An association is campaigning to rename a street and an amphitheater at the university.

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E.Provenzano 20 Minutes

  • The Mémoires et Partages association has launched a petition addressed to the university to rename a street, an institute and an amphitheater bearing the name of Paul Broca.

  • This Bordeaux scientist used craniology to justify racist and sexist theses, according to the association.

  • The university announces that it wants to launch a debate around this issue, within the university community.

In several places in the Gironde capital, homage is paid to the memory of Bordeaux scientist Paul Broca, who died in 1880. A street near the University of Victoire, an amphitheater and a neurobiology institute, inaugurated in 2017, bear his last name.

The Mémoires et Partages association demonstrated in front of this institute on Wednesday and launched a petition addressed to the president of the University of Bordeaux to ask to rename the street, the center and the amphitheater.

The initiative is supported by Bordeaux en Luttes, the political group led by Philippe Poutou.

"Broca has defended and scientifically justified the theses justifying racial, colonial and sexist domination by announcing that craniology is able to provide valuable data on the intellectual value of human races", points out the association in the text of the petition.

She quotes edifying excerpts from her writings: “On the average, the mass of the brain is greater in higher races than in lower races.

"And further:" Never has a people with black skin, woolly hair and a prognathic face, been able to rise spontaneously to civilization.

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"A debate" to come on the name of the institute

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, the management of the University of Bordeaux reacted: “in 2017, the name of the building was widely discussed and chosen by the neuroscience community to pay tribute to the work of Paul Broca, from Bordeaux, an internationally recognized pioneer of neurosciences, specialist in the anatomy of the brain, of which an area associated with language now bears his name.

However, beyond his exceptional scientific work, Paul Broca confirmed racist and sexist theories that the University of Bordeaux firmly rejects, because they are in total contradiction with the university values ​​of equality and diversity that it defends.

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"We must and we will collectively take up the question of the name of this building, which must be the subject of a debate within the university community", assures Antoine de Daruvar, vice-president of the board of directors of university.

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  • University

  • Petition

  • Racism

  • Aquitaine

  • Bordeaux