This Ph-D thesis develops the twofold history of the notions of "race" and "degeneration" between the XVIIth and the XIXth century. This history is studied from two points of view: historical epistemology that is "how race and degeneration became the concepts of various knowledges (natural history, anthropology, psychiatry)"; and history of government practices, that is "how race and degeneration became problems of government". Focusing on the historical link between these notions gives us the possibility to analyze the emergence, in the XIXth century, of a field of knowledge that dealt with what we call the "abnormal man", that is this very specific entity which agglomerates madness, criminality and "inferior" races as deviations of human normality, in an ambiguous space between the normal and the pathological. Our thesis describes the various categories that organise this field of knowledge. More deeply, we want to argue that the notions of race and degeneration, far from being external to humanism and universalism, far from being systematically correlated to practices of exclusion, are intimately connected to a practical and theoretical humanism and to practices of inclusion, that deal with race, madness and crime as alterations of a norm one has to regenerate, correct and improve through specific apparatus of power. Through this historical lens, we want to study all the ambiguities and aporias that lurk in the very heart of this will of inclusion and this analysis of heterogeneous realities as alterations of a norm. We show in particular how we can establish a very strong link between the insertion of the concept of "race" into natural history and monogenism; and, on the other side, how it is important to study the insertion of "race" into the political field and, more broadly, the emergence of the knowledge of the abnormal, to take into consideration its logical links with political liberalism in the beginning of XIXth century.
