French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

By the end of the eighteenth century, the outlines of all continents would have been carefully drawn, the Earth mapped extensively thanks to Cook’s and Lapérouse’s epic voyages around the world. Australia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Antarctic continent were the missing pieces to the puzzle that the earth had been until then. In 1792, as Europeans contemplated their perspective on the globe, halfway across the planet, the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands also gained new knowledge of the peoples half a world away. After boarding the British ship Daedalus, and as he saw the expedition’s astronomer, Gooch, writing, the chief of the Ohitahoo asked him to tattoo his hip with ink.¹ The observer now observed, and the observed now observing, those who previously had been objects of writing now commissioned works themselves. Global encounters had come full circle.

Five years later, writing from exile in London, Chateaubriand would mourn the mysteries lost to the empirical gain of discoveries. Comparing himself to Cook, he admitted,

Chateaubriand’s slippage from science to connaissance was telling of the word’s broader meaning at the time. Science, up until the 1762 fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, designated a “certain and evident knowledge of things by their causes”; only in the sixth edition of 1832 does knowledge become defined by its subject matter, rather than by its method, science “the sum or system of knowledge on a given topic, Natural sciences, Physical sciences.”³ For the greater part of the eighteenth century, what we now think of as science, the study of the natural world, was the object of distinct practices, carried out across a broad range of disciplines. Many of what we would understand today as sciences fell under the purview of natural philosophy, or “Particular physics,” the term preferred by Denis Diderot and Jean Lerond d’Alembert in their compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopédie.⁴ Natural history also dealt with the natural world, but it did so through observation and description: while natural philosophy considered the way things work, natural history painted a picture of what these things were. The people who pursued these inquiries came from distinct professional paths, and the fields of study in which they endeavored were in no way fixed, changing vastly throughout the century. In Bacon’s earlier Description of the Intellectual Globe (1612), natural history belonged to the branch of knowledge pertaining to memory, namely, history, while the broader category of natural philosophy fell under the aegis of reason, under the predominant branch of philosophy. Soon after, Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728) restructured this order to grant theology a central place, under the branch of rational knowledge and alongside physics, and did away with the faculties and the heading of philosophy altogether. The Encyclopédie, which had begun as a translation of Chambers’s work, quickly abandoned the new classification to revert back to Bacon’s divisions and, in the process, reflected the rising stature of natural history in France, as well as increased the number of practices included within “Particular Physics,” thereby unsettling the divide which had previously existed between natural history and natural philosophy.⁵ Beyond the shifts in classification, investigations into what it meant to be human cut across categories as humans became the subject of a broad range of methods.

Sidestepping a causal view of history, and the frequent reading of Enlightenment forays into human diversity as a result of world discoveries, in the pages that follow I will examine the elective affinities among emerging scientific inquiries into humankind, global knowledge, and literary investigations that converged to produce a new understanding of the human.⁶ How did Enlightenment literature, stranded as it were under a different branch of knowledge, a product of imagination, engage with sciences to ask what it means to be human? And more specifically, how was the notion of the human, and questions of identity and difference within it, inflected by the rise of scientific discourses—and natural sciences in particular—in a global perspective?⁷

The question of the relation between sciences and literature in the eighteenth century has a long history, and served to catalyze the resurgence of French literary history studies in the early twentieth century. When Gustave Lanson and his student Daniel Mornet reestablished the discipline of French literary history, one of Mornet’s first discoveries was that literature did not dominate the readerly tastes of the eighteenth century; rather, it was natural history books that flew off the shelves. Both literary historians championed an empirical methodology focused on reconstructing a historical context through detailed observation of facts, on sifting through correspondences and statistical analyses of readership, and they argued that such data could explain a text’s meaning. Understanding the dominance of natural history was not only the key to understanding the century’s literary production, but it also ultimately revealed the nation’s character. Mornet’s privileging of facts, he was quick to admit, was further validated by eighteenth-century naturalists’ own defense of empiricism against the prevailing esprit de système, sciences at once the object, method, and missing link of French eighteenth-century literary history.⁸

Since then, Enlightenment historiography has continued to relate the more specific notion of the “Enlightenment” as an intellectual movement and not simply as a synonym for the century on the whole, to scientific rationalism, even though most historians of science privileged the scientific developments of the seventeenth century and its more visible “discoveries.” A critical reconfiguration of the period emerged in the 1930s in reaction to this early positivism. In France, Germany, and the United States, among others, historians such as Ernst Cassirer (as well as, to a certain extent Paul Hazard, Alexandre Koyré, and Arthur Lovejoy) turned their focus to the “spirit” or “mind” of the Enlightenment and produced an idealist historiography in which reason fueled progress and, inversely, the latter legitimated the former.⁹ During this time, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer also pointed to the mutually defining relation between science and the Enlightenment, but they perceived the rise of scientific rationality as leading to the ultimate demise of Enlightenment values and they warned against the period’s dangerous move toward positivism. A study of the eighteenth century, they argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment, should examine the coterminous effects of the rise of capitalism, the defense of rationality, and totalitarian practices as foundational to our contemporary era.

More recently, cultural historians have focused on specific scientific endeavors of the Enlightenment and shown the institutional structures that made them possible, as well as the material conditions that shaped them. Science appears to be not so much a series of discoveries but another facet of culture, participating in a wider network of social practices. During this period, Michel Foucault also brought to the fore a history cognizant of the material dimension of ideas, and he examined the relations of power imbricated in the production of knowledge and in the claims of new epistemologies to transparency and objectivity—which he located in the classical age of the mid-seventeenth to eighteenth century.¹⁰ In later works, Foucault showed how the rise of life sciences, as well as appeals to a common human nature, enabled the legitimation of new social entities over the course of the eighteenth century. Together, these changes provided a language through which to police beings along the lines of physical criteria, a shift that is echoed in fictions of the period.

Whereas for Mornet, natural history was brought to bear on literature to outline a national identity, excavating positivism as a path to progress, a study of Enlightenment sciences and literature today points to a broader context where peoples involved in exploration, scientific endeavors, and economic speculation across the globe influenced and shaped each other. As two coexisting and at times contiguous practices and discourses, literature and sciences both raised broader social questions of the time, such as what it means to be human, conceptions of identity and difference, and they did so with the tools of their respective fields.¹¹

Early Enlightenment fiction set narratives in a context where readers considered the globe from afar, reflecting upon the notion of humanness through the prism of natural philosophy, outside a theological perspective. Balloons, wings, comets in flight, vials of dewdrops—these modes of transportations and others were being harnessed by writers who longed for their narrators to take flight. Travels through space simultaneously criticized human realities of war, and fantasized mobility and human mastery over nature. Human beings were all of a sudden able to put themselves “above” others, quite literally. Cyrano de Bergerac’s Les états et empires de la lune et du soleil (1657–62) features an adventurous man who devises various flying contraptions, among which dewdrop vials whisk him across the Atlantic, their lighter weight carrying him upward. Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) envisioned a pedagogical dialogue under the stars. Later, in Micromégas (1752), Voltaire imagines two travelers who explore the stratosphere by catching comets in flight, while Rousseau’s protagonist, in Le nouveau dédale (1743), built a pair of wings in an attempt to succeed where Icarus had failed. Throughout these texts, the protagonist is in turn an imperfect scientist, a fearless traveler, an improvised ambassador. Time and again, our unassuming hero encounters new worlds, and at times nonhuman beings, and the very notion of the human is put on trial.

Voltaire’s Micromégas built upon the early tradition of the conte, which he had developed as a philosophical genre, bringing fiction to bear on Newton’s natural philosophy and consequently bringing it back down to Earth.¹² As the giant Micromégas and a man from Saturn travel through space and to Earth, they cast a relativizing gaze enacted through rhetorical figures such as hyperboles and the genre of burlesque, remarking that the earth is nothing more than a bad small-town cabaret. Voltaire’s tale culminates in the rewriting of a passage of Homer’s Odyssey that stages the superiority of the gods over other deities. The Greek intertext is invoked in a final scene, in which a lengthy discussion between the protagonists, a philosopher and a theologian who claims the world was built for them, leads to a laughing fit at the two mortals’ expense. Micromégas and the Saturnian—the narrator and reader in on the joke—look down at Earth, fiction triumphant as it allows us to laugh “inextinguishably” with the gods at human presumptuousness.¹³

Much more than an illustration of Galileo’s cosmography or Newtonian physics, Voltaire’s tale—just like Cyrano’s—becomes a space where, despite a mastery of facts and empirical knowledge about the planet, the reader and the protagonists come to realize that we do not have the answer to the question of humans’ place in the universe. Through metaphors lacking a referent and through its final “blank book” of knowledge (Micromégas leaves humans with a comprehensive volume of information, the pages of which are empty), these fictions frustrate our desire for the text to signify in any definitive way, in favor of signs left open to interpretation.

While certain texts engaged sciences of the time by focusing on the broader relation of humans to the universe, other fictions addressed more directly the question of human diversity raised by natural history and emerging sciences. Sciences of Human nature, the natural history of man and Hume’s famous call for a ‘science of man’ were overlapping terms to describe a broad range of inquiries into what it means to be human, from the description of physical diversity to mores and customs across the planet.¹⁴ In their own examination of classifications, of identity and difference, fictional texts invoked these new scientific investigations and produced a deeply social understanding of human groups in the process.

Early in the century, European representations of human variety rested on a notion of humankind whose commonality was not founded on any intrinsic notion of the species, but rather rested on the belief in a unified essence of the human situated outside our purview, in God’s hands. The threshold separating what is human from what is not did not lie so much within humankind itself as it existed in relation to the question of salvation.¹⁵ The only radical difference between groups of beings was articulated according to whether a creature belonged to humankind under the law of God. One instance of this framework can be found in the United States, where as late as the nineteenth century, it was still said of “mulatto” slaves that they had “human blood,” establishing their identity within a common humanness, and not yet as a group heterogeneous to others within the species, or as we would now say, not yet racialized—where race is understood in its current definition of “a closed category, endo-determined, hereditary, homogeneous in itself and heterogeneous to other social units.”¹⁶ In this perspective, diverse individuals were included—or not—within an overarching human category, and their specific differences seen as modifiable through religious conversion and change of climate, among other factors.

This is not to say that within humankind the variety of beings was not remarked upon. Differences were indeed noted, as were similarities in mores, dress, and religious beliefs, as much, if not more than physical traits.¹⁷ In Denis Diderot’s article “Humaine espèce” in the Encyclopédie, to which we will return later, one learns that the Laplanders of what was then Denmark worship a large black cat, that in mainland China people are as white as in Europe, and that the Jalofes of Africa have the same criteria of beauty as Westerners.¹⁸ During this period, literary texts’ encounters with other peoples spoke of strangeness, or foreignness—the French term étrangeté refers to both—rather than heterogeneity, with its implications of fixed natural differences between human groups, that would later become dominant. Fictions of alterity sought to defamiliarize readers, mirroring a critical image of France back to itself from an ingenuous point of view. Stories returned to known lands: to Greece, and to the Levant, where the French explorer and geographer La Condamine had just traveled, and Europe relocated its myth of origins to the locations of antiquity.¹⁹ Galland’s publication of the Thousand and One Nights (1704–17) had consolidated the popularity of the short story genre, the conte oriental becoming the preferred form for social and political satire, the Orient doubling as vantage point and target.

Inscriptions of human diversity served as the vanishing point from which to build a critique of France, and at the same time, they stressed a situated notion of identity in which one’s identity is formed within a given context. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes complicated the distancing device by staging Usbek and Rica’s view of France and life in the seraglio they had left behind. Not only did both cultures come under scrutiny, but the epistolary novel, one of the most popular prose genres of the century, also showed how letters and social identities were equally as performative as they were relational, an idea Montesquieu would develop in his social study L’esprit des lois. From outside the confines of a Catholic culture, in Letter XXIX, the pope becomes no more than the “chief of Christians, he is an ancient idol, worshipped now from habit,” his identity more arbitrary than absolute. In a similar fashion, the first eunuch reveals, in Letter IX, that the masculinity to which he seems to be born is less an essential given than it is a social position to be reclaimed through the exercise of power. In speaking of the women he watches over, he notes, “I never forget that I was born to command them, and I feel as if I recover my lost manhood [je redeviens homme] in the moments where I command them again.”²⁰ The eunuch makes clear that his choice to perform masculinity is molded by a culture of binary roles, the innate feeling of becoming a man subsequent to the awareness of, and inscription within, a given order. Summing up these examples, Roxane’s last letter to her husband Usbek also reveals the malleability underlying these various social roles: “But you had, for the longest time, the advantage of believing that a heart such as mine was submitted to yours: we were both happy, you believed I was betrayed, and I was betraying you. . . . This language, in all likelihood, will seem novel to you. . . . I reformed your laws on those of nature.” Here, nature is, above all, an ideal from which the heroine can redress wrongs rather than being the material from which human identity is determined. It is specifically Montesquieu’s articulation of a situated identity that Paul Gilroy draws upon in Postcolonial Melancholia, making the case that we should substitute for the notion of the “global” that of the “planetary”: “The planetary suggests both contingency and movement. It specifies a smaller scale than the global, which transmits all the triumphalism and complacency of ever-expanding imperial universals.”²¹ One’s place in society is not designated by an external, predetermined natural or theological order; instead, identity is shown to be produced through the articulation of individual agency within a set of available discourses and positions, set against the ideal of a universal nature of humankind.

What were these increasingly dominant discourses on the human that privileged physicality as a path to understanding the human? Natural history included fields such as anatomy and anthropology, and its purview went beyond today’s human sciences to include then important disciplines such as organology—Franz Gall’s study of the anatomy of the brain—that have now disappeared. Naturalists also addressed questions of taste, economy, and the use value of natural goods.²⁴

A European and Eurocentric science, natural history nevertheless depended on knowledge gathered at the four corners of the earth, often from the aboriginal peoples whom explorers encountered, as Baron de Lahontan’s journals from New France, the French colony in North America, testify.

Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, was the first explicitly to include the human within the realm of the animals, in a taxonomy of beings whose binomial nomenclature is still in use to this day.²⁵ He considered humans as a separate species, Homo sapiens, but took the decisive step to include them alongside apes under the order of Primates.²⁶ It was George Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the keeper of the king’s natural history collection at the Jardin du Roi (later the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle) for more than forty years, who edited the first lengthy work on the human animal. His forty-four-volume Histoire naturelle, reprinted in fifty-two complete editions between 1749 and 1785, devoted two of the first three volumes to humans alone, alongside other natural beings.

In the spirit of the broad purview of natural history at the time, which considered humans under all angles, from mores to anatomy, Buffon’s notion of human groups was still very much a fluid one, an inquiry into the étrangeté described earlier, where the term race still bore the idea of a sociohistorically defined nobility, and did not yet designate, as it would half a century later, a closed category, heterogeneous to others. In fact, Buffon strongly defended monogenesis, the belief that all humans come from a single origin, against partisans of polygenesis such as Voltaire, who thought that human variety ran deep into the coexistence of different “species” scattered across the globe. For partisans of monogenesis, inscribed in a long tradition of debates over environmental determinism, skin color, temperament, and physical traits could all change if beings were to live in different climates.

Where they had resisted strictly reifying categories of race, Linnaeus and Buffon more easily proposed another anatomical marker of differentiation at the center of all natural orders: in everything from Linnaeus’s taxonomies of plants to Buffon’s description of human communities, sexual difference was posited as an anatomical given, and granted a new status that it never previously possessed.²⁷ This emphasis on a reproductive binary, along with the focus on humans as physical beings, and Buffon’s implications that physiological traits could be linked to social roles, together paved the way to the naturalization of human groups that Cabanis and the Ideologues, a group dedicated to evolving a science of ideas, would bring to full fruition.²⁸ By the end of the century, Cabanis staged groups along the lines of presumed “natural differences” and reframed institutional categories such as age and race as entirely determined by physiology.²⁹

This was carried out not simply along the lines of races, but first and foremost, in France, along the lines of class, with workers marked as constituting a separate race from the end of the eighteenth century onward. During this period, as Colette Guillaumin has shown, a broad range of groups—from workers to races, sexual categories, children, and the mentally ill—became more radically othered through a common process of naturalization.³⁰ In making humans the object of empirical study, naturalists at the end of the century had produced a synecdochal language of natural kinds where to know one “specimen” was to know the group, a language that became the central discourse through which to address questions of identity, as will be reflected in fictions at the end of the century.

An appeal to the commonality of the human grounded in a unique species, and a commitment to sciences, was at the heart of much of Denis Diderot’s works.³¹ In the other all-encompassing collaborative project of the era, the seventeen-volume (with an additional eleven volumes of illustrations) Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, the editors, D’Alembert and Diderot, reserved the lion’s share of their project’s new tree of knowledge for natural history. Diderot, who authored a number of forays into materialism, such as Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, delegated a number of the headings to the naturalist Daubenton and others and wrote a few articles himself, including “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle.”

In a wide range of articles, from the foundational “Encyclopédie” to “Juifs,” Diderot invoked a shared humanity by referring to “humaine espèce,” “corps humain,” and, most often, “genre humain.” He drew upon this commonality to either include a minority group within a universal or to call out a category that set itself apart, or above, others (such as the sect of Dositheans, in the article “Juifs,” who were said to “look down at the rest of human species with disdain”). In his article “Humaine espèce,” Diderot took up Buffon’s three criteria to describe humans: skin color, size and shape of bodies, and mores. Scanning the globe from pole to pole, north to south, this overview of the world’s populations aimed at exhaustiveness. And although Diderot echoed contemporary clichés—northerners are more handsome, Indian women are lascivious, Africans generally lack intellect—he concluded his survey with a defense of monogenesis, the belief that all peoples constitute a single species. Adopting a stance of social analysis, he makes clear that it is only through the social relation of slavery that certain groups become identified as “beasts of burden”—a nonhuman group, radically heterogenous to other human groups.

At a distance from his repeated case for a universal species from which to make appeals to equality, and from which to critique the status quo, Diderot’s fictions return time and again to the singular and partial knowledge afforded by local contexts, such as the island of Tahiti, or to singular voices such as that of the reluctant nun, Suzanne (La religieuse). With their innovative staging of the individual’s point of view, voice, and rhetorical self-awareness, Diderot’s novels made manifest the tension between individual cases and the supposed homogeneity of a ‘natural’ category. In the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, two narrators, A and B, discuss the recent travels of the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and the text then opens up to the embedded fiction of the travel narrative. The presumed excerpts of Bougainville’s voyage feature the young Tahitian Orou, an old man from the island, and a priest, each of whom voices a different perspective on the encounter between Europeans and Tahitians. While Diderot appealed to a universal human nature to denounce European civilization, he simultaneously exposed, through the singular voice of the narrator, how particular identities undermine the universality of categories. Against the claim that distinct human groups exist and that social roles are steeped in different anatomies, and despite his abundant readings in physiology, Diderot’s narratives undermined any notion of “naturalness” and questioned any epistemological claim of a text to grant us direct access to a referential nature.³² Instead, the texts return to the moment of utterance, and to the social structure within which identity is constructed: A and B, the protagonists of the Supplément, remind us that their knowledge of the Tahitian “other” is mediated through the representation of a book, and that the presumed natural society of the island is itself ruled by laws, such as limiting one’s number of sexual partners to ensure that paternity can be retraced. Similarly, the fictional Suzanne of La religieuse discloses that she is merely playing at femininity in her last avowal: “I am a woman, perhaps a little flirtatious for all I know” (je suis une femme, peut-être un peu coquette, que sais-je?).³³ While the protagonist reveals that her identity is the result of a carefully crafted discursive effect, Diderot never loses sight of the fact that performing these roles is achieved only within the parameters of social positions that were increasingly legitimated by a discussion of physiological differences. Stripped of all its spirituality, the convent appears as a sexed world where Suzanne is forced to join what she names “the herd,” a socially constructed universe dominated by the third-person plural feminine pronoun Elles, a group less defined by its common anatomy than by its material relation to the outside world, the nuns playing their hypocritical role only “for the thousand coins that the house would receive for it. That is the reason for which they lie their entire life, and prepare forty, fifty or even a life’s worth of misery for young innocent women.” In inscribing existing social structures within his texts, Diderot produced a theory of difference that emphasized the social relations at work in defining human identity.

Bougainville’s travel accounts from around the world, published in 1771, did more than open the door for Diderot’s musing on the possibilities and limits of society based on a natural order. His was one of a series of circumnavigations in search of an illusionary Terra Australis. Cook would map the little-known Southern Hemisphere in 1772–75, and Lapérouse would conduct a similar journey to the Pacific in 1785.³⁴ Travel writing had become a steady best-seller: James Cook’s account to the Antarctic sold out in one day in 1777, and a hundred editions of various reports from Cook’s voyages were printed before 1800.³⁵ Meanwhile, hurrying to locate imaginary societies in places relatively unexplored by Europeans, texts such as Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440 (1771) and Rétif de la Bretonne’s La découverte australe (1781), as well as Paul et Virginie (1787) by the more established Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, directly drew from the genres of travel narrative and natural history. Through mock scientific drawings and characters—Buffon appears barely disguised as Noffub in the Découverte, and the naturalist Spallanzani figures in L’an 2440—these fictions capitalized on the authority of the science they incorporated, and at times posited the superiority of fiction over natural history and natural philosophy in stories that staged the relation of the metropolis to the world at large. Marked by the scientific turn that debates on human groups took at the end of the century, later fictions staged the biologization of the human and often presented an essentializing view of identity.

The previous fashion of the conte, with its often-satirical tone, and of the epistolary novel, with its emphasis on communication and polyphonic structure, had been replaced by a unique observer, traveling Earth with a scientific and a colonizing bent. This desire for a global perspective, and for new territories to serve as profitable colonies, was critically assessed in the monumental project of the Histoire des deux Indes, directed by the Abbé de Raynal, which collated data on colonial production, the opportunities and dangers of commerce, to articles commenting on the downfalls of luxury (1770).³⁶ Just a few years earlier, France had lost almost all of its colonies—New France, most of its Caribbean possessions (Grenada and Saint Lucia), and the French East India Company—to the British over a series of conflicts, including the Seven Years War, and it is in the wake of those losses that the fictions of colonization were written.

The move to a global economy, a comprehensive knowledge about the human and the naturalization of identities appear clearly imbricated in these texts. As Europeans increased commercial activities on a global scale, they correspondingly theorized differences of the human species in terms of “races.” Inheriting Aristotle’s and Hippocrates’s theories of natural kinds and physiological variations, which had been invoked by earlier projects of racialization from antiquity to colonial Latin America, eighteenth-century naturalists broke with their forebears’ formulation of human categories within a theological framework, and instead ushered in an understanding of groups defined by endogenous determinism, in which inner characteristics yield social purpose and specific roles.³⁷ As inequality grew in a global context, fictions began policing racial categories and articulated them through a new frame of sexual difference. By the end of the century, such fantasies of natural orders would be writ large, applied to whole communities such as Ile Bourbon, now known as Reunion Island, where segregation policies reconfigured the population along lines of “naturally” determined categories.

As a société d’habitation, a use of colonial land prior to a fully developed plantation economy, the Ile Bourbon demonstrated a more fluid understanding of social groupings. Racial categories and social status had no overlap: “mulatto” women were mostly free, and the majority of free couples were considered “mixed,” namely composed of a European man and his legitimate wife, originally from the island. Yet, as early as 1710, the colonial administrator Antoine Boucher’s account of the island, the Mémoire pour servir à la connoissance des habitans de l’Isle Bourbon (1710), gives evidence of the island’s shift to a colonial economy reliant on slaves for its coffee production, and of the need to create a fundamental differentiation between social units. In a series of 115 portraits of heads of house-hold and their wives, Boucher aligned binaries of color to those of social status, the newly circumscribed categories of blacks/whites were encouraged to confine themselves to their own groups and became narrowly associated with the respective roles of slaves/owners, and the category of “mulatto” women was set apart as dangerous to this order. Through Boucher’s eyes, the population of the Ile Bourbon assumed a heterogeneity that betrays a concrete relation between groups of owners and owned, free individuals and slaves, in which the in-between category of the “mulatto” woman was presented as hypersexualized and immoral, seen as a threat to the greater project of “whitening” the colony’s population. Foreshadowing the laws of the Code noir that would regulate all interactions with slaves in French colonies from 1723 onward, and that forbade marriages between individuals of presumed different “races,” the Ile Bourbon presents a rare example of the production of social differentiation along anatomical lines to ensure that physiology coincided with the new ideologies of race as distinct and determinant groups.³⁸

Such an engineered order would be fantasized by Rétif de la Bretonne, in his hybrid fiction La découverte australe. The text draws from travel narratives, natural history, and the tradition of scientific illustration, as well as from political treatises. Echoing the epoch’s discontent with the status quo, the Découverte australe imagines an ideal society free from the ancien régime value system of historical privilege, moving from the local to the global level as the story unfolds. Victorin, a young commoner, founds a new society on a remote hilltop where, with the help of artificial wings, he decides to elevate “his own above others” by differentiating them through their exclusive ability to fly. In rejecting the ancien régime, which had afforded him few rights, Victorin embodies the struggle of a rising social category, which, as Foucault has argued, sought to escape “historicism, and demanded an ahistorical constitution, through recourse to natural rights.”³⁹ In the society of his making, Victorin replaces aristocratic status and privilege with a language of natural equality, which thinly veils the instigation of a hierarchical order of natural differences newly noted or, even, produced. All are said to be equal, but it is the protagonists’ family alone that has the presumed natural ability to fly, and thus to explore and expand their empire to other lands.

This imperial impulse dominates the second section, in which the protagonist expands his society to faraway lands where Nature rests in its original state and hybrid species—men of the night and women-elephants among them—roam intact. Despite its claim for natural equality among all species, the text further creates natural difference through successive breeding of generations of characters to distort the very representation of the reality it builds. Victorin’s own son marries a woman from a giant people, the moniker “The Great” (Les grands) no longer referring to aristocrats but literally to beings who are physically “higher up.” Rétif simultaneously consolidates his dream of inequality by framing the entire tale within a larger discourse on nature as difference. Borrowing integrally from scientific texts of the time such as de Maillet’s Telliamed, the Découverte australe presents a deterministic and polygenic view of nature that supports the shift to natural marks of distinction, identity now legible in bodies that are deemed determinant of social positions.

Such a story of fantastical creatures no doubt points to the possibilities of fiction and, as Marie-Hélène Huet has pointed out, to the artist’s agency—as a new kind of creator, imagining monstrous beings. Yet, at the same time, this fiction identifies a move in French eighteenth-century prose fiction that betrays an empiricist impetus, and through its mastery of a secular anthropologizing gaze toward other cultures, it speaks of a desire to deepen the tie between nature and culture. Projecting the future, and across the globe, categories are “discovered,” delimitated by somatic traits, signed by a physiological marker in the radicalization of difference. In proposing its own natural history of the southern globe, the text engineers human and animal species into distinct taxonomies and ultimately replaces a history of positionality with a science of difference.

In the end, it can be said that in staking a claim for change, the French philosophes turned to a notion of universal human species that functioned as a double-edged sword: as a tool of critique of the ancien régime status quo and an empowerment of a new, nonaristocratic Frenchness, but also as an increasingly biologized understanding of social questions. As material inequalities grew during the century, appeals to natural equality were made to be reconciled with disparity through a discourse of presumed natural differences. If the Enlightenment had now taken measure of the planet, armed with a more comprehensive knowledge of the human, it appealed to a global concept of humanity while systematically staging the planetary and contingent circumstances through which individual identities are produced.