

In central Europe, we shall deal with the Alpine race, a reduced Upper Palaeolithic type, which in its pure form is a medium to short- statured, laterally built, brachycephalic, short and broad-faced, short­nosed, relatively large-jawed, human variety. The perfect Alpine looks very much like the Germanic concept of a dwarf, the small men with snub noses and long beards who live in the mountains and forests, and who foster such poor unfortunates as the Princess Snow White.¹

The thesis that the Alpine race is an in situ descendant of the Upper Palaeolithic men of France still remains unproved. The Mesolithic is a vast ten-thousand year gap in our knowledge of the racial history of Europe, and it is still possible that the Alpine race entered central Europe from the east during that time, or that it was reenforced by

¹ The production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt Disney in 1938 has made this physical type familiar, by means of caricature, to almost the entire American and western European public.

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migrations from North Africa. It is also possible, and in fact more than likely, that the Alpine race represents a reemergence within a reemer­gence; that with the post-glacial climatic changes the shorter-statured, brachycephalic, short-faced, low-orbitted element within the heterogene­ous Cr6-Magnon and Afalou stocks asserted its selective superiority genetically over the taller, longer-headed and longer-faced elements, and that the Alpine race as such existed in Europe by the end of the Mesolithic; later it was pushed out and absorbed by the incoming Medi­terraneans, through mixture with whom it subsequently made its second reemergence. One difficult feature of this whole problem is that the Alpine race, in combination with certain other elements, produces a number of special mixed forms which help to complicate the racial picture.

A further complication is that the geographical frontier between the region of Alpine reemergence and that of Borreby reemergence is not clearly drawn; the two meet and overlap in the Low Countries and in Germany. In the east, free from Borreby competition, the Alpines follow the mountain chain into Asia Minor and southern Turkestan; on the plains of Russia and Poland it is a Lappish or Ladogan element which reemerges.

The Mediterranean race is a foreigner on European soil. Only in Spain and Portugal, and the western Mediterranean islands, where the large Briinn and Borreby hybrids were never important; only in Great Britain, where geography yields little quarter to ancient survivors; and in eastern Norway and Sweden, where the land was relatively empty before their arrival, could Mediterraneans of either blond or brunet pigmentation survive as unaltered major populations on European soil. Europe owes her civilization to the Mediterraneans, but she owes her blood and bone, to an equal if not a larger extent, to the people who settled the continent during the last interglacial.

2. FRANCE

The racial history of France is so integral a part of the racial history of western Europe as a whole that there is little need to review its earlier phases in detail. The Neolithic food-producers who first settled this country came largely from the south, from Spain and also from Italy; the Danubian invasions affected France little, if at all, in a direct racial sense. Megalithic invaders paid considerable attention to the whole western shore of France, and penetrated up the river valleys of the north, while Brittany was their especial stronghold. They were not, however, the first food-producers to arrive, as in Ireland, Scotland, and Denmark; hence their influence upon the subsequent population was relatively slight.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

France was a cultural backwash during the Bronze Age; the farmers of Neolithic tradition tilled the valleys and plains, while hunters and gatherers of Mesolithic inspiration still wandered about the infertile uplands. Only in the northeastern part of France, adjacent to southern Germany, was there a Bronze Age civilization of any importance. The Iron Age brought with it invasions from the north of considerable magni­tude; first the waves of Keltic peoples, and then of Germanic, culminating in the establishment of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire. These invasions gave to the whole north of France a Kelto-Germanie racial cast, which has penetrated many other parts of the country. The Nordic infusion

So produced has had a lasting effect upon the French racial composition.

Other movements of importance were the penetration of the Basques northward, as recorded in the preceding chapter; the arrival of the Northmen from Norway in what became, under their regime, Nor­mandy; the earlier arrival of Saxons along the coast; and the settlement of Cornishmen in Brittany. In more recent times the infiltration of Ital­ians into the Riviera is a racial movement of some consequence.

The Romans established themselves more firmly and with greater success in Gaul than in most of their colonies; the Romanized Kelts gave up their language for a popular variety of Latin, as did the Aquita- nians in the southwestern portion of the country, and the Ligurians in the southeast. Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other subjects of the Roman em­pire established themselves in Gaul in considerable numbers. The Parisian spirit of internationalism dates back to the Roman occupation. The sur­vival of Romance speech through the blanket of Frankish German and of Norse in Normandy is a tribute to the strength of the Roman imprint.

Throughout her history, France has absorbed more than she has expanded; except for French Canada, she has never had a colony to which Frenchmen have gone in numbers to settle. In the same sense the territory of France is greater than her linguistic boundaries; on the corners of her domain are border provinces in which new foreign tongues have crept in, or in which older ones have long resisted absorption. Italian, in the southeast, is new; Basque and Breton date to the fifth century of our era—of the two the former is increasing, the latter slowly decreasing; Catalan in the Roussillon, so closely related to Langue d’Oc, is apparently static; in the north, Flemish, reaching westward from Belgium, is gradually on the decrease, as is German in Alsace. Although French is spoken by thousands of educated persons outside French territory as a second language, it is not an aggressive language within France itself. The total number of persons of native French citizenship within France whose mother language is not French is three and a half out of forty-two millions. At the same time four other millions

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out of the forty-two are naturalized or unnaturalized foreigners. The emigration of Frenchmen is negligible.

At the turn of the twentieth century, France was probably the best documented of the larger European countries in an anthropometric sense. Since that time, however, almost no further statistical information has been collected; our sources are the same as those with which Deniker and Ripley worked. The material consists almost entirely of detailed studies of the distribution of a few characters, notably stature, the cephalic index, and pigmentation. The only new contribution that one can make lies in the field of interpretation.²

If we pass rapidly through the geographical distribution of stature, the cephalic index, and pigmentation, we shall have covered most of the existing information of an accurate nature. The mean stature of the French is about 166 cm.,³ which is neither tall nor short, but inter-

2. The old material has been ably summarized and interpreted by Professor Georges Montandon in VEthnie Frangaise. His volume contains a complete bibliography of the older sources. Chief among those which have been used in the present section are:

Atgier, E. A., BSAP, ser. 4, vol. 9, 1898, pp. 617—637; ser. 4, vol. 10,1899, pp. 171- 199.

Aubert, RDAP, ser. 3, vol. 3, 1888, pp. 456-468.

Bouchereau, A., Anth, vol. 11, #6, 1900, pp. 691-706.

Bouchereau, A., and Mayet, L., BMSA, ser. 5, vol. 6, 1905, pp. 426-448.

Carlier, G., BSAP, ser. 4, vol. 4, 1893, pp. 470-476,

Carriere, G., Homme, vol. 2, 1885, pp. 334-337.

Carret, J., MDSS, vol. 21, 1883, pp. 1-108.

Chassagne, A., RDAP, ser. 2, vol. 4, 1881, pp. 439-447.

Collignon, R., Anth, vol. 1, 1890, pp. 201-224; vol. 4, 1893, pp. 237-258. REAP, vol. 7, 1897, pp. 339-347. BSAP, ser. 6, vol. 3, 1883, pp. 463-526; ser. 3, vol. 10, 1887, pp. 306-312; ser. 4, vol. 1, 1890, pp. 736-805. MSAP, ser. 3, vol. 1, fasc. 3, 1894, ser. 3, vol. 1, fasc. 5, 1895.

Debidrre, C., BSAL, vol. 5, 1886-87, pp. 129-149.

Durand de Gros, J. P., BSAP, ser. 2, vol. 4, 1869, pp. 193-218.

Garnier, M., Anth, vol. 24, 1913, pp. 25-50.

Grilli&re, BSAP, ser. 6, vol. 4, 1913, pp. 392-400.

Herv6, G., REAP, vol. 11, 1901, pp. 161-177.

Hovelacque, A., and Herve, G., MSAP, ser. 3/vol. 1, fasc. 2, 1894, pp. 1-256.

Lagneau, G., BSAP, vol. 6, 1865, pp. 507-511.

Lapouge, G. V. de, BSSM, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 235-243.

MacAuliffe, L., and Marie, A., Ethnographie, No. 5, 1922, pp. 41-48.

MacAuliffe, L., Marie, A., and Thooris, A., BMSA, ser. 6, vol. 1, 1910, pp. 307-311.

Manouvrier, L., BSAP, ser. 3, vol. 11, 1888, pp. 156-173.

Papillault, G. F., BMSA, ser. 5, vol. 3, 1902, pp. 393-526.

Pommerol, F., BSAP, ser. 3, vol. 10, 1887, pp. 383-397.

Routil, R., ZFRK, vol. 5, 1937, pp. 177-181.

Topinard, P., RDAP, ser. 3, vol. 4, 1889, pp. 513-530; JRAI, vol. 27, 1897, pp. 96- 103; Anth, vol. 4, 1893, pp. 579-591.

France more than almost any other European country stands in need of a new and complete anthropometric survey. The older surveys suffer in the technical sense as well as in the paucity of criteria studied.

7. Figures for 1910.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

mediate in relationship to other European peoples. France is divided into two principle stature zones by a slightly convex line which passes diagonally from Cherbourg to Marseilles, with mean statures of 166 cm. to 168 cm. lying to the northeast, and those ranging between 161 and 165 cm. on the southwest. Aside from this general scheme, taller people are found along the larger river valleys than in the hills, with one principal exception—the inhabitants of the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, from the Basques to the Catalan-speakers of the Roussillon, are taller than the people immediately north of them. In the northeast, in the taller region, there are stature modes of 164 and 168 cm.⁴ The centers of relatively short stature in France are: the Maritime Alps, to the east of the valley of the Rh6ne, which acts as a wedge of newer popu­lation between the mountain nuclei on either side; the Massif Central, the classic Alpine country; the Perigord-Limoges region, including the Dordogne, which is the strongest outpost of dolichocephals in France; and Brittany.

It is curious that the Keltic-speaking Bretons are among the shortest people in France, and are, in fact, seven centimeters shorter than their kinsmen the Cornish who live directly across the Channel. A detailed stature map of Brittany by cantons shows that the jump from Cornwall is not as abrupt as it appears; ⁵ around the coast extends a thin band of maritime cantons with stature in the 164-165 cm. class, which gives way rapidly through a zone of transition to an inner nucleus in which the mean stature is 162 cm. This evidence, as well as that of the cephalic index, indicates that Cornish speech has survived in Brittany among a people to whom it is an adopted tongue, while it has died out in south­western England whence it came.

Stature has increased to a certain extent in France during the last century, as it has in other parts of western Europe; one of the most strik­ing examples of this change is seen in the mountainous region of Savoie, especially in the canton of Mt. Blanc.⁶ In the five year period from 1807-12, the mean stature of some 12,000 men was 158 cm. Within this period, the stature seems to have been static. Between 1828 and 1837, the recruits from this same region had attained the mean of 162 cm., and in the 1872-79 interval they had reached 165 cm. Unfortunately there is no more recent data to trace the further history of this regional group. In the rest of France, the changes have been much less marked; the case of the Savoyards is apparently an example of diminishing isolation.

One of the most widely discussed subjects in French anthropology is that of the so-called taches noires, the black spots upon the stature map of

⁴ Montandon, G., op. citp. 64. ⁶ Carret, J., MDSS, 1883.

6. Chassagne, A., RDAP, 1881.