Scientific objectivity and social mores: Paternity testing,illegitimacy and misogyny in Constance Pascal’s ‘La Goutte de Sang’ (1935–1936)

Abstract

This article examines the French historical, scientific, social and biographical background to Constance Pascal’s filmscript ‘La Goutte de Sang’ concerning the search for a reliable paternity test. The philosophical argument is between adherence to scientific truth against entrenched social custom. Pascal’s filmscript highlights routine misogyny in the scientific workplace and the injustices to women and children of male sexual irresponsibility. I analyse the relation between Pascal’s personal life, her psychiatric career and the filmscript’s critique of scientific efforts at social reform, concluding with her enduring belief in the value of science based on humane principles.

Introduction

Scientific Objectivity and Social Mores: Paternity testing, Illegitimacy and Misogyny in Constance Pascal’s ‘La Goutte de Sang’ ¹ (1935–1936). ²

Towards the end of her career, Doctor Constance Pascal, médecin chef at the Parisian psychiatric hospital, Maison-Blanche and specialist in ‘la démence précoce’, wrote a screenplay, ‘La Goutte de Sang’, Comédie – Film en Trois Actes, on the subject of paternity testing, or ‘recherche en paternité’ (Gordon, 2013: 198–199; Pascal, 1935–1936). It was, as far as is known, her first and only foray into fiction. Although Jean Painlevé, Director of the Institut de Cinématographie Scientifique, expressed interest, he was also concerned that the cinema public might take her anticipation of a reliable discovery for paternity testing as a reality. ³ In the event, the film was never produced. The script, encompassing biographical and scientific themes, concerns the conflict between seeking to identify paternity through a blood test and its unintended social consequences. The philosophical argument is between adherence to scientific truth and the complexity of social custom, between enforced morality and liberty. The play also focuses on routine misogyny in the scientific workplace and on the injustices to women and children of male sexual irresponsibility.

Form and subject of the filmscript

Two key questions arise before considering the filmscript. Why did Pascal choose to write her fiction in the form of a film scenario and why was her choice of subject the issue of paternity testing, a subject unconnected with her profession, psychiatry, where she had extensive research publications (Gordon, 2013: 245–247)?

Form

That she turned to film as a medium of expression is consistent with her innovative use of popular journalism to publicise the problems of mental illness and to open up the secretive world of mental hospitals to the public. Between 1932 and 1933, she gave extensive interviews for three pictorial popular journals; Détective, Vu and Le Petit Journal. Vu, in particular was a leader in pictorial journalism (Gordon, 2013: 189–191). Pascal’s contacts in journalism were consistent with her extensive links with politicians, artists and intellectuals of the Left. She was acquainted with the pioneers in photography, the Lumière brothers. ⁴ She knew and corresponded with Jean Painlevé, an innovator in scientific cinema, who though, as noted above, turned down her film script, did so on the grounds that its imagined, but dramatically convincing, discovery of a reliable paternity test might mistakenly be taken for a reality by the cinematic public. He proposed filming patients at Maison Blanche, the hospital where Pascal worked, but this was almost certainly prevented by the recurrence of her cancer in 1937. ⁵ Arguably, to move from pictorial journalism to film scenarios was for Pascal a logical step.

Choice of subject

Paternity testing and paternal responsibility in law were of particular personal interest to Pascal. It would be possible to read ‘La Goutte de Sang’ in part as a form of disguised autobiography. However, the personal thread running through ‘La Goutte de Sang’ is more than just a biographical curiosity. It allowed Pascal to interrogate questions of scientific objectivity, to suggest how social conventions governed professional life, while exploring the long-standing social injustices connected with paternal responsibility in France. Her screenplay illustrates on a number of levels the adage that the personal is political.

Pascal had had an early interest in analysing blood samples to diagnose specific conditions with their possible application to psychiatric treatment. In 1929 in her annual report she noted:

Nous avons organisé, avec des moyens de fortune un service de recherche de laboratoire, sérologies, hématologiques etc. . . . pour déceler les maladies qui créent des tares profondes et constituent l’organicité des psychoses. ⁶

We have organized, with whatever means we had, a laboratory research clinic in serology, haematology etc. . . . to understand those illnesses that create profound lesions and constitute the organic basis of psychosis.

In 1932 in her report to the prefect, she wrote:

J’ai organisé un laboratoire, la thérapeutique est mieux contrôlée; nous pouvons suivre avec précision les traitements antituberculeux, antisyphilitiques etc. . . . j’ai pu créer un petit service de donneurs de sang dans le but de faire des recherches sur la thérapeutique sanguine. ⁷

I have created a laboratory, therapy is better controlled; we can follow exactly anti-tubercular, anti-syphilitic treatments. . . I have been able to found a small clinic of blood donors with the aim of doing research on blood therapies.

Although Pasal’s screen play concerned the use of blood types on paternity testing, her own research focused more widely on the therapeutic possibilities for psychiatric patients emerging from discoveries in haematology.

La ‘Goutte de Sang’ breaks new ground in her work by dealing with a social problem (the treatment of illegitimacy and parental responsibility) rather than a psychiatric condition. However, it is consistent with her broader social concerns, exemplified in her last monograph, Chagrins d’amour et psychoses (Pascal, 1935), which argued that many women fall ill through the social pressures they face concerning love and maternity (Pascal, 1935). On a personal level, it echoes the dilemmas she faced regarding her own daughter, born out of wedlock.

Medical educational films: Where does ‘La Goutte de Sang’ fit into the thriving, international, early 20th-century production of scientific, medical and educational films (Pernick, 2007)? On the one hand, focussing on the scientific search for a reliable paternity test, on the other a problem play (pièce à thèse) raising philosophical questions about morality and social convention, it borders on but does not sit comfortably in the tradition of educational films on science whilst making scientific enquiry one of its principal subjects. ⁸

In France state support and private investors attest to the popularity of short films for teaching purposes, in scientific instruction and health education. ⁹ In 1926, the film producer, Jean Benoit-Lévy was tasked by the French government to make educational films on public health and disease prevention to be shown in schools and cinemas. Some of the films were purely factual, others had a romantic or melodramatic story line (Vignaux, 2009). Pascal’s film script shares aspects of these stories, without the pedagogic intent of Benoit-Lévy’s films. Jean Painlevé, known for his imaginative depiction of the natural world in films such as ‘Les Oursins’ (The Sea Urchins) in 1929, also contributed educational films, but resisted their co-option primarily for schools, prefering instead to show them in working-class cinema clubs. He considered his films as works of art rather than as health propaganda (Hamery, 2008). But his response to Pascal’s imagined scientific discovery suggests that for Painlevé, scientific exactitude necessarily trumped imaginative projection.

Formal characteristics of the ‘La Goutte de Sang’ screenplay

The only known text is a typed manuscript of 63 pages. It is divided into three acts. Act One has three scenes, Act Two five, and Act Three, the longest, three scenes. Setting: Acts One and Three take place in the laboratory and offices of the Institut Claude Bernard. Act Two is largely a flashback 25 years before to a Paris flat and a New York hospital. The dramatis personae comprise eleven named characters with their ages listed as well as ancillary characters like ‘First working man’, ‘Second working man’, ‘angry old man’.

Plot: Set in a laboratory of the (fictitious) Claude Bernard Institute, the protagonists are the laboratory director, Daniel Meyran, his research colleague, Christiane Viot, and associated personnel. Meyran and his assistant are dedicated to developing a blood test that will infallibly determine the identity of a child’s father. Meyran is driven by guilt over a young woman and fellow researcher whom he had seduced and abandoned 25 years previously when she became pregnant. His co-researcher, Christiane Viot, equally dedicated to their goal, discovers the perfect test, only to reject its social consequences. In a final melodramatic twist, Meyran discovers that Viot is his lost daughter. He dies of the shock.

Stage directions

• Act One: after panning in on the exterior of the Institut Claude Bernard, the camera moves to the interior of a vast laboratory; in the foreground young men bend over their microscopes and test tubes, in the background appears the profile of a young woman researcher, Christianne Viot. The camera focuses on the Director, Daniel Meyran’s appearance and expression. Statistics of blood types posted in the laboratory are highlighted.

• Act Two: Scene One is set in Meyran’s study, reflecting his scholarly character; symbolised by the over-charged bookcases. Scenes Two and Three are a flashback to a student flat, 25 years previously, Scene Four a New York hospital maternity ward. Scene Five returns to the present in Meyran’s study.

• Act Three: In the foreground appears the new Dispensary for taking blood samples and the reception of clients, both men and children. In the middle ground are huge tables with microscopes, cabinets holding slides marked ‘Recherche de paternité’ or ‘Recherche de filiation’. In the background, children accompanied by their mothers, come to give blood. The scene then turns to Mlle Viot’s office. In the foreground her bookshelves, filing cabinets, two chairs, a vase of flowers a framed photo of her mother. Viot is the only senior woman researcher in the filmscript. Her office denotes a place of serious work but also a retreat from the surrounding all-male atmosphere.

Although this scenario offers explicit visual directions in a cinematic language, one can note that the tradition of theatre lingers. At the end of each act is the direction ‘Le rideau tombe’, ‘the curtain falls’.

This bald résumé does not do justice to the themes raised nor to the interest of placing this text in its socio-political and scientific context. My analysis of Pascal’s screenplay will centre on: the French historical background to ‘recherche en paternité’, feminist, conservative and pro-natalist debates on the issue, contemporary scientific research on blood groups leading to the possibility of identifying the father, and the extent to which Pascal’s situation as a single mother can be traced in this drama in the context of both a scientific and a social problem.

Historical background

Though predating the French Revolution, the question of whether it was the responsibility of men who engendered children out of wedlock to give monetary or other support to the mother and child was answered firmly in the negative by article 340 of the Code Napolé on (1827 [1804]): ‘Scrutiny as to paternity is forbidden.’ The effect of this law was to allow women’s sexual exploitation whilst giving men protection from legal responsibility. The embargo against ‘recherche en paternité’ was intended to strengthen the husband’s authority, preserve the family, and entrench property rights (Fuchs, 2000). Claims of illegitimacy or desertion could not undermine a man’s honour or reputation save in proven cases of rape.

Over a century later (16 November 1912), the French Senate finally passed a law, sponsored by the Socialist Deputy, René Viviani, permitting paternity suits, but not against married men (Fuchs, 2009). A movement to enforce paternal responsibility, supported by men and women of the left and right, Catholics and Protestants, finally succeeded in partially rectifying a long-standing social injustice while not threatening the patriarchal structures of the family. An exhaustive list of campaigns by diverse feminist groups, detailed in Comtesse Pierre Lecointre’s ‘The State of the Feminist Question in France in 1907’, composed 4 years before the successful passage of Viviani’s bill, demonstrates the changes in social attitudes towards supporting abandoned children and their mothers (Lecointre, 1994 [1907]: 46). Nevertheless, the stigma attached to mothers of children born out of wedlock and to their children did not vanish. Nor did it help the situation of a woman who had borne a child outside marriage to a married man. She was still precluded from seeking child support through the law.

The Socialist feminist, Marie Pognon, president of the League for Women’s Rights (Ligue pour le droit des femmes), argued that women should not be dependent on men for support. Feminist proposals, such as from The National Council of French Women in 1903, included the right to determination of paternity and for equal justice, liberty, morality, and rights for both sexes (Fuchs, 2000: 35). These feminists questioned the presumption of wrongdoing that routinely fell on women and their children.

Paternity laws, even the relatively progressive law of 1912 relating to ‘recherche en paternité, were often in conflict with the scientific consensus that male and female parents made equal contributions to generation. The law reflected not scientific knowledge but political dogma (Milanich, 2019: 11–31). How was it possible to identify the father, not anecdotally but by scientific proof? As Pascal’s screenplay also confirms, ‘the scientific quest for a reliable paternity test exposed long-standing tensions between the social and the biological; the scientific and the legal, the imperatives of truth and those of justice, morality and the social order’ (Milanich, 2019: 31).

What was the state of scientific certainty on paternity testing when Pascal wrote ‘La Goutte de Sang’ in the 1930s? Following the discovery of blood groups, A, B, O, and AB by Karl Landsteiner c.1900, Emile von Dungern and Ludwik Hirshfeld in 1910 demonstrated that, via Mendelian patterns of inheritance, possible and impossible blood groupings emerged. This enabled the elimination of ‘impossible’ fathers, but not their positive identification. The use of blood groups to determine paternity in the courts was subsequently pioneered by Fritz Schiff in the 1920s (Milanich, 2019: 54–58). Thus, when Pascal wrote her screenplay in 1935, there was growing interest in determining paternity via scientific means, but as yet no breakthrough.

Analysis of the text

‘La Goutte de Sang’ opens in the (fictitious) Claude Bernard Institute. That Pascal should have wished to honour the founder of experimental medicine is no accident. In her psychiatric practice, she had experimented tirelessly with a variety of treatments, shock therapy, and modified psychoanalysis among them, to try to alleviate her patients’ illnesses. ¹⁰ The imagined institute represents Pascal’s commitment to innovative experimentation but underscores its difficulty. Thus, at the opening of Act I, a laboratory assistant, Fernel, bemoans his disappointment at having worked for years with Meyran without yet discovering a reliable paternity blood test. He emphasises his patron’s devotion to research and his dream of a social transformation where men would be obliged to accept their paternal responsibilities. Fernel, however, doubts the possibility either of a successful discovery or of social transformation:

Notre grand patron est un rêveur . . . J’ai beaucoup d’estime et d’admiration pour lui, il a fait tant de belles découvertes, mais le rêve de pénétrer le grand mystère de la vie et de changer la face du monde avec une goutte de sang. . . me paraît invraisemblable. . .A sa dernière leçon, il parlait comme un illuminé et affirmait que les travaux biologiques sur la recherche de la Paternité et de la Filiation pourraient transformer le monde civilisé pourri de mensonges et d’erreurs. . . (Act I. p. 2).

Our boss is a dreamer. . .. I admire him a great deal, he has made so many fine discoveries, his dream of unveiling the great mystery of life and changing the face of the world with a drop of blood. . . seems incredible to me. . .. In his last lecture, he spoke as one inspired and claimed that work in biology on the search for paternity and filiation could transform the civilised world, rotten with lies and errors.

He cynically emphasises the deep-rooted challenges to the social/moral transformation envisaged by Meyran: ‘Il ne sait pas ce que c’est la lâcheté des hommes. . .et que depuis que le monde est monde, c’est le mâle qui gouverne tout. . .’ (Act I. p. 2) [He doesn’t understand men’s cowardice. . . and that since the beginning of time, the male has governed everything].

Masculine dominance, combined with social irresponsibility and cowardice, run throughout the play. A senior researcher, Professor Vinot, lecherously pursues young female lab assistants. Meyran’s own doleful history of abandoning his lover under parental pressure illustrates both his weakness and the power of the bourgeois patriarchal family. Even the men queuing for paternity tests in Act 3 are looking for long-lost sons, not, as the young woman receptionist notes ironically, a daughter.

Working quietly and indefatigably, Meyran’s young colleague, Christiane Viot, offers a counter-image to the dominant masculine atmosphere of the laboratory. Her dedication and dignified persona exempt her from flirtatious advances by Vinot and others. Pascal, who was the first woman in France to become a fully qualified psychiatrist, knew the sexual harassment women often faced in the public sphere, particularly in medicine. As a young woman, she was praised in the press both for her beauty and her dignity. A Doctor Paul Courbon, at Ville Evrard Hospital, described her as ‘aussi belle que savante’, so different from her radical feminist colleague Madeleine Pelletier (Gordon, 2013: 50). Christiane Viot may represent Pascal’s youthful vision of herself, devoted to scientific research, as epitomised by her photograph as an intern at the asylum of Perray Vaucluse holding a human brain for dissection (Gordon, 2013: 47).

Act II provides a flashback to Meyran’s past, his love affair with a fellow student, Marthe Manet, and the latter’s response to her pregnancy when Meyran deserts her. The couple had planned to marry after finishing their studies, but Meyran’s father intervenes, forbidding the marriage and threatening to leave his son penniless. Meyran caves in to parental pressure and abandons Marthe, though he knows she is pregnant. This cowardly betrayal is the impetus behind his obsessive quest, 25 years later, for a paternity test, partly in expiation, partly in the hope of finding his lost child, and partly to rectify a wider social injustice.

The section entitled ‘Evocation’ deals with Marthe’s despair, panic, and eventual joy at her pregnancy. In the play, Marthe is first overwhelmed with grief and then elated by the thought of her coming child:

Le courage me revient; les ressorts de mes forces ne sont plus cassés, le lâche a tué mon amour, mais pas moi. Je vivrai. Je lutterai jusqu’au bout. J’irai n’importe où, dans le pays des mères seules, s’il existe. Je ferai n’importe quoi, je travaillerai, j’élèverai mon enfant. Créature inconnue, je t’aime. (Act II, p. 11)

My courage returns; the source of my strength is unbroken, the coward has killed my love, but not me. I will live. I will battle to the end. I will go anywhere, to the country of single mothers, if such exists. I will do anything, I will work, I will bring up my child. Unknown being, I love you.

Whilst this scene could well echo Pascal’s feelings when she discovered her own pregnancy, the sequel could not have been more different (Gordon, 2013: 82). The fictional Marthe finds work in the United States, gives birth to a daughter, but dies in childbirth. The baby, adopted by a French charity worker, is brought back to France to become the research associate of her unknown father. Pascal, in contrast, succeeded in bringing up her cherished daughter and continued in her difficult but ultimately very distinguished career in psychiatry. Yet to a certain extent, the situation of General Mengin, her child’s father, and herself was reflected in Pascal’s film script. Mengin, though he loyally supported Constance and her daughter, Jeanne, was unwilling to recognise her as his child (Gordon, 2013: 94). It is the issue of legal recognition by the father that is at the heart of ‘La Goutte de Sang’.

Constance, for her part, was obliged to hide her maternity for fear of losing her professional status. To avoid public opprobrium, women in an all-male profession needed to be what was termed ‘morally irreproachable’. Sexual lapses, as they would have been considered, were unacceptable. She adopted Jeanne as a war orphan; throughout her life, she and the general practised a complicated web of deception. The general was denominated Jeanne’s godfather. The constants in the Pascal and the fictitious Marthe Manet cases were a woman’s desire for a child and the pressures of bourgeois society.

Perhaps the most feminist aspect of Pascal’s screenplay lies in her refusal to characterise the pregnant mother as ‘fallen’ or guilty. In social convention such guilt fell on the woman, not her male partner, as Nelly Roussel, the feminist and birth control advocate, wrote when attacking the Civil Code. Speaking as though to an unwed mother, Roussel (1904) wrote:

Tu seras seule à supporter le poids de ce que les hypocrisies bourgeoises appelleront avec mépris ta ‘faute’ . . .. La Société gardienne de la ‘morale’. . .te réserve, pour te mieux châtier, l’abandon, le mépris, la misère, l’impossibilité de te refaire, par le travail, une vie heureuse et libre.

You will be alone to carry the burden of what the bourgeois hypocrites scornfully call your fall. . .. Society, that guardian of ‘morality’. . . reserves for you for your better punishment, desertion, scorn, destitution; the impossibility of rebuilding a happy and free life through work.

A similar theme is dealt with in a novel by Jules Mary, La Détresse d’une Mère, or ‘La Goutte de Sang’, published in 1926. The novel dramatizes the misery of a woman who before her marriage clandestinely bore a son, whom she cannot recognise without disgracing her husband and two sons (Mary, 1926). ¹¹ It was the kind of scenario that Pascal deplored, the theme of familial guilt traced to the mother. Neither Marthe nor her daughter reflects this culpability narrative, although they do strongly express the anguish of their situations, Marthe as an abandoned mother-to-be and Christiane as a child with no family status. She speaks of being born under an unlucky star. ‘Mon enfance et ma jeunesse se sont écoulées sans joie’ (Act 3, p. 22) [My childhood and youth have passed without joy]. She adds, speaking to Meyran, that her motivation for persevering in their research is in memory of her mother’s suffering. ‘C’est en pensant à l’abandon de ma mère que j’ai travaillé jour et nuit à la réalisation de votre idée’ (Act 3, p. 23) [It is the thought of my mother’s abandonment that leads me to work night and day to achieve your ambition]. Christiane’s wish to find the paternal blood test rests not on a desire for vengeance or to gain an inheritance from her absent father, but to find someone who can restore links with her mother.

In Act I, Christiane Viot discovers the long-awaited blood test. Act III describes the consequences of Meyran’s new law, ensuring that paternity tests become mandatory. Men come in droves to his laboratory to accept their unacknowledged offspring. Levels of male hypocrisy and self-seeking reveal themselves. A Monsieur Danville, director of a Save the Children Society, tries to hide his identity while finally acknowledging his child. Other men want to find sons who might assist them in their old age. As the female receptionist remarks ironically: ‘Ils désirent tous avoir un Fils ! . . . Ils doivent avoir des regrets lorsqu’on leur apprend que l’enfant retrouvé est du sexe féminin’ (Act III, p. 7) [They all want to have a son! . . . I expect they will be sorry when they are told that their lost child is of the feminine sex].

One elderly gentleman, however, ‘un savant’, repents of his past:

. . . le plus grand bonheur d’un homme est d’accomplir son devoir paternel. . . .j’ai commis la faute d’abandonner mon enfant et sa mère. J’en ai eu des remords, j’ai travaillé pour ne pas souffrir. . . .On m’a donné la Légion d’Honneur pour mes travaux scientifiques, mais je ne l’ai jamais portée, je ne suis pas digne. L’honneur est la poésie du devoir, disait notre Vigny, et, je n’ai pas fait le mien. (Act III, p. 6)

A man’s greatest happiness is to fulfil his paternal duty. . .I committed the sin of abandoning my child and his mother. I have suffered remorse, I have worked in order not to suffer. . .I have been awarded the Legion of Honour for my work in science, but I have never displayed it, I am not worthy. . .. Honour is the poetry of duty, said Vigny, and I did not do my duty.

Not all men are self-interested or devoid of ethical principles, but in this film script they are rare. Yet one of the workmen in the queue, like the much-decorated professor, shows himself awake to his moral responsibilities: ‘Quand on a fait du mal, il faut savoir le réparer.’ (Act III, p. 5) [When one has done wrong, you have to know how to make it right].

The pièce à thèse or problem play

Act III, subtitled ‘Science et morale’ announces the debate that will ensue. Meyran and Viot engage in a vigorous dispute as to whether science can create a moral and just society. Like a philosophical exercise in developing conflicting but logical and evidence-based views, there is no correct conclusion, albeit a pragmatic one. Meyran believes that he has achieved a social revolution with his Code Meyran, which has already had wide-ranging effects. He rejoices at the new statistics showing fewer infanticides, fewer children not recognised by fathers, fewer extra-marital relationships, and fewer abortions. His programme appears to be less the liberation of women and children from the opprobrium of illegitimacy than a restoration of the patriarchal family by paternal responsibility. This is not the vision of a feminist like Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939), who campaigned for women’s right to abortion, arguing that women’s control over their fertility was a fundamental human right, and for their liberty as citizens (Pelletier, 1911). Meyran salutes the growing number of marriages and a rise in the birthrate. This revolution, he rejoices, is occurring not just in France but throughout Europe and in the United States.

In contradiction to Meyran’s messianic enthusiasm, Christiane Viot, discoverer of the ground-breaking paternity test, is not enthusiastic about its transformative results. She sees nothing but negative social consequences:

A cause de vous, de moi, les maris quittent leur foyer et abandonnent maintenant les femmes et les enfants légitimes pour retourner avec l’enfant illégitime. Que de foyers nous avons détruits! Je suis maudite par ces femmes délaissées et leurs petits. (Act III, p. 12)

Thanks to you and me, husbands leave their homes and now abandon their wives and legitimate children to reunite with their illegitimate child. How many homes have we destroyed! These abandoned wives and children curse me.

She notes that whereas under the previous law, children born to a married mother were assumed to be the children of that woman’s husband, now husbands who may have had doubts about their wives’ fidelity, research the legitimacy of the children within their marriage:

Consultez nos demandes de recherche de la paternité, la moitié des hommes viennent à nous pour exiger la confrontation de leur sang avec celui de l’enfant sur lequel plane leur suspicion. Ah ! nous avons installé la haine dans ces foyers jadis paisibles, et nous avons créé un malheur nouveau: la misère de l’enfant désavoué. . .Car avec la certitude biologique que nous avons apportée, il n’est plus possible d’imposer à un homme, qu’il soit le père de tous les enfants de sa femme, comme autrefois. (Act III, p. 13)

Look at the requests for paternity testing, half come from men who demand to compare their blood with that of the children in their family, about whom they are suspicious. Ah! we have introduced hatred into formerly peaceful homes, and we have created a new misfortune: the sorrow of the repudiated child. . . For with the biological certainty that we have introduced, it is no longer possible to deceive a man that he is the father of all his wife’s children as it was formerly.

Christiane alleges that her discovery has resulted in the substitution of one form of hypocrisy and social injustice for another. The world, she says, cannot live without its lies.

In response, Meyran mounts a spirited defence of his Code, denouncing the ugly morality of the past, the suffering of abandoned children and their mothers, enshrined in the infamous 1804 article of the Napoleonic Code:

Depuis l’An II, 12 Brumaire, où la recherche de la Paternité fût abolie, plusieurs se sont levées pour défendre les droits des enfants sans père, mais le code civil est resté inflexible, la paternité incertaine servait d’excuse a sa réforme. (Act III, p. 15)

Since the Year II of the 12th Brumaire, when paternity research was abolished, many people have tried to defend the rights of fatherless children, but the civil code has remained inflexible, the difficulty of establishing paternity with certainty serving as an excuse not to reform.

From this discussion it is clear that Pascal was well-versed in the legal and feminist arguments surrounding marriage and children born out of wedlock. In a country where women still had few civil rights, a child’s legal identity was vested in the father. Proof of paternity was in a sense a proof of existence. To the extent that Meyran is her spokesperson in this section, Pascal rejects the concept of masculine family honour based on hypocritical denial and feminine guilt. The exile and death of Marte reflect the vulnerability of women, deserted by their seducers and blackballed by society, the themes evoked by Nelly Roussel.

In Pascal’s handling of the debate between Meyran and Viot, it may seem surprising that Christiane Viot, as a female representative of paternal desertion, does not champion women’s rights as far as ascribing paternity and responsibility to men are concerned. She becomes the spokesperson for human liberty, especially in love:

Pauvre Eros mutilé! Vous lui avez coupé les ailes et vous l’avez enchainé aux nombreux articles de la nouvelle législation, basés sur l’acte de la fécondation. En rabaissant l’Amour a cet acte instinctif, vous l’avez dépouillé de son art, de sa beauté, de sa richesse sentimentale et de ses forces spirituelles. L’homme est devenu le ‘bon animal’ qui remplit ses devoirs et qui craint surtout vos sanctions. Vous l’obligez à supporter toute sa vie une erreur de jeunesse, il souffre plus que l’ancien ‘méchant animal’ qui avait au moins la liberté, le pouvoir de faire son choix, de changer après s’être trompé, parfois de repérer. Vous avez rendu l’amour haïssable et vous avez fait de la vertu une mécanique affreuse! (Act III, p. 17).

Poor mutilated Eros. You have cut off his wings and chained him up in your new legislation, based on the act of impregnation. By reducing Love to this instinctive act, you have stripped it of its art, its beauty, its richness of feeling, and its spiritual power. Man has become ‘a good beast’ who fulfils his duties and who, above all, fears your sanctions. You force him to carry the burden of a youthful error all his life. He suffers more than the former ‘bad beast’ who at least had the liberty, the power, to make choices, to change, after making mistakes, sometimes to find his way again. You have made love hateful and you have turned virtue into a dreadful machine.

For Viot, Meyran’s Law entails the end of spontaneity in human relations, the codification of everything.

In defence of his moral code, Meyran reminds Viot how men formerly took responsibility for their actions excepting that of illegitimate paternity. He has no regrets about having eradicated this shameful situation (Act III, p. 15). Now, the welfare of the child has become sacrosanct. He evokes the coming of a new religion of social responsibility and care for the weak. He tells her that Christiane Viot, discoverer of the paternity test, inspires this sublime religion. Meyran has moved from a social critique to a form of exalted enthusiasm.

Christiane’s trenchant riposte decimates this argument. Meyran’s new religion, she insists, represents another form of coercion. Freedom in love has been destroyed: ‘Vous avez rendu l’amour haïssable et vous avez fait de la vertu, une mécanique affreuse !’ (Act III, p. 17) ‘You have made love hateful and you have turned virtue into a dreadful machine!’].

In denouncing the new Code, she raises another problem, namely the relationship of science to morality and human freedom: ‘La science, voyez-vous, ne peut pas créer une morale; elle manque de la pitié; elle n’a qu’un but, la vérité froide et la justice glaciale’ (Act III, p. 17) [Science, you must realize, cannot create a moral system; it has no pity; it has only one aim: cold truth and icy justice].

‘Cold, cruel, hateful, icy’, Christiane’s rhetoric evokes a mechanistic, Gradgrind world devoid of human feeling. Is science necessarily divorced from humanist concerns? This question is one that Pascal confronted in relation to her efforts to develop therapies for her patients. She was acutely aware of her patients’ genuine suffering, unable to free themselves from their traumatic memories. For Pascal, science, whilst striving to be objective, should not ignore the reality of human feelings. For example, just because a mad person has ‘unreal’ visions does not mean they are not real to him or her, nor that the suffering they cause is unreal.

The Viot/Meyran debate reflects not only the unintended social consequences of Meyran’s Code, but also Pascal’s concerns about the way science and, in her case, medicine and psychiatric treatments could be misused. She wrote her screenplay when the science of genetics was becoming a tool not only of social engineering but of possible authoritarian repression. Even in the psychiatric profession, abuse of power was all too common, as was the arrogance of psychiatrists in relation to their patients. In a remarkable letter to Georges Daumezon, a young psychiatrist asking her for advice on research projects, Pascal detailed her own philosophy of listening to patients rather than merely labelling them. ¹² As with Christiane Viot, cold truth, such as a diagnostic label, could hinder the understanding of a patient’s experience:

Je déplore chez mes collègues la méconnaissance totale de l’aliéné; avant tout on lui colle une étiquette avec un mot grec et on lui poursuit ainsi toute sa vie. Il y a des aliénistes qui sont plus nuisibles que les cataclysmes dévastateurs.

I deplore among my colleagues the total misunderstanding of the mad person; before doing anything else, they stick a label on him with a Greek title, and pursue him with it all his life. There are psychiatrists who are more harmful than devastating cataclysms.

The debate between Christiane Viot and Daniel Meyran encapsulates the tensions and contradictions between human feeling and scientific objectivity. Pascal’s filmscript does not offer a neat resolution. It is a problem play in every sense. Meyran, who has made science a quasi-religion in his search for a paternity test, is himself an emotional volcano, overwhelmed with guilt towards his unknown child. Yet he affirms the necessity of a moral law to which all are subject, speaking one feels with Pascal’s voice and in a virtually Kantian passage: ‘…personne n’est digne de vivre sans contrainte: personne n’est assez moral pour mériter la liberté’ (Act III, p. 20) [No one is worthy to live without constraints; no one is moral enough to be worthy of liberty]. As opposed to his earlier elegiac tone, he admits the limitations of science but also its potential to improve human behaviour:

Je n’ai pas la naïveté de croire que nous possédons toute la vérité, mais ce qui nous est déjà révélé, suffit pour nous permettre de prescrire une morale d’attente, mobil car, elle doit se renouveler et se perfectionner sans cesse. (Act III p. 19)

I am not so naïve as to think that we possess all the truth, but what has already been revealed to us, is enough to allow us to prescribe a pragmatic, flexible morality, for it must be ceaselessly renewed and improved.

Meyran makes a distinction between elites who can understand and accept the new morality, and the majority of people who need rules, incentives, and penalties. Yet he recognises in his final confession to Christiane that it was precisely being part of a social elite, the upper bourgeoisie, that led him to abandon his lover and her child. His long dedication to finding an infallible blood test for paternity is based as much on class guilt as on intellectual curiosity.

The theme of guilt runs throughout the filmscript. Pascal was not a partisan of theories of original sin. Indeed, her objection to Freud’s emphasis on infantile sexuality was that it was a substitute for original sin by another name. Yet the idea that we are all in some way tainted and need moral boundaries does permeate this text. Her two prefatory quotations from Renan (1995 [1880]: 318–319) signal the role of science as a form of substitute religion to provide a moral code. The first reads: ‘Le sage n’a pas besoin de prier à ses heures, car toute sa vie est une prière’ [There are no set hours for the sage [scientist] to pray, his whole life is a prayer]. Renan asserted that his rejection of Catholicism did not lead to atheism; his religious impulse was transposed into the rational quest for truth.

In his 1880 preface to L’Avenir de la science, Renan looked back on what he termed the errors of his youth, his early enthusiasm for socialism, soon quenched after the 1848 revolution, his rejection of an egalitarian society, and his decision at the time not to publish. Formerly a fervent Catholic, now lapsed, he accepted the need for a moral code to replace religious belief. Though critical of his dogmatism, Renan (1995 [1880]: 6) saw this early inchoate work as valid.

J’eus donc raison, au début de ma carrière intellectuelle, de croire fermement à la science et de la prendre comme but de ma vie. L’immortalité, c’est de travailler à une œuvre éternelle.

I was right, at the beginning of my intellectual journey, to believe firmly in science and to make it the aim of my life. Immortality is to labour for an eternal creation.

Pascal’s second quotation introducing Act III links scientific progress to the progress of humanity. ‘La Science fournira toujours à l’Homme le seul moyen qu’il ait pour améliorer son sort’ [Science will always provide man with the only means he has to improve his lot] (Renan, 1995 [1880]: 6). Though ‘La Goutte de Sang’ conveys Renan’s sense of dedication to the scientific ideal, a perpetual quest for truth, Pascal’s text also queries the moral and psychological effects of such single-minded devotion.

My discussion of Pascal’s filmscript has focused on thematic questions: paternity testing, social ostracism, misogyny in the workplace, and the scientific ideal. However, some literary as well as thematic analysis is also appropriate. ‘La Goutte de Sang’ falls into the French literary tradition of ‘une pièce à thèse’, where the debate on ideas predominates over action. This aspect is most marked in Act III, scene 3 entitled ‘Science et morale’ involving the lengthy and passionate discussion between Christiane Viot and Daniel Meyran on the value of science. Yet the filmscript is by no means static. Pascal ably gives voice to her minor characters, notably the working-class men queueing for their blood tests, the laboratory assistants and Marthe, Meyran’s abandoned lover.

A greater difficulty lies in the play’s use of coincidence and its melodramatic resolution. The long-lost-child-found-again narrative convention, appropriate in the sense that discovery of paternity lies at the heart of the play, rings false in the drama’s climax. ¹³ The reader has long since surmised that Daniel is Christiane’s father, heavily signalled by the loyal laboratory assistant, François:

Comme ils sont beaux tous les deux ! Deux vrais êtres supérieurs. A force de travailler ensemble, ils ont fini par se ressembler, mêmes gestes, mêmes expressions. Parfois, je retrouve chez Mademoiselle Viot, le même timbre de voix. . .C’est drôle ! (Act III, p. 24)

How handsome the two of them are! Truly two superior beings. . . By dint of working together, they have come to resemble each other, same gestures, same expression. Sometimes in Mademoiselle Viot I find the same tone of voice. How strange!

Like a Dickensian narrator keeping up suspense, Christiane refuses to tell Daniel her mother’s name, when he compares his and Christiane’s blood tests. It is only seeing her mother’s photograph, fortunately displayed in Christaine’s office, that he recognises Marthe and can acknowledge his daughter. If his death is a form of ironic revenge on errant fathers, it seems puzzling, especially as Meyran throughout has emphasised his sense of guilt and responsibility. Another perspective might be that neither Daniel Meyran nor Christiane Viot, dedicated researchers as they are, will profit from their discovery, to enjoy finding the child and the parent they have lost. The ending suggests that even the attainment of long sought knowledge may turn out to be personally unrewarding.

Returning to the original title ‘La Goutte de Sang, Comédie en Trois Actes’, one may also query in what sense this is a comedy. According to Larousse, a comedy is a play inducing laughter by representing the manners, the absurdities, and the vices of society. Such social mores, absurdities, and social vices are the play’s underlying subject. Though Pascal’s text may not provoke laughter, there is considerable wry humour in the behaviour of Meyran’s colleagues, like the lecherous Professor Vinot, or Monsieur Danville, Director of the Saving the Children Society, seeking not to be recognised as the father of an illegitimate child. The subtitle of Act III, scene 1, ‘Le Remords des hommes’ [Men’s Remorse], is largely ironic. Even the arbitrary and seemingly futile death of Meyran reflects this form of comic perspective, not a tragic ending. The recourse to coincidence and melodrama underscore the idea that this is a fable, pitting science against the realities of human behaviour. Though informed by Pascal’s own life, she by no means limits her analysis to it. Indeed the ‘comedy’ reveals her capacity for irony and her ability not only to utilise her personal experience, but also to distance herself from it.

If Pascal’s screenplay conveys a sense of pessimism, it also offers an open-ended debate about the possibility of scientific, moral, and social progress. It does not easily fit into a feminist analysis. The search for a paternity test to enforce male responsibility towards women and children still places men at the head of the hierarchy. Nor is the structure of the family questioned as many feminist campaigners did, much less birth control or abortion (Pelletier, 1911). Meyran speaks of the latter, along with divorce as evils largely abolished with his Code Meyran.

Christiane Viot’s alarm at the social disruption caused by the Code Meyran reflects Pascal’s concerns about the powers conferred on scientists by society and their social cost to individuals, a view expressed in her letter quoted above to Georges Daumezon. The ‘harm greater than cataclysms’ charge that Pascal levels at her psychiatric colleagues evokes Meyran’s conclusion that no one is sufficiently moral to live without constraints or to enjoy complete liberty, neither a scientific elite, nor the common man or woman. In ‘La Goutte de Sang’ Pascal has focused on contemporary interest in the quest for paternity as a paradigm of the conflict between social cohesion and science. As Milanich (2019: 31) suggests:

The quest for paternity in the twentieth century exposed long-standing tensions between the social and the biological; the scientific and the legal; the imperatives of truth and those of justice, morality, and the social order.

These tensions are dramatized in Pascal’s remarkable filmscript, both a tribute to science as Renan envisaged it and to its limitations. Science alone for Pascal cannot create a moral order. Her colleague Dr Jacques Vié, in his unpublished obituary of Pascal, identified as her particular distinction: ‘the union of the intelligence and the heart, overseen by a courageous mind schooled in the objectivity of scientific thought.’ ¹⁴ Based on a scientific quest quite separate from psychiatric theory and practice, ‘La Goutte de Sang’ demonstrates the struggle to unify heart and mind, compassion and objectivity in the pursuit of truth.