French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

When in 2006 the president of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, gave his inaugural address for the Musée du Quai Branly dedicated to the “arts” of “first peoples” (arts premiers, peuples premiers), he spoke of the need to redress the wrongs to “peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors, peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history, peoples still now often marginalized, weakened, endangered by the inexorable advance of modernity.” He spoke of the need to reject “ethnocentrism and . . . the indefensible and unacceptable pretension of the West that it alone bears the destiny of humanity.”¹ Standing in the auditorium named for (and in the presence of) Claude Lévi-Strauss, Chirac invoked the anthropologist’s call to preserve the “fragile flowers of difference.” To counter a utopian desire for unity and homogenization from economic globalization, he offered this presidential project as “imagination, inspiration and dreaming against the temptation of disenchantment.”

Chirac’s speech echoed principles going back to at least the Enlightenment: equality (among arts and cultures, and their peoples), tolerance, progress, and a universalist sense of shared humanity. To these, he added the ambition to demonstrate multiple perspectives showing “other ways of acting and thinking, other ways of relating to the world.” It did not escape participants in the opening colloquium (philosophers, curators, literary critics, and more), or critics of the project, that with this ethnographic museum, Paris was again becoming if not the center, at least the fulcrum for cultural exchange. They probed questions for the twenty-first century coming out of the eighteenth that have not yet found definitive answers: From where in the world (geographically) do we speak, and who is the “we”? When “they” become “us,” and “we” become “them,” how do people and cultures enter into dialogue?

John Mack, a professor of world art at the University of East Anglia, collapses distinctions between the ethnographic and the esthetic, pointing out that what is observed is less important than how the observer observes.² The aim of this essay will be to show how writers in the eighteenth century created different points of view to critique their own society. Between the period of European conquest in the sixteenth century and the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century—in which the relation to other cultures and territories was one of appropriation (of peoples as well as objects)—many eighteenth-century writers embraced ways to learn and to gain knowledge from contact with peoples from other times and places. Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Graffigny, and Voltaire, among others, argued in differing ways that to see oneself as an individual and member of a culture, it was necessary to look afar: in some instances temporally in a history of humankind; in other instances spatially—to other cultures or imagined societies. Whether through the reconstruction of primitive societies in nature and the origins of language, or through interrogation of social, political, religious, and moral values elsewhere, they took up within a practice of fiction what travelers and historians had culled from observation of language, culture, and governance beyond the borders of France. Discussions about freedom of speech, religious and moral tolerance, human rights, the foundations for a social contract (within and beyond the nation), inclusion and exclusion from citizenship were begun in literature and philosophy. What was at stake was nothing less than a sweeping vision of the future of humankind and society. To describe the goal of the vast collective project of the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences et des arts, Diderot drew on a spatial metaphor for knowledge: “to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us.”³ The general order of the book was to be “like a world map [mappemonde] on which will be seen nothing but broad regions,” in contrast to particular orders of knowledge that would be “like maps of particular kingdoms, provinces, countries.” Diderot’s hope for the Encyclopédie, from which the term Lumières emerged, was that he and his contemporaries might change “the common mode of thinking [changer la façon commune de penser].”

For many eighteenth-century writers, the desire to see and imagine other cultures, customs, and sociopolitical regimes gave rise to works that put the reader elsewhere culturally; literal and figurative dépaysement, estrangement or disorientation, catalyzed questions about new and different ways of thinking. Some, like the earlier travelers, traders, pilgrims, and missionaries, recorded what they saw and thought.⁴ Others created imaginary narratives about nature and society throughout the world: from the state of nature in northern and southern climates to the American colonies, Canada, Persia, Peru, and Tahiti, among other places. For those who did not make the actual voyages, travel books and visual images provided nourishment for a kind of “mental traveling” that allowed them to conceive of their own communities in a global context and to extend the sense of the “we” before it contracted into a Jacobin sense of a pure and contained nation during the French Revolution.

Before the word “nation” indicated primarily a political state, the French word nation (going back to the Anglo-Norman naciun) signified a people of the same language and culture, and the word “people” (peuple from the Latin populus) indicated a multitude of persons under the same prince, inhabiting the same area, or professing the same religion, whether or not they lived in the same territory: the Jews, for example (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1762). With respect to the term ethnology, the root ethno in Greek means race, tribe, nation, people living together in community, and family. While the actual terms ethnology and ethnography did not come into usage in French until 1820, they appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century within the German tradition (with August Ludwig Schlözer and Johann Gottfried Herder, among others) and spread throughout Europe. Ethnology became the term for the comparative study of cultures and their territory, as well as the relationship among languages; ethnography indicated the description of one culture in the present.⁵ Before the nineteenth century, when ethnology added to its focus the study of national identities and race in an evolutionary conceptual framework, and before the twentieth century when it became associated with fieldwork as the basis for analysis and comparison, the study of different cultures was included within philosophical discourse.

I consider ethnography for the eighteenth century in a broad sense, close to Merleau-Ponty’s formulation: “The apparatus of our social being can be taken apart and reconstructed by travel, just as we learn to speak other languages. . . . Ethnography is not a specialty defined by a particular object, ‘primitive’ societies.’ It is a way of thinking, the way which imposes itself when the object is ‘different,’ and requires us to transform ourselves. Thus we become the ethnologists of our own society if we set ourselves at a distance from it.”⁶ For Merleau-Ponty, access to the universal would come not through “an overarching and strictly objective method” (reaching back to nineteenth-century positivism), but rather the “constant testing of self by the other and the other by the self.” Anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano formulated the complexity of the challenge this way: “The ethnographer is caught in a . . . paradox. He has to make sense of the foreign. . . . Like Benjamin’s translator, he aims at a solution to the problem of foreignness. . . . The translator accomplishes this through style, the ethnographer through the coupling of a presentation that asserts the foreign and an interpretation that makes it all familiar.”⁷ To distinguish what is foreign (be it from observation or invention) and then to make it familiar by interpretation constituted for many of the eighteenth-century writers more than a sequential set of tasks; it produced a distancing effect from the presuppositions about their existence that enabled self-criticism and the ability to scrutinize failures within their own society.

If ethnography in this broad sense involves encounters with and the awareness of other cultures, the notion of imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, comes from the Latin root (imago, image) and encompasses thought (pensée) and invention. As defined in the Encyclopédie, the imagination accompanies philosophical reason and memory as a structuring principle to become the creative faculty for architecture, literature (poetry and eloquence), painting, sculpture, and music. In his article “Imagination” in the Encyclopédie, Voltaire proposes two kinds of imagination: one passive and servile, the other active and creative. Passive imagination involves reception of objects through the senses and retained in memory, an involuntary reaction shared with animals, and it is weak: subject to the passions, to error, and a herd mentality leading to superstition and fanaticism, among other evils. By contrast, the active imagination draws on memory, demands judgment, and is a gift of nature. Imagination in this sense produces invention in the arts and the sciences within a venerable tradition going back to Homer, Virgil, and Horace. As a source of enthusiasm, imagination allowed an author to put him or herself in the place of characters.⁸ Although we commonly refer to “literature” of the eighteenth century, the word did not come into usage until the nineteenth century, as Yves Citton notes in his essay in this volume; yet the epistolary novel, like the philosophical tale and the essay were part of an intense dialogue about what the status of the “we” in culture could mean.

In what follows, I look at several works, written between 1715 and 1772 (after the Regency and some time before the French Revolution) by writers for whom the ethnographic imagination helped locate the expansion and limits of knowledge to challenge the status quo. Rousseau, Montesquieu, Graffigny, Diderot, and Voltaire asked in differing ways what the place of men and women was within the natural, social, and political world and how change might come about through critique. In 1694, the French word critique meant, as a noun, the art of judging and as an adjective the day when a crisis arises. In Marmontel’s article “Critique” in the Encyclopédie, the role of critic was broadened to include moral guidance on conflicting opinions and mores.⁹

Claude Lévi-Strauss paid homage to ways of viewing the world during the Enlightenment when he saluted Jean-Jacques Rousseau as not just the precursor but also the founder of modern ethnography: exploring the way others live and think as a way to better understand the relationship of humans to society in general and different societies in particular.¹⁰ He specifically referred to Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (henceforth Second Discourse, 1755) in which Rousseau described a hypothetical development of society and language going back to an “original” nature and reaching across the planet. In his Discours sur les arts et sciences (1749), the essay that launched his career, he described moral dissolution within advanced societies and attributed it to the ill effects of the arts and sciences. In his Essai sur l’origine des langues, he looked to the emerging relationships between humans and nature in different geographies, and humans among themselves prior to all social contracts: “When one wishes to study men, one has to look close by; but in order to study man, one has to learn to cast one’s eyes far off; first one has to observe the differences in order to discover the properties [Quand on veut étudier les hommes, il faut regarder près de soi; mais pour étudier l’homme il faut apprendre à porter sa vue au loin; il faut d’abord observer les differences pour découvrir les propriétés].”¹¹

Like others during the mid-eighteenth century, Rousseau had read the writings of travelers. Among others, he had read John Chardin, a Protestant jeweler who published an immensely popular three-volume account of his trip to Persia, Voyages de Monsieur le Chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient (Travels in Persia [1686, 1711]), and from two centuries earlier, Jean de Léry’s (1536–1613) celebrated Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578). He read the physicist Maupertuis (1698–1759), who traveled to Lapland to make longitudinal measurements, and La Condamine, who went to South America for measurements at the Equator; he also had read the compilation of travel narratives published by l’Abbé Prévost (1697–1763) in Histoire des voyages (1746–59). These writers and others provided Rousseau with a sense of expanding knowledge and also engendered in him a large dose of skepticism about what could be learned from such works. He writes with astonishment in the famous note 10 to the Second Discourse that the “Peoples of the East Indies” and Africa are “still to be examined; the whole earth is covered by Nations of which we know only the names—yet we dabble in judging the human race!”¹² From the notion of a sacred “voyage on earth,” travel had become the source for everyone’s ability to gain knowledge. Yet, Rousseau mocks the burgeoning literature of returning travelers; how could they understand and translate what they see? How reliable could firsthand accounts be? More than practical knowledge gained through travel would be necessary to understand other societies. In his pedagogical novel Emile, Rousseau credits the writers of antiquity, especially Homer and Herodotus, as better observers of culture—though they traveled little—than the writers and historians of his own time.¹³ In a double-edged comment, Rousseau announces what would be necessary for an epistemology of travel:

Let us suppose a Montesquieu, Buffon, Diderot, Duclos, d’Alembert, Condillac, or men of that stamp traveling in order to inform their compatriots, observing and describing, as they know how, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the land of the Bantus, the interior of Africa and its Eastern coasts, the Malabaras, Mogul, the banks of the Ganges, the Kingdoms of Siam, Pegu, and Ava, China, Tartary, and especially Japan; then, in the other Hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Straits of Magellan, not forgetting the Patagonias true or false Tucuman, Paraguay if possible, Brazil . . .

Rousseau worried about precisely how imagination would permit a person to put him or herself in the place of the other. An emerging view of secular selfhood presupposed an individual living in a contingent rather than a god-centered world derived from Cartesian rationalism: a thinking being superior to other species. Rousseau then substituted for this reason-centered definition of the human natural commiseration or identification with others based on feeling, a sense of human connection and spiritual unity. In his Second Discourse, he announced two principles prior to reason: first, self-preservation (amour de soi), and, second, a “natural repugnance to see any sensitive Being perish or suffer [he called this pitié], principally those like ourselves.”¹⁵ “Pity” was the faculty that originally allowed humans to recognize one another as sentient beings and to establish pacific rather than hostile relations. Rousseau revised that definition in the Essay on the Origin of Languages and in Emile, stating that any relationship to the other required social development to activate the imagination and bridge the distance between self and other. Jacques Derrida analyzed the contradiction between the definitions of pitié, providing the basis for an economy of reading that disabled Rousseau’s hypothesis of an original state prior to imagination that was both pure and self-sufficient.¹⁶ For our purposes, what is important is that both descriptions of pitié involve putting oneself in the place of the other. Both therefore establish an equality between self and other, albeit at different stages of social development.

Lévi-Strauss returned in magisterial homage to Rousseau, who was “the most anthropological of the philosophes,” and who, “although he never traveled to distant lands” had “documentation . . . as complete as it could be for a man of his time.”¹⁷ Beyond documents, both thinkers looked to hypothesis: as a model for truth for Rousseau and for Lévi-Strauss, of knowledge. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau turned away from the facts of history toward narration of the hypothetical origins of humankind, creating an imaginary truth to counter humankind’s moral degradation in society. Here was the vision of a primitive untainted by original sin, a good “man” in the beginning, and underneath. Although, as Rousseau wrote, the state of nature may never have existed, and may not in the present or ever in the future exist—it is necessary to know the “truth” of this state, as it establishes the theoretical basis for Rousseau’s later sociopolitical works to remake human nature and the social order.

The development of language and writing were important in both the Second Discourse and the Essai sur l’origine des langues (c. 1761): from accent closer to poetry and song, Rousseau traced a slow decline into articulation and prose. What is beautiful and even surprising about Rousseau’s description of the early development of language is its multilingualism. The first language was passionate, close to Chinese, Greek, and Arabic in its euphony and beauty; this initial language could persuade without needing to convince—rather than work through logical argument—as it could paint objects rather than reason. As for writing, a first manner—like that of the Mexicans and Egyptians—in which allegorical objects were figured was followed by a second involving the development of conventional characters and laws (his example is Chinese); the final and contemporary phase became alphabetical through commerce and travel. The hypothetical stages in the development of language correspond to the three stages of society: primitive society, barbaric peoples, and finally an ordered or policed society.¹⁸ Moving away from the origin, then, a language infused with global associations gives way to languages in general and French in particular—all situated in a specific culture and history. In this scenario, the French language becomes commensurate in its degenerate development to that of society. Yet those travelers who could learn several languages, spoke a lingua franca (a Frankish—that is, European—tongue used in the Levant sometimes described as a garbled mixed language) that in no way resembled language in its early development. The irony is that French is the only language in which Rousseau himself writes—with astounding rhetorical brio—about its very decay.

Who is inside and who is outside a culture? The ethnographical method that Lévi-Strauss extracted from Rousseau’s thought takes the self of the observer as his or her own instrument of observation in a particular way. Writing a kind of doubly representative autobiography of the individual and the group (“Does the ethnographer write anything else but confessions?”), the ethnographer acquires knowledge by making the self other to itself,¹⁹ transforming the sense of what is foreign precisely because the self views itself and culture from a distance—geographical or imagined, or both. The determination to identify with the other involved for LéviStrauss, as ethnographer, the rejection of an identification with the self and the culture out of which one comes. In every “I,” there lies embedded a “he,” or “she,” in a long tradition: from Montaigne’s “what do I know?” to Descartes’s thinking self, who never doubted his ability to doubt and therefore to exist (“I think, I am”), to Rousseau’s insistent “know thyself; who am I?”

Twice Rousseau calls himself a barbarian: in the epigraph both to the Discours sur les sciences et les arts and again his late work of autofiction, the Dialogues, he writes: “Here I’m a barbarian because they don’t understand me [Barbarus hic ego sum quia non itelligor illis],” slightly misquoting Ovid’s Tristia by substituting “they,” the others, for “nobody.” Assuming the position of “barbarian,” those scorned by the Greeks in the strict sense of the non-Hellenophone peoples (whose language was so abstruse they might as well have been emoting ba-ba-ba), Rousseau accords to himself the position as outsider or stranger: providing insights that the insiders cannot easily recognize.²⁰ Rousseau relays Montaigne’s compelling question in the essay Les cannibales of who really should be considered barbarian, and he turns the ethnographic imagination on himself and his society, as a distancing effect. (As we will see, Diderot asks the same question in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville).

Rousseau chose to write fiction, along with essays and treatises, to explore these problems. Thus in a very broad sense, he invested literature with the power to change thought. Rousseau reimagines the relationship to others, whether near or far, first in the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, and in the concept of the general will in the Social Contract—that is, relinquishing part of personal autonomy and individual freedom to the greater whole, in return for which the individual gained civil freedom.²¹

Rousseau had read Montesquieu with care and explains in Emile that he has understood Montesquieu’s message in Les lettres persanes: “If the phrase ‘How can one be Persian’ had been unknown to me, I would have understood, from hearing it, that it came from the country whose national prejudices reign supreme and from the sex that spreads them the most [Quand le mot peut-on être Persan? Me serait inconnu, je devinerais à l’entendre dire qu’il vient du pays où les préjugés nationaux sont le plus en règne, et du sexe qui les propage le plus].”²² Rousseau slams the ethnocentrism of his compatriots as he glosses the iconic scene in which the French reveal the limits of their knowledge of the other: Rica, the exotic rock star in Persian dress, goes unnoticed when he appears in European garb. Reciprocally, we know that French people were being dressed up as Turks for painters like the Swiss-French Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–89) and Jean-Baptiste Van Mour (1671–1737). But beyond appearance and costume, the issue embedded in the celebrated phrase “How can one be Persian?” was the trenchant question of how one could, under the circumstances, be French.

Charles-Louis Secondat Montesquieu’s Les lettres persanes, first published under a pseudonym in Amsterdam in 1721, is an epistolary novel that tracks the voyage of a noble Persian and his friends from Isfahan, Persia, to Paris between 1712 and 1720. Three narratives intersect in this work: first, the travel journals, describing French society at the end of Louis XIV’s reign, as observed by the traveling Persians, Usbek and Rica; then, life in Usbek’s abandoned harem (which may recall but is not close to the Oriental tales so popular in the eighteenth century taken from Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights, 1704–17); finally, fragments of philosophical inquiry about liberty, justice, and happiness are sprinkled throughout the letters from various perspectives. In the first instance, the contrast of cultures (Isfahan and Paris) comes not from the encounter with a primitive society, nor merely from the conceit of a “fresh look” inside French society from outside observers—although it is that, too; it comes more importantly from observation of social mores by characters of more or less equal stature within their respective societies. The Persian protagonist leaves his country dogged by political troubles, but a “desire to know,” and to exceed the limitations of his insular society, make exile attractive. A similar motivation characterized some of Montesquieu’s sources for his knowledge of Persia: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89), author of Six voyages en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (1676) and John Chardin (1643–1713)—who, as a Protestant, was certainly sensitive to the history of religious conflict and persecution within France. Montesquieu’s story of leaving the homeland reverses the voyage of these previous travelers, reprising Tavernier’s route and shadowing Chardin’s cultural observations about what he sees. So Montesquieu grounds the story of foreigners coming to Europe in the superimposition of his characters’ reflections on those of the Europeans who traveled out. The effort to displace the center from Europe to Persia, and thereby to provide a distancing effect on everything observed in Europe, comes through multiple letter writers, all of whom write (seemingly without any problem) in French. Here the term barbare signals kaleidoscopic perspectives on displaced centers: from a form of language distinct from the vulgar Latinate languages in mixed neighborhoods (Letter XXXVII), to the harem wife’s lament about Usbek’s voyage to “barbaric countries” (Letter II), references to the Barbary Coast (the Roman term for Barbarians taken from the word Berber to designate what is now the Maghreb [Letter CXVIII]), a Persian view of Turks and Tartares as “barbares” (Letter XIX), and finally the more diffused sense of the word “barbarous” in the cruelty inflicted on the women of the harem by the Eunuchs (Letter XLVII).

Usbek and his friends are foreigners, travelers, and ethnographers of Parisian and European society: “I spend my life in inquiry. In the evening I write down what I have noticed, everything interests me, everything surprises one [je passe ma vie à examiner, j’écris le soir ce que j’ai remarqué, ce que j’ai vu, ce que j’ai entendu dans la journée. Tout m’intéresse, tout m’étonne]” (Letter XLVIII). No Europeans are mentioned by name except, ironically, the two travelers upon whose works Montesquieu based his narrative, Tavernier²³ and Chardin, cited by a man who Usbek claims knows Isfahan better than he (Letter LXXIII). Usbek and his friends describe group behavior rather than individuals, including European religious, political, and economic life, along with the court, the women, and more. Knowledge, however, is different from assimilation, and Usbek remains in “un climat barbare” (Letter CLV), whereas Rica adapts. Their letters are written in the form of personal essays, reminiscent of the Montaigne’s style, in a freewheeling and fragmented format that allows for commentary, quotations, and the inclusion of narratives. The overarching dramatic framework rests on the story of Usbek’s long distance relationship to his domestic harem in Isfahan.

The second aspect of the novel is painful and compelling : the final catastrophe in the harem that provides the work with its key ethical message. Usbek is as blind to the needs and political structure of his domestic world (Letter CXIX), as he appears to be lucid when observing France. When he must face the meltdown of his own harem, he cannot be wise. The narrative of Usbek’s increasingly violent rule over his wives—through the mediated power of the Eunuchs—brings a crisis and a moral lesson: politically unchanged, despite all that he has learned abroad, Usbek becomes brutal and repressive. The harem revolt explodes with a tragic act of personal and political freedom, the suicide of one of Usbek’s wives, Roxane, who proclaims in the last letter that however much she has been repressed and enslaved within harem rule, she has maintained her own freedom within. Writing out from her “prison,” with a sense of “inner emigration,” Roxane declares her act of moral and political resistance.

If we accept the terms of the novel—outsiders writing about Europe, and particularly Paris, in an epistolary novel addressing a French reading public—Usbek has made what is strange familiar to him in order to remake what is familiar strange to his readers. But he has not gained sufficient distance (socially or politically) to change himself or his society. And here is Montesquieu’s red flag : the harem’s fate could be that of France; monarchy could descend into despotism. Usbek is thus a flawed ethnographer, since the knowledge gained from ethnographic descriptions remains splintered, often satirical, and incomplete when unaccompanied by self-examination; tyranny and despotism remain a threat within even the most cosmopolitan societies. Yet, the aspiration toward essential justice and a shared humanity remains strong—even if glimpsed only through the limited and perspectival testimony of the epistolary form. Montesquieu famously wrote that he was by necessity a man and by circumstance French. That contingency—being from where one is—underlies the imaginary sequence of written letters, as a dialogue from differing points of view that brings knowledge about how self and other relate not just in binary oppositions but also in multiple networks.

In the Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747), Mme de Graffigny provides a cultural encounter echoing Lettres persanes as well as the earlier Les lettres portuguaises (1669), the first popular epistolary novel, and gives voice to an Enlightenment feminist discourse. Hovering between the genre of the philosophical tale and the sentimental novel, Lettres d’une péruviennes probes, beyond what it means to be Peruvian, what it means to be a French woman. In this story, situated in the sixteenth century, an Incan princess, having been kidnapped from the Temple of the Sun by Spanish raiders, ends up as a “forced immigrant” in France, albeit in great luxury. Zilia translates the letters she “writes” to her betrothed Incan prince with quipus, a nonphonetic form of writing through which she maintains her original identity. The quipu is a type of knot hypothesized to have been either an idiosyncratic system of one person, or a conventional system whose code to this day hasn’t been fully cracked.²⁴ The love plot fails when the beloved Aza is discovered to have betrayed Zilia by assimilating to Spanish society and abandoning her to marry another. Although the rationale of her Incan destiny disappears, a contingent but unflinching independence and resistance to complete assimilation to French society takes over, in Zilia’s unwillingness to marry her passionately devoted host, Déterville. Zilia’s precursor in this refusal is La Princesse de Clèves, who chose part-time convent life as an alternative to remarriage after her husband’s death. Zilia follows a secular path in which language, both written and oral, provides a key to learning about and critiquing French society. Once she learns French and becomes fully bilingual, Zilia sounds more like a female philosopher than a French woman (caught up in a culture of appearance), exercising freedom of choice as she negotiates with the dominant culture of her hosts. Zilia’s choices result from her quasi-ethnographic observations and the contingent agency gained in France, which differentiate her from her Persian predecessors, Usbek, and the women of his harem, particularly Roxane. No longer dependent on the ethos of her origin, Zilia chooses to remain alone and, to the extent possible, independent. The questions probed here, for which there are no final answers, are: when and how much to assimilate to a new culture, and what the consequences are of such choices.

Voltaire’s tale L’ingénu deals with the question of assimilation and learning. In his prodigious writings, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), drew examples from the long history of civilization. He was a cosmopolitan who argued for a European rather than a national identity, who saw in Confucius the prototype of the wise philosopher, and for whom the main passion in the 1760s became his fight against fanaticism, intolerance, superstition, and the abuses of the Catholic Church.²⁵ The Europe that Voltaire designates is bounded by the values of reason and freedom, over and against the past excesses of religious allegiance. In L’ingénu, published anonymously in Geneva in 1767, Voltaire returns to Rousseau’s discussion of the “noble” savage by staging the arrival in France of the “Huron,” a member of an indigenous population in New France (a territory extending from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, also including Hudson Bay and Louisiana). The area was known through Gabriel Sagard Théodat’s Grand voyage au pays des Hurons (1632); Voltaire may well have read the French Jesuit missionaries and the Baron de Lahontan (1666–1716), who wrote about his voyage of 1683 in the successful Voyages de mr. le baron de Lahontan, dans l’Amérique septentrionale (1703). Voltaire’s “Huron” (named by the Europeans) turns out, however, to be genetically European descended from a family in lower Brittany.²⁶ Taking aim at Rousseau’s theory of humans in nature, Voltaire’s trenchant irony works with and against the sentimental narrative of the innocent “Huron,” whose naive assumptions constitute the basis for revealing the excesses of judicial authority in an absolute monarchy, as well as the arbitrariness of Christian ritual and power within society. Recalling l’Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and a tradition of novels indebted to the English novelist Richardson, the sentimental story is superimposed on a satirical tale and critique of contemporary society. The potential of the Huron’s untutored learning creates choice where none seemed previously to exist, as, for example, when he stands in a river awaiting baptism, having read about the river baptism of an Ethiopian Queen’s eunuch, rather than go to a lavishly decorated church.²⁷

The question of what is innately human and what is learned formed part of the debate with which Voltaire engaged; the Huron is innocent, free, without prejudice, and capable of learning. Saddened by becoming aware of the crimes of history, he nevertheless accommodates to the local customs and begins to assimilate. How much one could change and in turn transform society was another part of the debate. Two scenes show incremental change. First, the Huron is imprisoned at the Bastille—a place not yet but soon to become the emblem of the French Revolution—by a lettre de cachet (an arbitrary royal order without legal recourse) on intelligence from the King’s confessor that he had been frequenting French Protestant Huguenots (and so might burn convents and make off with French women). He ends up in close proximity to the Jansenist Gordon, who believes in Saint Augustine’s concept of predestination and salvation. The Jansenist panoramically envisions the Huron’s voyage from Lake Ontario to England, France, and finally the Bastille as an act of Providence, while the Huron calls his imprisonment barbaric. The two engage in discussion about the difference between Providence and the lettres de cachet, good and evil, original sin, and debate the merits of Cartesianism. Each comes to see the other’s point of view. Thus, to a question raised by Rousseau following Montesquieu’s discussion of diversity: Where and how could religions interact without domination or danger? Voltaire responds that within society, freedom becomes possible when divergent two points of view enter into dialogue.

The good news from Voltaire is that in captivity the Huron is transformed from “brute to man [de brute en homme].”²⁸ Without changing his nature, he becomes progressively civilized—learning to read, write, and exercise good judgment. European learning, unavailable in America, has thus been opened up to him at the very moment that he is deprived of this possibility in jail. Voltaire explores the limits of how much in human life is determined and how much free, as he did in Candide and his poem about the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake. The Jansenist Gordon learns that his own reasoning about la grace efficace (predestination), the freedom of God and man, has not brought him any closer to freedom, and that Saint Augustine can be no practical help in getting him out of prison. Both the Jansenist and Huron change, and in a sentence reversing centuries of colonization by Jesuit missionaries around the world, the narrator concludes with some astonishment, “As a last wonder, a Huron converted a Jansenist [Pour dernier prodige, un Huron convertissait un janséniste].” Human perfectibility combined with natural goodness and religion creates the possibility for change and progress.

The bad news is that the price for the Huron’s political freedom is a woman’s virtue; Sainte Yves, the Huron’s beloved, exchanges her virginity to free the Huron and the Jansenist, giving the droit du seigneur (the right to initiate her sexually) to the minister Saint Pouange, who intercedes. Saint Yves dies believing herself to have betrayed love in order to save it. In a sense, she cannot assimilate what is foreign to her nature, while all the men benefit from this sacrifice: the Jansenist abandons his excessive beliefs, the newly repentant minister devotes his life to making reparations, and the Huron becomes a military officer in Paris. To Gordon’s optimistic motto, “Misfortune is of some use,” the narrator sounds a less certain note: “How many people can say Misfortune is for no purpose?”²⁹

Through the imagined ethnographic distance created in an encounter between a quasi-indigenous immigrant and a civilized clergyman, Voltaire brings into relief an ambivalence between the moral and the political. Reinhardt Koselleck’s analysis of critique and crisis locates the political secret of Enlightenment in “the politically crucial shift from inner moral freedom to outward political freedom,” a shift that would be hidden even from “most of the Enlighteners themselves.”³⁰ Koselleck argues that “criticism set itself apart from the State as non-political yet subjected to its judgment. Therein lay the root of the ambivalence of criticism, an ambivalence that after Voltaire became its historical bench-mark: ostensibly non-political and above politics, it was in fact political.” Criticism, he concludes, “spelled the death of kings.” The Enlightenment thus constituted at once an end, a beginning, and a period of transition.

No one worked harder to make the transition into a dialogue than Denis Diderot, and in Le supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) he presents the complexity of the task. Diderot reviewed for his friend Grimm’s cultural newsletter, Correspondence littéraire,³¹ Bougainville’s account of the circumnavigation of the globe; it took Bougainville from France around Africa and South America back to France, with a stop in Tahiti about which he wrote in his Voyage autour du monde (1771). Like Rousseau, but perhaps more practically, Diderot asks how adventurers attracted to the fantastic could possibly write about things “as they are”; travelers tend to exaggerate and justify the extraordinary effort it takes to arrive at such faraway places; self-interest abounds in these accounts. Bougainville lacks the philosopher’s awe at and ability to analyze and understand what he sees in the “masterpieces” of other societies and nature. Diderot then takes off from Bougainville’s writing to write his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville.

In the Supplément, Diderot juxtaposes dialogues in Tahiti, a society close to nature, between a French chaplain (the Almoner) and a Tahitian husband, father, and elder who reveals the joys and perils of hospitality, as well as the arbitrary (and hypocritical) mores of European society and religion. Two readers, A and B (as though characters taken from the alphabetical order of the Encyclopédie), comment upon and analyze Bougainville’s voyage and the descriptions of this well regulated and sexually free society—a community based on an alternative family structure. The somewhat disconnected dialogues nevertheless comment upon one another, and the lengthy discourse of an “Old Man” is particularly important. He addresses Bougainville and his compatriots directly at the departure of the Europeans: do not cry at their departure, he exhorts, but at the fact that they ever came; from a free people, Tahitians have come to know slavery, private property, violence, and the illness brought by outsiders. Reading this discourse, translated from the old man’s native language to Spanish and French, interlocutor A says, “Through something brusque and primitive, I seem to find European ideas and turns of phrase [à travers je ne sais quoi d’abrupt et de sauvage, il me semble retrouver des idées et des tournures européennes].” In this speech, Diderot winks at one of his sources: Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, a work he and L’Abbé de Raynal had also reprised in writing the Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (1771), in an acerbic discourse denouncing the transgressions of colonialism. In the Supplément, the old man speaks out against the intrusion of Bougainville and other Europeans whose appropriation of the island people of Tahiti transgressed their freedom and innocence by bringing illness and their future “enslavement.” Voicing muted critique, he shows that empathy and understanding cannot be reciprocated by the Tahitians because, as Orou their spokesman puts it, the Europeans come from a country whose shoddy order makes them “more Barbarians than we are.”³² Yet, Tahiti’s spokesman pragmatically states that the need for more children, upon which their economy is based, requires help from the sailors to procreate because, although the Tahitians are stronger, the Europeans are smarter. So the seeds of the civilizing mission—an argument later used to legitimate colonialism in the nineteenth century—are literally sown in this encounter.

Diderot inserts a female outcry against the injustice of laws in New England in a fragment detached from the discussions about Bougainville’s voyage between A and B, and separate from the discussion between the Tahitian and the European: Miss Polly Baker defends herself in court against the injustice of the laws that would penalize her for having five children out of wedlock. Here, Diderot writes a slight variation on Benjamin Franklin’s fiction about a woman who changes her own fate (the court exonerates her, and the magistrate, the father of the children, marries her) in the American colonies where repressive laws about reproduction contrast dramatically with the Tahiti he portrays.³³ In the Supplément, Diderot takes aim at the false morality not only of French society but also of colonial America. Although the message is sometimes deliberately incomplete and ambivalent, Diderot’s characters seduce the reader with a view of Tahitian culture that—though not in itself a model to be followed—begins to pull the rug out from under the existing order of European society.

The works that I have evoked in this essay find themselves not only in a multiplicity of geographical spaces but within a temporal sedimentation as well: Rousseau writes the Second Discourse in 1755 looking back to the origins of humans in nature in order to effect a devastating attack on contemporary society. In dialogue with Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes of 1721 (situated before the end of the reign of Louis XIV), Graffigny’s work of 1747 throws us back to the sixteenth century and early colonialism. Voltaire’s tale of 1767 takes place in 1689, closely following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the repression of Protestants in 1685. Diderot’s Supplément, written in 1771, stays roughly contemporaneous with Bougainville’s voyage and Diderot’s own life. Like the mappemonde Diderot envisaged for the Encyclopédie, knowledge in these works emerges from connection, an ethnographic distancing, and kaleidoscopic effect of times and places: going out from France to locate knowledge and coming back to take stock of their own context. The idea of an otherness without and within enabled critique of their own society. Events would bypass this period of transition and change, and later move to a sense of the nation as a unified political entity during the French Revolution. Yet the lessons of cultural encounter in a network of relations (through persons and across spaces) would not be lost. For these thinkers, the ethnographic imagination was not about only the particular places, times, and cultures; it was also about asking urgent questions not so different from those posed by participants in the colloquium to launch the new French ethnographic museum of the twenty-first century: How can one find a sense of a unified humanity within a world of differences?