Anti-French Discourse in the Nineteenth-century British Antivivisection Movement

Antivivisection literature has for some time now been the corpus of research of scholars of cultural studies, particularly since Richard Ryder's revealing publications in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Although it is well-known and accepted that it was the rise of experimental physiology as a discipline in continental Europe (particularly France and Germany) that launched the establishment of vivisection as the absolute means for medical research, further explorations as to the type of discursive constructs used by British antivivisectionists to construe French medical culture aids us in the comprehension of how animal protection groups explored and tested their strategies. In this paper, I focus exclusively on the image of France in the nineteenth-century activist writing of British animal protectionists to analyse how their discourse emerged and evolved in response to legal regulations on vivisection.