In February 1940, Eugène Apert published an article in the journal Pédiatrie entitled “Eugenics in France,” which was one of the last of his writings to appear before his death in April of that year. It was a timely moment to reflect on eugenics in France, because the course of events was about to alter its nature dramatically. Apert was certainly qualified to assess the work of French eugenicists. He attended the First Eugenics Congress in London in 1912, was one of the founders of the French Eugenics Society later that year, and had been an officer in the society from the start – first as general secretary, then vice president, and finally president, beginning in 1934.

In describing the major accomplishments of French eugenics, Apert listed three as being most important: the campaign in favor of a mandatory premarital examination, work on arresting the population decline, and the monitoring of foreign immigration to France. Previous chapters have shown the great deal of attention paid to the first two of these accomplishments, as well as some of the concerns about immigration expressed by members of the French Eugenics Society in the 1920s. For eugenicists to be concerned with the question of immigration was not unusual. In the United States, for example, they made it a major issue after the First World War, and lobbied successfully for the Immigration Act of 1924, which put quotas on the so-called inferior populations of southern and eastern Europe.