Abstract
As eighteenth-century Europeans looked to the Orient to debate the relative merits of Eastern and Western civilizations, they also looked across the Atlantic to consider the benefits and drawbacks of civilization itself, as weighed against the charms of a simpler, more primitive existence in harmony with an idealized Nature. The figure of the “noble savage” was increasingly invoked in these debates as a sort of discursive experiment, an effort to discover what Man would be in the absence of societal and cultural constraints. Cultural critics from Montaigne to Lahontan to Rousseau invoked the example of indigenous American peoples to condemn tyranny, religious persecution, social inequality, and artificial, alienating culture in Europe itself. While the Chinese mandarin had been the symbol most convenient for the advocates of enlightened despotism, the noble savage came to represent egalitarianism and a sort of romantic anarchy.
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Notes
Michel de Montaigne, “Des Cannibales” [1580] in Essais, ed. Charles Louandre (Paris: Charpentier, 1862), 1:307.
Alain Beaulieu, “Introduction,” Réal Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu, eds., Lahontan: Oeuvres complètes (Montreal: Presses Universitaires de Montreal, 1990), 91.
For a more thorough analysis of Lahontan’s life and work, and the political and intellectual motives behind his construction of the noble savage, see David Allen Harvey, “The Noble Savage and the Savage Noble: Philosophy and Ethnography in the Voyages of the Baron de Lahontan,” French Colonial History 11 (2010), 161–191.
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 582.
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 7.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality” [1755], in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. Masters (Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1964), 93.
Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1965);
Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
For critiques of the common association of Rousseau with the idea of the noble savage, see Giuliano Gliozzi, “Rousseau: Mythe du bon sauvage ou critique du mythe des origines?” in Primitivisme et mythes des origines dans la France des Lumières, 1680–1820, ed., Chantal Grell and Christian Michel, (Paris : Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1989), 193–203; and Ellingson, The Myth, xiii–xvi.
Cited in Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762; repr., Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1963).
For a more extensive discussion of the religious roots of Lafitau’s anthropology, see David Allen Harvey, “Living Antiquity: Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages amériquains and the Religious Roots of the Enlightenment Science of Man.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 36 (2008), 75–92;
as well as Andreas Motsch, Lafitau et l’emergence du discours ethnographique (Sillery, PQ: Septentrion, 2001).
William N. Fenton, “J. F. Lafitau, Precursor of Scientific Anthropology,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 25:2 (1969), 173–187;
and Mary E. Fleming Mathur, “The Iroquois in Ethnography… A Time-Space Concept,” The Indian Historian 2:3 (1969), 12–18.
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 24.
Voltaire , Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756; repr., Paris: Gamier Frères, 1963), 1:30.
On this point, see Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
For more information on the La Condamine expedition, see Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale, depuis la côte de la Mer du Sud, jusqu’aux Côtes de Brésil et de la Guyane (1745; repr., Maastricht: Dugour & Roux, 1778); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World : Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
and Roger Mercier, “Les Français en Amérique du Sud dans le XVIIIe siècle : La Mission de l’Académie des Sciences, 1735–1745,” Revue Française d’OutreMer 56:205 (September 1969), 327–374.
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, “Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique commencée en l’année 1756, le 15 mars,” in Bougainville, Ecrits sur le Canada : Mémoires, journal, lettres (Sillery, PQ: Septentrion, 2003), 137.
Denis Diderot, letter of November 2, 1760 to Sophie Volland, in Diderot, ed. Laurent Versini, Diderot. Tome V: Correspondance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 303.
For Diderot’s contribution to the essay that launched Rousseau’s notoriety, see Raymond Trousson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Taillandier, 2003), 210–211.
Cited in Jacques Roger, Buffon (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 400.
Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 55.
Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 299.
Roger Mercier, “L’Amérique dans l’Histoire des Deux Indes de Raynal,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 65:3 (1978), 316.
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© 2012 David Allen Harvey
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Harvey, D.A. (2012). The New World and the Noble Savage. In: The French Enlightenment and Its Others. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002549_4
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