Théodule Ribot and the reception of evolutionary ideas in France.

Although the French scientific community was reluctant to honour Darwin for his work, the eminent psychologist Théodule Ribot used an evolutionary framework for his thesis on heredity. The publication of L'Hérédité psychologique in 1873 was intended for lay readers at a period in French history when many scientific topics were popular. As a result French readers were introduced to the Darwinian and Spencerian ideas that Ribot included -- as an analysis of L'Hérédité shows. This work was important for French psychology and psychiatry: it extended the domain of the former, and by endorsing degeneracy theory provided alienists with a scientific explanation of mental pathology which a somatic approach had failed to discover. L'Hérédité is a synthesis of biology, exolutionary ideas and the features of heredity, addressed and related to social concerns of the last three decades of nineteenth-century France.