The French Aristocracy's Secret Selective Breeding Project

A bit of contemporary anthropology relating to Costin Alamariu's "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy"...

A very interesting phenomenon happened a few weeks ago: an obscure doctoral thesis in philosophy, self-published by its author, one Costin Alamariu, went viral and became a best-seller on Amazon.

The thesis, titled Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, is very interesting and I recommend all with an interest in history and the history of ideas to read it. It makes many provocative arguments on many topics related to the history of aristocracies and philosophy.

For the purposes of this post, an important argument made by the thesis is that most historic aristocracies are the product of violent conquest by a nomadic tribe over a sedentary, agricultural population. The nomadic tribe, being a population of horsemen and herders, is familiar with notions of heredity and breeding, and engages in a selective breeding “project” to maintain its vitality and strength, since its rule over its subject people is always precarious.

Why Alamariu believes that this “breeding project” of the Greek aristocracy led to the invention of philosophy is a different issue which I may go back to on a later post, but for now I want to focus on the idea of an aristocratic selective breeding project. This is obviously a very strange idea to modern ears and perhaps raises the uncomfortable specter of “eugenics.” Alamariu’s thesis includes a fascinating historical survey of the way aristocracies arose and of their ethos, not just in the Ancient world, but also in places as disparate as Rwanda and Japan. Many of the ideas are not original to Alamariu but have been put forward by other historians, archeologists and anthropologists.

To someone familiar with the world of the French aristocracy, reading these passages brings up many familiar echoes.

After all, this is putatively the origin of the French aristocracy, which originates in the Frankish warrior class which conquered Gaul in the 5th century. During the French Revolution, a popular slogan among revolutionaries was to tell nobles to “go back to Germany.” (Whether it’s actually true that the French aristocracy is ethnically distinct from the original French stock is a question I can’t explore here.)

A world of caution first: to most outside observers, French aristocracy vanished some time between 1789 and now. To these people, France, which after all produced Sartre and Foucault and New Wave Cinema, is a secular, leftist, democratic republic. Obviously this is true to some extent. But these same people are surprised when, say, one million people march on the street against same-sex marriage, or when retired generals write a public letter subtly warning of a potential coup.

The reality is that the French aristocracy never really went away. It conceded the field of politics but has maintained parallel institutions and surprising vitality. At a time when American conservatives are opting out of institutions like four-year college and the military, France is the only Western country I’m aware of where elite circles contain a significant representation of people of very right-wing views, though these people typically keep it secret; and these people tend to be of a certain, very specific socioeconomic background. `This “world” is made up of the French aristocracy in a broad sense, including direct descendants of the aristocracy, those who (like yours truly) are only partially descended from such, and those who, though not technically not ennobled, have a certain kind of elite family background over enough generations that they are essentially indistinguishable. It has its own schools, its own institutions, its own subtle “clues” to identify each other, such as dress codes (think Brooks Brothers in the US), modes of speech, and so on. A friend was recently commenting on the fact that members of this class can “recognize” each other visually on the street.

All historically elite groups typically find ways of intermarrying as a way of preserving themselves into the next generation. I am told that American WASPs still have more-or-less secret clubs and débutante balls and the like; indeed, even the African-American aristocracy (a group which is taboo to acknowledge on both right and left for different reasons) has such institutions. Where the French aristocracy is different, it seems to me, is that it has managed to pass on not just family names and socioeconomic status and superficial cultural codes, but a certain esprit and set of views. In other words, while the average American WASP is likely to embrace fashionable causes and political views, the average French aristocrat is much more likely to attend Latin Mass, to subscribe to “far-right” newspapers, and to draw from his status, not a form of privilege guilt, but a sense of duty and leadership.

It is also the case that the French aristocracy, in spite of being between 0.1 and 0.2% of the population depending on how you count (and there are no official figures), is starkly over-represented in every elite field, in particular academia, senior civil service, and the military officer class, including institutions such as the special forces and the Foreign Legion.

Could this have something to do with selective breeding? Alamariu’s thesis raises this question.

Well, there exists another French aristocratic institution which, to my knowledge, has no foreign equivalent. This institution is shrouded in secrecy, and it would only partly be stretching the truth to call it the French aristocracy’s secret selective breeding project.

This institution is called le rallye mondain.

The closest Anglo-American analogue of le rallye is the institution of the débutante ball (a French expression, you will note), and indeed this is the most visible feature of le rallye: formal dancing soirées where only “the right kind” of young people are invited.

But such dancing soirées are only the visible part of the iceberg, and le rallye is much more than the débutante balls that have existed and may still exist in some form in the US and the UK.

In reality a rallye is a membership organization of families that want to, well, to put it crudely but not inaccurately, breed their children together. Membership is by invitation only, and to my knowledge there isn’t a single rallye that even has a website. According to lore, the rallyes were founded after World War II, when arranged marriages went out of style, to ensure that the same kind of “selectivity” that was previously ensured by arranged marriages would endure.

Thus, the goal of the rallye is very clear, and in a word, it is breeding. The goal of the rallye is to select the “right kind” of young people with the explicit goal of increasing the odds that they pair up with other young people who are the “right kind” and marry and, well, breed.

Children of the right families are typically invited to join a rallye between the ages of 12 and 14. At that age, how can you tell that someone is the right kind of person for young adult courtship? Presumably, you can’t, really, unless you look at their breeding.

The children take part in a course of extracurricular activities over several years, which includes things like cultural outings and étiquette and dancing lessons. (A specific dancing style, similar to swing dancing in the Anglo-American world, is a very important part of that world, and indeed dancing has a long history in the French aristocracy, since it was thought that the sense of footwork and balance helped with sword-fighting, and it was a mandatory part of the curriculum in military schools.)

The goal of the program to teach them certain social skills as well as their history and culture—Alamariu’s thesis emphasizes the idea of training within a competitive sporting context as part of the Greek aristocratic ethos—, but also, for the rallye organization, it serves as a kind of audition to make sure that they are the right kind of people. It is really a multi-year course designed to select the right kind of people for, yes, courtship, love, marriage, of course, but also, in a word, for breeding.

(This is where the term rallye comes from: like a rally race, the rallye “race” takes place over a different discrete events and stages—this is the big difference with a débutante ball, which is a one-time event. Another popular etymology is that it’s a reference to the earliest, heroic days of auto racing, when it was an aristocratic hobby, and a rally race was typically followed by a party at some local nobleman’s château. The exact etymology is unclear because, again, the world of le rallye is shrouded in secrecy, with no formal written histories that I am aware of, but it seems clear that the term has stuck, in a semi-humorous way, because of its connotation of racing, i.e. of sporting competition, which has a clear resonance to the Greek aristocratic ethos as described by Alamariu. On this point, we may also remind the reader that the founder of the modern Olympic Games, the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was a French aristocrat. It’s also telling that the name for the institution is really a nickname, because there is no formal name for it. There’s no, like, brochure you can read.)

Because there is nothing like a formal definition of a rallye, of course, there are many kinds of rallyes—and I can vouch for the fact that, among upper crust parents, much energy is spent on sharing gossip about which rallye is “the best,” which best aligns with a particular family’s sociology or values, which rallye the So-and-Sos are sending their children to, and so on, much as I imagine well-to-do WASP families discussed the relative merits of various Ivy League schools in the days before newspaper rankings. Some rallyes are aristocratic in the strictest sense, only admitting members of the French aristocracy as accredited by the ANF, the French association in charge of determining who is “really” an aristocrat, while others take a broader definition, perhaps a necessity since, as a Republic, France has not been minting new nobles for 200 years. Some are grossly materialistic, admission being almost purely based on economic criteria (one legend has it that a prominent rallye’s original membership roster was curated by collating lists of public company directors), while others are much more attentive to cultural traits. Some have devolved into little more than party clubs, renting out night clubs so that children of rich people can jump up and down to a techno beat. But this is a minority, and most rallyes are either explicitly or implicitly Catholic.

There are rallyes all over France—the ones in the big cities are the most elaborate, while rallyes in small towns are little more than parent-run clubs that organize chaperoned house parties for teenagers. But even then, the same ethos of selectivity in the service of “breeding” (to use Alamariu’s term) prevails.

This diversity in the world of le rallye also shows that, even in 2023, this world has vitality. To young people of a certain class and their parents, le rallye is still very much relevant even (perhaps especially) in the world of Instagram and Tinder.

Is it fair to call le rallye mondain, as I have, “the French aristocracy’s secret selective breeding project”? Obviously this is a somewhat over-the-top and partial description. But it also clearly captures an element of truth.

Could this “secret selective breeding project” be the reason for the French aristocracy’s unique vitality? As well as by its surprising resilience in maintaining a traditional ethos?

The obvious answer is that it’s very hard to say for sure since, as I’ve said, the world of le rallye is very discreet (I know I will get a few tut-tut texts from friends for writing this, even though I am only writing in a very general sense). The only formal studies of le rallye come from hard-left sociologists monomaniacally focused on denouncing it as a horrible institution of transmission of socioeconomic privilege, which is myopic: the reality of assortative mating all over the West has shown that People Of Privilege everywhere and for all time don’t need le rallye to find each other and marry each other. Socioeconomic privilege is, inevitably, part of the purpose of le rallye, but it seems obvious to me that it is not the only part.

Most rallyes have a Catholic spirit, and for parents today it is also a way to give their teenage and young adult children a safe environment for courtship and avoid hook-up culture and the other degrading aspects of contemporary “courtship”. At least in many cases, there is a clear moral and cultural element to le rallye.

If, as I am surmising, le rallye is an important component of the vitality of the French elite, there would be more than a few ironies. For a start, the most acceptable racial prejudice in the contemporary West (indeed one which is celebrated) is the idea of “inbreeding” in the historic European aristocracy, a stereotype which is grossly deformed and inaccurate. What if intermarriage (which is not the same thing as inbreeding) in aristocratic cultures was a source of strength and vitality?

The other obvious irony is that, as books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart have shown, modernity and its extremely individualistic ideas of courtship and mating, completely independent from family or social guidance, has arguably led to more of what is now called “assortative mating,” not less. You can even think of meritocratic society as a kind of giant rallye, selecting the “best” (according to its own criteria, which can also be crassly materialistic—I am not sure in which sense the ability to take a test is somehow less materialistic than having rich parents, neither are as such evidence of virtue) from society and shuffling them through a handful of schools and social rituals within which it is understood that courtship and mating will occur. On some readings, the contemporary West’s elite class may be much more cut-off, exclusive, and “inbred” than the historic European aristocracy ever was.

But before fans of “eugenics” cheer, we find a further irony, which is that this “eugenics” program doesn’t seem to be very successful, as the competence level of contemporary Western elites seems to be dropping with every generation since 1945.

Another irony relates to a certain set of American Catholic conservatives who view any discussion or acknowledgement of the reality of heredity and blood as a kind of mortal sin. It turns out that a certain class of people who have been Catholic for much longer, and who, certainly as a historic class, have made immeasurable contributions to the Church, including truckloads of saints and theologians, find such notions utterly unproblematic. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was commonly thought that nobles were physiologically (today we would say “genetically”) different from commoners; while such “racial” ideas were never established as any kind of dogma or hardened doctrine, they were also not seen as particularly shocking or controversial, and they coexisted easily with the fact that it was possible to join the aristocracy through merit. To be clear, the point is not that these ideas are necessarily “true” or “good” as such, just that they have been, as it were, in the air, for many centuries in a certain world in Europe. To someone who was raised in this environment, the idea that they are somehow diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine is not so much wrong as bizarre and incomprehensible.

There is even an irony as relates to Alamariu’s thesis: in the book’s introduction, he charges the Catholic Church specifically with creating a “dysgenic” “breeding program” in the West, leading to the contemporary West’s decline. (I may write more on this specific aspect later.) But here we have something that seems to be exactly what he would like to see in the world, quite literally an aristocratic selective breeding program, and it turns out to be extremely Catholic.

Anyway—if you’ve read me for a while, you will know that I think that elites, and the history of elites, is one of the most fascinating and important topics out there, one which I’m fascinated with. The elites of the West produced the most advanced civilization in the history of mankind and, at some point (perhaps you think it is 1789, perhaps 1968) became consumed with a kind of bizarre syndrome of self-hatred, and have set upon destroying their heritage. Notions of “breeding” may or may not play a role, I don’t know. But it’s not crazy to think that it may be one aspect of it. And if nothing else, it’s certainly funny.