Anthropology as a weapon of social combat in late‐nineteenth‐century France

The evolutionary anthropology and radical political commitment of Gabriel de Mortillet and his colleagues at the École d'Anthropologie in Paris played a major role in the growth of anthropology in late‐nineteenth‐century France. They combined leftwing politics and philosophical materialism with their studies in the physical and cultural evolution of mankind to create a combat anthropology. Their battles to establish a new science of man were constantly interwoven with their struggles against an anti‐evolutionary scientific establishment, the Second Empire, the Catholic clergy, and the conservative forces of the Third Republic. As a result, their evolutionary theories were inseparable from their vision of anthropology as a weapon to promote social change.