Dreaming of China in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

In eighteenth-century France, knowledge of the Far East improves while still remaining fragmentary and incomplete. The Jesuits' Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Edifying and Curious Letters), and especially the great work by one of their members, Fr Du Halde, Description de la Chine (Description of China), 1735, contribute to the advance of knowledge, and the number of works on China and Japan grows constantly over the century, as can be seen in the tables of two periodicals, the Année and the Mémoires de Trévoux, which give a wide circulation to summaries of these texts. Here is a significant continuity in this mass of material, which often extends a type of thought dating back to the previous century. What is at stake in treating the subject changes, however, in the eighteenth century. The Far East is no longer the prerogative of erudite circles but is used to provide an entire society with a critical scrutiny of Western institutions. In a sense, this tendency contributes to masking Asian realities rather than unveiling them. Montesquieu's Persian becomes Chinese for Voltaire (and later Indian). De la gloire, ou Entretien avec un Chinois (Of Glory, or A Conversation with a Chinaman), 1741, invites the French to relativize their ideas on civilization, religion and history, while the Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary) uses the Chinese to criticize the Catholic religion. Later, Ange Goudar's L'Espion chinois (The Chinese Spy), 1773, is written in the same critical vein: inspired by Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Goldsmith's Chinese Letters, 1762, it represents a violent attack on Western society, its political régime and social organization. In the area of political or religious reflection, the Chinese world often seems like an almost Utopian model, heightening the denunciation of Europe as corrupt and in thrall to absurd traditions. The Far East, if it is used above all in the context of largely religious and historical thought, also provides the matter to re-examine all of Western art over the century: literature, theatre, music, painting, gardens. Some examples will be studied, notably in the press, the theatre and the novel, with the aim of identifying the stereotypes present in these texts and of determining whether literature looks as favorably on the Orient as does philosophy.