Georges Vacher de Lapouge

Georges Vacher de Lapouge
Born	(1854-12-12)12 December 1854 Neuville-de-Poitou, Vienne
Died	20 February 1936(1936-02-20) (aged 81) Poitiers, Vienne
Nationality	French
Influences	Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Alphonse de Candolle, Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton
Influenced	Otto Ammon, Madison Grant, Carlos C. Closson, Luis Huerta, Jon Alfred Mjoen, Eugen Dühring, Ludwig Woltmann
Spouse	Marie-Albertine Hindré
Children	Claude Vacher de Lapouge

Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge (12 December 1854, in Neuville-de-Poitou – 20 February 1936, in Poitiers) was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and racialism.

While a young law student at the University of Poitiers, Vacher de Lapouge read Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In 1879 he gained a doctorate degree in law and became a magistrate in Niort (Deux-Sèvres) and a prosecutor in Le Blanc. He then studied history and philology at the École pratique des hautes études, and learned several languages such as Akkadian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese at the École du Louvre and at School of Anthropology in Paris from 1883 to 1886.

From 1886 Vacher de Lapouge taught anthropology at the University of Montpellier, advocating Francis Galton's eugenic thesis, but was expelled in 1892 because of his socialist activities (he co-founded Jules Guesde's French Workers' Party and ran in 1888 for city mayor in the Montpellier municipal election). He worked later as a librarian at the University of Rennes until his retirement in 1922.