This Unknown Man, by Alexis Carrel

Alexis Carrel was born in Sainte-Foy-Lés-Lyon on June 28, 1873. Spontaneously attracted to the natural sciences, he began medical studies. At twenty-three, he was appointed internal hospital in Lyon. Free thinker and skeptic, he has the opportunity, as he accompanies the sick in Lourdes, to witness a miracle. The rigorously objective report that he made of this case in a city gazette earned him the hostility of political, university and hospital circles, and compromised the rest of his career. In 1904, he left for Canada, then he went to the United States, and he resumed in a research laboratory in Chicago the work he had begun in Lyon on vessel surgery. In 1912, the Nobel Prize for Medicine rewarded his work. Having never agreed to adopt American nationality, he returned to France to do his duty in 1914, and it was also in France that war, defeat and occupation found him in 1940. He died in Paris on November 5, 1944. His remains lie in the small Breton village of Saint-Gildas.

A pioneer in vascular surgery, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912, he is renowned for his experience of the chicken heart beating in vitro for a time much longer than the life of a chicken. Having made himself known worldwide by the publication of L'Homme, ce Unknown in 1935, he pleaded in particular for eugenics as well as for a pronatalist policy.

Man, this unknown and eugenics
In 1935, he published L'Homme, ce anonyme, which was the subject of multiple translations and reprints, and whose worldwide success would last until the 1950s.

He considers in this work that “it is necessary to establish new relations between men [and] to pull the individual out of the state of intellectual, moral and physiological decline brought about by the modern conditions of life. To develop in him all his virtual activities. To give him health, and presents a program in several points: “to substitute scientific concepts of life for old ideologies; to develop harmoniously in each individual all his hereditary potentialities; abolish social classes and replace them with biological classes, biocracy instead of democracy; to make men capable of behaving rationally: fraternity, the law of love; the purpose of life is not profit.

Believing that "natural selection has not played its part for a long time" and that "many inferior individuals have been preserved thanks to the efforts of hygiene and medicine", he asserts that eugenics is indispensable for the perpetuation of an elite possessing a global knowledge of man. This could profoundly change modern society and thus allow men to develop indefinitely, while keeping their intelligence and moral sense. For this, he first proposes a voluntary eugenics. He indicates that "by an appropriate education, young people could be made to understand the misfortunes to which they expose themselves by marrying into families where there are syphilis, cancer, tuberculosis, nervousness, madness, or weak minds. 'mind ". He also pleads there for a eugenics that we today qualify as negative, that is to say the pure and simple elimination of humans whom he considers undesirable to his project of "restoration of man in harmony of its physiological and mental activities" with the aim of "changing the Universe". Thus, in chapter VIII Reconstruction of Man, sub-chapter XII The Development of Personality, he proposes (re-)conditioning by whipping and euthanasia for the most criminal, even if they are insane.