DOIAbstract
When the term race was introduced into the French language, toward the end of the fifteenth century, and at least until the seventeenth century, its meaning was solely that of lineage and had none of its modem connotations of fixed physical and moral attributes. A transformation began in the second half of the seventeenth century, as natural sciences developed and the non-European world became better known. However, the keyfactor transforming these ideas into a racist ideology was the combined introduction of sugar production and African slaves in the West Indian colonies, aprocess requiring the domination of one human group by another, on the basis of a supposed moral and intellectual superiority allegedly reflected physically by natural d...
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