section_path: History/Racism as a modern phenomenon
section_name: Racism as a modern phenomenon
paragraph_text: Racism as a modern phenomenon
  
  Racism is frequently described as a modern phenomenon. In the view of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged in the Early Modern period as the " discourse of race struggle", and a historical and political discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.
  
  This European discourse, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by such people as Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), and then, during the 1789 French Revolution, Sieyès, and afterwards, Augustin Thierry and Cournot. Boulainvilliers, who created the matrix of such racist discourse in France, conceived of the "race" as being something closer to the sense of a "nation", that is, in his time, the "race" meant the "people".
  
  He conceived of France as being divided between various nations—the unified nation-state is an anachronism here—which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed the absolute monarchy, which tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to the Third Estate. Thus, he developed the theory that the French aristocrats were the descendants of foreign invaders, whom he called the " Franks ", while according to him, the Third Estate constituted the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as a consequence of the right of conquest. Early modern racism was opposed to nationalism and the nation-state: the Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, who borrowed Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his contempt for the Third Estate, calling it "this new people born of slaves... mixture of all races and of all times ".