Nicholas Dew - Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford Historical Monographs) (2009) PDF
Nicholas Dew - Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford Historical Monographs) (2009) PDF
Nicholas Dew - Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford Historical Monographs) (2009) PDF
OXF O R D H I S TO R I C A L M O N O G R A PH S
Editors
p. clavin r. j. w. evans
l. goldman j. robertson r. service
p. a. slack b. ward-perkins
j. l. watts
Orientalism in Louis
XIV’s France
NICHOL AS DEW
1
1
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Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France / Nicholas Dew.
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ISBN 978–0–19–923484–4 (acid-free paper) 1. Orientalism—France—History—17th century.
2. Middle East—Study and teaching—France—History—17th century. 3. Asia—Study and
teaching—France—History—17th century. 4. France—Intellectual life—17th century. 5. Herbelot,
Barthélemy d’, 1625–1695. 6. Thévenot, Melchisédec, 1620–1692. 7. Bernier, François, 1620–1688.
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For my parents and my brothers
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Note on Conventions xiii
List of Abbreviations xiv
Bibliography 245
Index 291
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Acknowledgements
This book was researched and written in a variety of locations, and over
a long period of time, and it is a pleasure to be able, at last, to record my
gratitude to the people and institutions who helped me along the way.
I am extremely grateful to the following institutions for their financial
support over the course of the project: the British Academy; St Hugh’s
College, Oxford; the Oxford-Paris Programme; the Zaharoff Fund; the
Society for the Study of French History; the Dr Günther Findel-Stiftung
and the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; St Catharine’s Col-
lege, Cambridge; the Leverhulme Trust; the British Academy, again;
the Huntington Library; and McGill University.
I would like to record my thanks to the staff of the following libraries,
in addition to all those mentioned in the bibliography: Magdalen’s
New Library; the Taylor Institution library; the Bodleian’s Upper
Reading Room; and the Médiathèque d’histoire des sciences at the
Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, La Villette. Suzanne Griffiths of
St Catharine’s College library helped me make use of the college’s
rare books. Stephen Ferguson, at Princeton, and Anke Hölzer, of the
Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, were both extremely helpful in their
responses to questions by email.
Early versions of this material were given as papers at numerous
venues, including the Edinburgh conference of the Society for the
Study of French History; the Luxury Project at Warwick University; the
University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the Cam-
bridge History and Philosophy of Science departmental seminar; the
USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; the Marco Institute
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville; and the Newberry Library, Chicago. My thanks to the organ-
izers and audiences on all those occasions for their comments. I am
grateful to Verso and E. J. Brill for allowing me to re-use sections of the
book that have already appeared in a different form elsewhere.
It remains for me to thank some of the many people who have
lent their support in countless ways, some of them over several years,
and others at specific moments. The project took shape in the con-
text of several overlapping reading groups at Oxford, among which
I must thank the early modern France group, run by Robin Briggs
x Acknowledgements
and David Parrott, which included Eric Nelson, Guy Rowlands, Phil
Grover, and Simon Hodson; the Enlightenment Workshop, run by
John Robertson and Laurence Brockliss; and the genuinely seminal
seminar, ‘History/Anthropology/Narrative’, run by John Nightingale
and Michael Gilsenan, which is where I first encountered Edward Said’s
Orientalism (among many other things). In Paris, I received advice
and help from Benoit and Corinne Lelong, Franck Achard, Véronique
Dubois, Marc Olivier, Natania Meeker, the late Bruno Neveu, Herbert
Schneider and his family, Audrey Provost, Filippo de Vivo, Déborah
Blocker, François Regourd, Stéphane Van Damme, Antonella Romano,
and Catherine Jami. At various times, I benefited from the support and
encouragement of John Robertson, David Harley, Sarah Knott, Scott
Mandelbrote, Eugenio Menegon, Cormac Newark, Tara Nummedal,
Mike Halvorson, Richard Drayton, Nick Wilding, Simon Werrett,
Lauren Kassell, Jenny Mander, Nick Hammond, Michèle Hannoosh,
Chris Prendergast, and J. B. Shank. Gerald Toomer, Sonja Brentjes,
David Lux, Florence Hsia, and Anne Goldgar all very generously
shared unpublished papers or research notes with me. Emanuele Senici
helped with Italian translations. Gottfried Hagen and Eleazar Birnbaum
answered my questions on Kātib Chelebi by email. Dan Carey, Moti
Feingold, Kapil Raj, Paul Nelles, Dhruv Raina, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Nancy
Siraisi, Alice Stroup, David Sturdy, Denise Spellberg, and Jim Watt
have all offered crucial references, offprints, and constructive criticism.
Pat and Ray Henson gave moral and material support over many years.
Ann Blair, Peter Burke, Neil Kenny, Simon Schaffer, Richard Serjeant-
son, and Sir Chris Bayly all gave me useful comments on several draft
chapters. I owe a special debt to Luce Giard, who acted as my first
mentor in Paris, and commented on an earlier version in its entirety.
Laurence Brockliss was the most forgiving of doctoral supervisors, and
has been unfailing in his support since then. In the final stages of the
book’s development, I have been extremely fortunate in being surroun-
ded by my colleagues and friends at McGill and the other Montreal
universities. With this project in particular, Laila Parsons and Michelle
Hartman have offered insight and encouragement at the final stages.
James Delbourgo has been a marvellous interlocutor, collaborator, and
friend, over several years. It has been a privilege working with him at
McGill, and I will miss our trips to Thomson House. Kate Desbarats,
François Furstenberg, and all our collaborators in Atlantic world history
have made me feel welcome in a second research field, and I look forward
to thanking them all properly in a future set of acknowledgements.
Acknowledgements xi
Such a list, though long, can not be complete, and I will surely have
forgotten some. Needless to say, despite all this help, the failings in what
follows remain mine. I owe a special kind of thanks to Karen Henson,
with whom I shared so much, over so much of the period that I was
working on this book.
My parents and my brothers have been patient and supportive over
the whole period of the book’s development, and I know how glad they
will be to see the finished thing in print. Since this is a book about
languages, and Asian travel, it seems especially apt to dedicate it to
Simon and Oliver. My nieces Eleanor and Isabelle arrived as the book
was being finished, and I look forward to reading bits of it to them soon.
N. D.
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Note on Conventions
Where there is a choice of name styles for a person, I use the form most
familiar in English, even at the risk of being inconsistent: Descartes
and not Cartesius, Erpenius not Van Erpe. For non-European proper
nouns, likewise, I have tried to use the more familiar form—Confucius
and not Kongzi, Abulfeda not Abū ’l-Fidā—except in contexts where it
is necessary to distinguish a figure as imagined by Europeans from the
historically real person. Given the lack of consistency in seventeenth-
century naming, I have followed, for French authors, the style used by
the Bibliothèque nationale de France. When citing primary sources, I
have not modernized spelling, and I have chosen to omit the accents
from capital letters in French. Chinese terms are romanized according
to the pinyin system, and Arabic names follow the style used by the US
Library of Congress and the Bodleian Library.
Unless otherwise stated, all dates are given in the New Style (with the
year beginning 1 January), and years are ad/ce.
All translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. I have tried
to convey the sense of the seventeenth-century language in modern
English, which has led inevitably to the loss of much of its period
colour. A particular difficulty when writing French history in English is
the question of whether, and how, to translate the often obscure names
of the posts and institutions of the ancien régime. This is both a matter
of style and of substance. Readers familiar with Louis XIV’s France
would find it jarring to find ‘l’abbé de Choisy’ translated as ‘the abbot
Choisy’, and it would be misleading to translate titles like conseiller
du roi as ‘the king’s counsellor’. I have therefore opted to retain the
original French titles as much as possible, even at the risk of burdening
English sentences with a large number of French terms. Definitions of
the French office titles can be found in Marcel Marion’s Dictionnaire
des institutions de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, or Lucien Bély’s
Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime.
List of Abbreviations
In the summer of 1709, with his translation of the Thousand and One
Nights about halfway finished, Antoine Galland made the following
entries in his diary:
Samedi ler de juin [1709]. L’après-disné le maronite Hanna me dit que trois
jours auparavant, c’est-à-dire le 30 du mois de mai, jour du S. Sacrement, en
voiant passer de la chambre où il estoit, vis-à-vis le port S. Michel, la procession
de Nostre-Dame, il avoit observé que le dessus du dais estoit couvert d’un
satin rouge, qui devoit avoir esté tiré d’une enseigne prise sur les Turcs ou sur
quelque vaisseau de Barbarie, en tems de guerre, qui apparemment avoit esté
porté à Nostre-Dame, où la profession de foi entière des Mahométans [estoit]
en grands caractères blancs, c’est-à-dire: La ela ella llah Mohammed rasoul llah.
‘Il n’y a pas d’autre Dieu que Dieu; Mahomet est son prophète’. Il en avoit
parlé ce jour-là à M. le chevalier Maunier, gentilhomme de M. le Cardinal
[de Noailles], afin qu’il en donnast avis à Son Eminence et que Son Eminence
donnast ordre que ce satin fust osté.
Jeudi 6 de juin. J’appris du maronite Hanna que, sur l’avis qu’il avoit donné, le
satin qui couvroit le dessus du dais de Nostre-Dame, qui sert aux processions du
S. Sacrement, avoit esté osté et bruslé, et qu’il y avoit quarante ans qu’il servoit.¹
[Saturday, 1 June [1709]. After lunch the Maronite Hanna told me that three
days ago, that is 30 May, a day of the Blessed Sacrament, he saw from the
window where he was, just opposite the Saint-Michel docks, a procession from
Notre-Dame going by. He noticed that the top of the canopy [covering the
host] was made from a red satin cloth, which must have come from an ensign
taken in war from the Turks or from some Barbary vessel, which had clearly
been brought to Notre-Dame, on which [was written] in large white characters
the entire Muslim profession of faith, that is: La ela ella llah Mohammed rasoul
llah. ‘There is no other God but God, Muhammad is his prophet.’ That very
day, he asked M. le chevalier Maunier, the Cardinal [Noailles]’s gentleman, to
inform His Eminence, so that His Eminence would have the satin taken away.
⁴ Preface to Les Orientales (1829), in Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, ed. P. Albouy (Paris,
1964), vol. 1, 580.
4 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
O R I E N TA L I S M B E F O R E E N L I G H T E N M E N T;
O R I E N TA L I S M B E F O R E E M PI R E
⁹ For useful overviews, see T. Todorov, Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la
diversité humaine (Paris, 1989); C. Fox, R. Porter, and R. Wokler, eds, Inventing Human
Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley, 1995).
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 7
not the dominant powers in this period in those areas. This is not to say
that the making of Orientalist knowledge in our period occurred in an
absence of power relations, but rather that the power relations in those
specific situations need to be studied on their own terms. We still lack
a model for thinking about the Orientalism of the pre-Enlightenment
period. My use of the term ‘baroque Orientalism’ is not intended as
anything other than a reminder that this Orientalism existed, that it was
of its time, but that we still have difficulty categorizing it.
The term ‘Orient’ and its cognates in modern English usage are archaic
terms which inevitably carry the freight of past meanings, many of them
politically charged; using the term historically also runs the risk of
conflating meanings from different periods. The ‘Orient’ was always,
of course, a floating signifier, with a wide range of referents, from the
Islamic world to East Asia. But it is retained here, and in what follows,
to reflect the French usage in the period. That range of reference is
important in itself. According to the official dictionary of the Académie
française (in the editions of 1694 and 1798), the term Orient in French
was properly used to refer to ‘Asia Major’, as distinct from the Levant
(Asia Minor), with the division placed at the river Jordan.¹⁰ However, in
seventeenth century usage, the term ‘Orient’ was frequently used for the
Levant, and ‘Oriental’ was a standard adjective to refer to Hebrew, Syriac,
Arabic, Persian, and Turkish books. Contemporary usage, however, was
never entirely stable, and the adjective ‘Oriental’ was capable of being
applied across the whole of the Asian continent. Crucially, the concepts
that seventeenth-century European readers associated with such a term
were not the same as those that were to become current in later periods,
particularly in the later eighteenth century, and nor was there a unified
concept of ‘the Orient’. Nonetheless, as we shall see, European scholars
from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment often asked a similar set of
questions, and used a similar conceptual tool-kit, when studying cultures
as diverse as Egypt and China. This was for intellectual reasons: with
universal history still framed by a biblical account of human origins and
diversity, harmonizing the unfamiliar with the familiar was necessary.
It is worth adding, of course, that not only were seventeenth-century
concepts of ‘the Orient’ not what they would be in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but nor were the later definitions available for
the terms ‘Europe’, or ‘the West’.¹¹
‘Orientalism’, ever since Edward Said’s groundbreaking and contro-
versial book appeared in 1978, has been a useful but ambiguous term: it
refers to the specialist work of ‘Orientalists’, scholars of the ‘Orient’; but
it also refers to the more general Western discourse on the Orient, which
over a long period shaped conventional European attitudes, and served
(at least some of the time) to justify the economic and political practices
of imperialism. One of Said’s points was that the specialist scholarship
influenced, and was influenced by, the broader field of discourse. Said
was primarily concerned with the period of British and French colonial
presence in Egypt, the Middle East, and India, beginning in the late
eighteenth century. For Said, arguably, the inaugural gesture of Orient-
alism—and the moment which best exemplifies his concept of it, as
authoritative knowledge produced by and for the colonial project—is
the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt of 1798.¹² Bonaparte’s scholarly
invasion can certainly be taken to represent a key stage in the institution-
alization of European Orientalism generally, and European knowledge
of Egypt in particular, and it mirrors parallel colonial developments in
other European scientific centres. In the years around 1800, as European
science reached new levels of global ambition (this was the age of Joseph
Banks and of Alexander von Humboldt), the connections between
imperialism and science were indeed becoming more intimate.¹³ What,
though, to make of the Orientalism of earlier periods, periods when
Europe’s relations with its various ‘Orients’—the Ottoman empire,
Safavid Persia, Mughal India, or Qing China—were entirely different,
and certainly not those of domination? An answer to this question is
what this study of scholarly Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France aims
to provide. An imbalance needs to be redressed both in the established
literature on the history of Orientalism, in which any period before the
late eighteenth century is usually given cursory or dismissive treatment,
and in our views of French cultural history, in which the ‘classical age’
¹¹ See A. Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union
(Cambridge, 2002).
¹² E. W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth, 1995
[1978]), specifically 22, 42–3, 80–8.
¹³ On the scholarly aspects of the expedition to Egypt, see M.-N. Bourguet, et al., eds,
L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée: Egypte, Morée, Algérie (Paris, 1997); Y. Laissus,
ed., Il y a 200 ans, les savants en Egypte (Paris, 1998); P. Bret, ed., L’expédition d’Egypte:
une entreprise des Lumières, 1798–1801 (Paris, 1999).
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 9
(Paris, 1971), 65–136. Gustave Lanson had given a course on the influence of the Orient
on the ‘esprit philosophique’ as early as 1907–8. For the age of Gibbon, see now
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4 (Cambridge, 2005).
¹⁷ See A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of
Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995); L. Daston, ‘The ideal and the reality of the
Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, 4 (1991), 367–86.
¹⁸ P. Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne: 1680–1715 (Paris, 1935), 3–29.
A new overview is provided by J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); for the sources, see P. M. Conlon,
Prélude au siècle des Lumières en France: répertoire chronologique de 1680 à 1715, 6 vols
(Geneva, 1970–5). For recent accounts of the role of travel in the early Enlightenment,
see J. Charnley, Pierre Bayle: Reader of Travel Literature (Bern, 1998), and D. Carey,
Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond
(Cambridge, 2006). For the Levant and European scholarship, see S. Brentjes, ‘The
interests of the Republic of Letters in the Middle East, 1550–1700’, Science in Context,
12 (1999), 435–68; A. Hamilton, et al., eds, The Republic of Letters and the Levant
(Leiden, 2005).
¹⁹ My approach borrows from the historical sociology of science; for a useful overview
of this literature see J. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the
History of Science (Cambridge, 1998); equally important are studies of scholarly practice,
such as H. Zedelmaier and M. Mulsow, eds, Die Pratiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen
Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2001); G. Pomata and N. Siraisi, eds, Historia: Empiricism and
Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005); P. H. Smith and B. Schmidt,
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 11
eds, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800
(Chicago, 2007); A. Blair, ‘Note taking as an art of transmission’, Critical Inquiry,
31 (2004), 85–107.
²⁰ For the seventeenth century, D. F. Lach and E. J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making
of Europe [‘vol. 3’:] A Century of Advance, 4 vols (Chicago, 1993). The earlier ‘volumes’
covered the sixteenth century: D. F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe [‘vol. 1’:] The
Century of Discovery, 2 vols (Chicago, 1965); [‘vol. 2’:] A Century of Wonder, 3 vols
(Chicago, 1970).
²¹ On the Turks, see for example C. D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought
and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris, 1941); for Persia, O. H. Bonnerot, La Perse dans la
littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle: de l’image au mythe (Paris, 1988). See also
M. Rodinson, La Fascination de l’Islam (Paris, 1982); T. Hentsch, L’Orient imaginaire: la
vision politique occidentale de l’est méditerranéen (Paris, 1988); A. Gunny, Images of Islam
in Eighteenth-Century Writings (London, 1996); D. Carnoy, Représentations de l’Islam
dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1998).
²² V. Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France (1640–1740)
(Paris, 1932); B. Guy, The French Image of China before and after Voltaire, SVEC, 21
(Geneva, 1963); D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Acommodation and the Origins of
Sinology, 2nd edn (Honolulu, 1989); F. C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits
and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago, forthcoming); D. Porter,
Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2001); L. M. Brockey,
Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
12 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
century seems to have cast the earlier period into obscurity.²³ The use
of Oriental themes in the French poetry or drama of the period has also
received increasing attention from literary scholars. Texts like Molière’s
Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Racine’s Bajazet, or some of La Fontaine’s
Fables, have recently been re-read as documenting France’s commercial
and diplomatic engagements with her Mediterranean neighbours.²⁴
Rather than trying to offer an overview, or confining itself to one
particular geographical area, this book is defined by the interests of the
scholarly community in Paris in the period. This allows for detailed
exploration of the activities of a group of scholars, examining their
ways of working, their institutional situations, and how the two were
related. This method has the advantage of bringing us, albeit by
another route, to the very problems that Said was concerned with: the
relationship between power and knowledge.²⁵ French representations
of Ottoman, Indian, or Chinese cultures were, after all, produced in
particular settings, and these settings need to be carefully mapped if
we are to understand the authority of Orientalist writings. Moreover,
those Europeans who produced texts about Asia were not hermetically
sealed from the culture they were writing about. Europeans describing
the Orient necessarily owed a great deal to the people they met on their
travels, or to people they were connected to only indirectly through
networks of communication. Colonial knowledge, as recent work has
emphasized, was the product of exchange, interaction, contingency, and
luck.²⁶ Given that even in the late seventeenth century, the Ottomans
were still the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean, and given
²³ See however Z. Bamboat, Les Voyageurs français dans l’Inde aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles
(Paris, 1933). For European accounts of India, see S. Murr, ‘Les conditions d’émergence
du discours sur l’Inde au siècle des Lumières’, Purusartha, 7 (1983), 233–84; and J.-P.
Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes,
1250–1625 (Cambridge, 2000).
²⁴ P. Martino, L’Orient dans la littérature française aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris,
1906); M. Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge, 2002); I. Martin
and R. Elbaz, eds, Jean Racine et l’Orient (Tübingen, 2003). On Molière see M. Hossain,
‘The chevalier d’Arvieux and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’, Seventeenth-Century French
Studies, 12 (1990), 76–88; M. Couvreur, ‘Notes sur Alexandre Lainez: ses Relations du
Levant et leur influence hypothétique sur Molière’, XVIIe siècle, 167 (1990), 221–5. See
also DLF-17, art. ‘L’Orient’. I have not been able to consult I. B. McCabe, Orientalism
in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Regime (Oxford,
forthcoming).
²⁵ Said, Orientalism, 9–15.
²⁶ For example, C. A. Bayly highlights the dependence of British colonial government
upon Indian structures of communication: C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information:
Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge,
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 13
1996). See also Jasanoff, Edge of Empire; and K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science:
Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (Delhi, 2006).
²⁷ See Ogborn, Indian Ink; the power-balance of the Mediterranean is addressed in
D. Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002); cf. his
Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle, 1998).
14 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
O R I E N TA L S T U D I E S U N D E R LO U I S X I V
Galland and his peers were ‘Orientalists’, and members of the seven-
teenth century Republic of Letters. Their interests, and their methods
of working, overlapped to a large extent with that of the scholarly com-
munity as a whole. So it will not be possible to locate the institutions
that supported Oriental learning without reference to the more general
framework of the Republic of Letters. Far from being an empty label,
the term is a useful way of designating the collective of scholars scattered
across Europe in a diversity of disciplines and institutions, and seeking
social legitimation through patronage.³³
The ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV (1661–1715) marked a new stage
in the evolution of institutions of learning, with the establishment in
France of several new royal academies. What is distinctive about the
period of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s ministerial pre-eminence (c.1661–83)
is the increasing royal involvement in the Republic of Letters, which
was closely connected to the energetic construction of royal ideology.
Humanist conventions still structured the relationship between prince
and savant. For example, when Pierre Nicole wrote his preamble to
Pascal’s Discours sur la condition des Grands, he recorded that Pascal
³⁴ Nicole, preamble to Pascal, ‘Discours sur la condition des grands’, first published
in Nicole, Traité de l’éducation d’un prince (Paris, 1670); in Pascal, Œuvres complètes,
ed. L. Brunschvicg, et al. (Paris, 1904–14), vol. 9, 369: ‘une des choses sur lesquelles
feu M. Pascal avoit plus de vues étoit l’instruction d’un prince . . . On lui a souvent ouï
dire qu’il n’y avoit rien à quoi il désirât plus de contribuer s’il y étoit engagé, et qu’il
sacrifieroit volontiers sa vie pour une chose si importante.’
³⁵ [P.] A. Floquet, Bossuet précepteur du Dauphin fils de Louis XIV et évêque à la
cour (1670–1682) (Paris, 1864); on Huet, see A. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of
Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY,
2007).
³⁶ See A. Grafton, ‘Humanism and political theory’, in The Cambridge History of
Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991),
9–29; Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. L. Jardine (Cambridge, 1997);
R. Halévi, ed., Le Savoir du prince: du Moyen-Age aux Lumières (Paris, 2002).
³⁷ For an example of the ‘institutio principis’ in this period, see J.-B. Bossuet, Politics
Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, trans. and ed. P. Riley (Cambridge, 1990),
103–66 (book 5). See M. de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire (Paris, 1975), 162–4.
18 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
and do so on a scale larger than his most wealthy subjects.³⁸ From the
1660s onwards, Louis XIV demonstrated his magnificence by means of
increasingly organized cultural patronage. The production of scholarly
work in late seventeenth-century France was no exception, and became
increasingly involved in the ‘fabrication of Louis XIV’. Colbert’s role
in the royal patronage of lettres was crucial, and requires exploration in
further detail.
In September 1683, the French Huguenot scholar Henri Justel wrote
to an English friend with the news that Colbert was on his deathbed:
Jay appris de mes dernieres lettres auec bien du deplaisir la maladie de Monsieur
Colbert dont on desespere. La Republique des lettres perdroit beaucoup parce
quil aime quil protege et quil faut gratifier tous ceux qui trauaillent et qui se
donnent a lestude. Comme ie luy ai de lobliga[ti]on en mon particulier, ie
ressens le malheur auec douleur. Si no[us] le perdons l’Academie des arts ne
subsistera pas longtemps parce que le Roy ne se soucie pas dexperimens ny
dastronomie. Il prefere les soldats aux Astronomes.³⁹
[I have learned from my latest letters, with much displeasure, of the illness of
M. Colbert, for whom there is little hope. The Republic of Letters will lose a
great deal, because he loves to protect, and to gratify all those who work and
who give themselves to study. As I am obliged to him myself, this misfortune
brings me pain. If we lose him, the Academy of Arts will not last long, because
the king does not care for experiments nor for astronomy. He prefers soldiers
to astronomers.]
Even within his lifetime, clearly, Colbert had acquired a great reputation
as a patron of the ‘République des Lettres’. Although Justel admits that
his feelings are coloured by a sense of personal debt, we should not allow
that to discount the validity of his assessment. It is even more telling
that Justel expresses his concern that if Colbert died, the ‘Académie des
arts’ (clearly, from what follows, the Académie des sciences) will not
survive, because the king himself was more interested in war than in the
experimental natural philosophy.
Having served under Cardinal Mazarin in the 1650s, and profit-
ing from the fall of Nicolas Fouquet, Colbert began to accumulate
high offices from 1661, becoming Intendant des finances (1661), and
then acquiring in 1665 the posts of Contrôleur général des finances and
³⁸ See A. D. Fraser Jenkins, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’s patronage of architecture and the
theory of magnificence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970),
162–70.
³⁹ Henri Justel to Thomas Smith, 9 Sept. 1683, Bod. ms Smith 46, p. 323.
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 19
⁴⁰ The main source for Colbert’s patronage activity remains P. Clément, ed. Lettres,
instructions et mémoires de Colbert, 10 vols (Paris, 1861–82), vol. 5, 233–650. Useful
overviews of Colbert’s cultural policy include DLF-17, art. ‘Colbert’; and the exhibition
catalogue, Colbert 1619–1683 (Paris, 1983), 363–482.
⁴¹ J.-M. Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV
(Paris, 1981), esp. 23–40; P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992);
E. Pognon, ‘Une nouvelle séduction: les livres de fêtes et la propagande officielle’, in
[anon., ed.,] L’Art du livre à l’Imprimerie nationale: 5 siècles de typographie (Paris, 1973),
142–61.
⁴² ‘Liste de quelques gens de lettres français vivant en 1662’, in Opuscules critiques de
Chapelain, ed. A. C. Hunter (Paris, 1936), 341–64.
⁴³ G. Couton, ‘Effort publicitaire et organisation de la recherche: les gratifications
aux gens de lettres sous Louis XIV’, in [anon., ed.,] Le XVIIe siècle et la recherche
(Marseilles, 1977), 41–55; R. Maber, ‘Colbert and the scholars: Ménage, Huet and the
royal pensions of 1663’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 7 (1985), 106–14; J. Voss,
20 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁴⁹ See Collections de Louis XIV: dessins, albums, manuscrits (Paris, 1977); A. Schnapper,
‘The king of France as collector in the seventeenth century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 17 (1986), 185–202; Schnapper, Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du
XVIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1988–94).
⁵⁰ A. Jammes, ‘Louis XIV, sa bibliothèque, et le Cabinet du roi’, The Library, 5th
series, 20 (1965), 1–12; A. Sauvy, ‘L’illustration d’un règne: le Cabinet du roi et les
projets encyclopédiques de Colbert’, in anon., L’Art du livre à l’Imprimerie nationale,
102–27; M. Grivel, ‘Le Cabinet du roi’, Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale, 18 (1985),
36–57.
22 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
bring copies back for Colbert’s library.⁵¹ It was no accident that the
various assemblies of scholars that Colbert sponsored were to meet
either in his own library or in the neighbouring Bibliothèque du roi,
since the usefulness of the collection could only be realized if there were
scholars on hand to transform the documents into meaningful texts.
Beyond France, scholars were sent on missions to purchase both Greek
and ‘Oriental’ manuscripts, antiquities, coins, and Moroccan leather for
book-binding, in the markets of the eastern Mediterranean.⁵²
Colbert’s initiatives in the patronage of Oriental learning were largely
responsible for the growth of Parisian collections of Oriental texts, and
laid the foundations for French Oriental scholarship in the eighteenth
century. However, the emphasis on Colbert, and on royal patronage
of Oriental studies, should be qualified with a caveat. The king’s
intervention in the cultural sphere must not be thought of as all-
powerful: this would be to mistake the rhetoric of the royal cult for
the reality. Rather, the cultural life of late seventeenth-century France
continued to owe a great deal to the patronage of other figures, from
the great nobility (les grands, such as the Condé or Roannez families),⁵³
through royal intendants in the provinces, down to judicial office-
holders, like Gaulmin or Thévenot (whom we meet in Chapter 2).
Moreover, the crown’s patronage decisions were not made by Colbert
alone, but through the interaction of Colbert with his advisors (the likes
of Chapelain, Bourzeis, or the librarians Carcavi and Baluze), as well
as the king and others at court, such as Bossuet. The efficacy of crown
sponsorship of Orientalism should not be overstated, since, as we shall
see, the difficulties experienced by those trying to pursue Oriental studies,
whether they were sponsored by the crown or not, were immense.
⁵⁷ AN, AE BIII 265, pièce 59: letter from Armain, teacher at the ‘Chambre des enfants
de langues’, to an unidentified patron of one of the enfants, 5 Aug. 1756. He refers
to J. Golius, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Leiden, 1653); E. Castell, Lexicon Heptaglotton,
2 vols (London, 1669); F. Meninski, Thesaurus linguarum orientalium, 3 vols (Vienna,
1680).
⁵⁸ H. A. Omont, ‘Documents sur les Jeunes de Langues et l’imprimerie orientale à
Paris en 1719’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, 17 (1890),
99–112; G. Dupont-Ferrier, Les Jeunes de langues ou ‘Arméniens’ à Louis-le-Grand (Paris,
1923) and Les Jeunes de langue à Paris et à Constantinople (1762–96) (Paris, 1923);
[anon., ed.,] L’Orient des Provençaux dans l’histoire (Marseilles, 1982), 113–14, 205–6;
M. Degros, ‘Les Jeunes de Langues sous la Révolution et l’Empire’, Revue d’histoire
diplomatique, 98 (1984), 77–107; M. Hossain, ‘The employment and training of
interpreters in Arabic and Turkish under Louis XIV’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies,
[in 2 parts:] 14 (1992), 235–46; 15 (1993), 279–95; F. Hitzel, ed., Istanbul et les langues
orientales (Paris, 1997).
⁵⁹ On Arabic, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), 14–52; the standard history is J. W. Fück,
Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1955).
For France in the sixteenth century, J. Balagna, Arabe et humanisme dans la France des
derniers Valois (Paris, 1989). For Turkish and Persian see F. Richard, ‘Aux origines de la
connaissance de la langue persane en France’, Luqman, 3 (1986–7), 23–42; S. Yérasimos,
‘Le turc en Occident: la connaissance de la langue turque en Europe: XVe–XVIIe siècles’,
in M. Duchet, ed., L’Inscription des langues dans les relations de voyage (XVIe–XVIIIe
siècles) (Paris, 1992), 191–210. See also A. Hamilton and F. Richard, André Du Ryer:
Seventeenth-Century Orientalist and Diplomat (Oxford, 2003).
26 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
of professeurs royaux and the lecture courses they gave. From its found-
ation by François I in 1529, the Collège had embodied the humanist
commitment to the traditional three ancient languages: Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin. The two chairs in Hebrew had been established in 1531
and 1533. Even in the seventeenth century, the Collège royal was the
only secular institution in which Hebrew was taught. Larger Jesuit
colleges and Protestant academies taught Hebrew as part of theology
courses, although with varying degrees of thoroughness.⁶⁰ This associ-
ation may have made it seem natural that the Collège should also be the
home of other more specialized ‘Oriental’ languages. The first chair in
Arabic had been added in 1587 and a second around 1619. The first
Royal Professors of Arabic were holders of medical doctorates, whose
studies had led them to Arabic medical texts. It seems that after they
had acquired some skill in the language, they would often be given
diplomatic appointments. This was the case for the first professors,
Arnould de l’Isle and Etienne Hubert d’Orléans, who were both sent as
ambassadors to Morocco.⁶¹
Before this project had really got off the ground, though, Colbert
showed his willingness to provide patronage for young scholars of
Oriental languages. Since the existing institutions were somewhat ram-
shackle, it may have been easier to support promising young scholars
by means of direct payment. One example is provided by the case
of a young Provençal scholar named Louis Ferrand (whom we shall
encounter again in Chapter 2). We learn how he arrived at the centre
of French patronage from a letter from Francis Vernon (once again
informing us of Paris in 1671) to the Oxford Arabist, Edward Pococke.
A native of Toulon (born c.1645), Ferrand had profited from the ‘great
Concourse of Strangers, and particularly of Levantines’ there, making
friends with an Arab merchant who taught him Arabic. Ferrand’s family
sent him to Paris to study medicine, ‘but his own Genius irresist-
ibly carrie[d] him another Way, viz. to Oriental Studies’. As Vernon
goes on:
The main part of his time he spends in the King’s Library; where his great
Assiduity and eminent Parts have brought him acquainted with the learned
⁶² E. Pococke, The Theological Works of the Learned Dr. Pocock . . . To which is prefixed,
An Account of his Life and Writings, ed. L. Twells, 2 vols (London, 1740), vol. 1, 66–7,
here 67. This is Twells’s paraphrase of a letter of F. Vernon to E. Pococke, 12 Nov. 1671.
Ferrand had earlier written to Pococke to ask for references on Arab historians of the
Crusades.
⁶³ On Ferrand (c.1645–9), see DLF-17. He received a royal gratification for his
Annales regum Franciae et regum domus Othomanicae (Paris, 1670): J.-J. Guiffrey, ed.,
Comptes des Bâtiments du roi sous le règne de Louis XIV, 5 vols (Paris, 1881–1901), vol. 1,
col. 481. His later controversialist works were to provoke responses from Pierre Bayle:
E. Israels Perry, From Theology to History: French Religious Controversy and the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes ( The Hague, 1973), 16, 212.
28 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
de La Croix fils spent a total of ten years living in the Ottoman and
Persian empires. After three and half years in Aleppo he made the
long journey via Baghdad and the Persian Gulf to Shiraz and Isfahan,
where he settled for two years (1674–6), studying Persian. Then he
made his way back to Istanbul, where he stayed a further four years,
perfecting his languages and putting his skills at the service of the
French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, the marquis de Nointel.⁶⁴
Only then, in 1680, did he return to Paris, where he was probably
the most accomplished linguist in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (native
speakers aside). For the rest of his life he worked in the service of
the crown, receiving the charge of secrétaire-interprète to the navy in
1682. This appointment brought with it more travel, as a diplomatic
and military translator. Having already translated a Franco-Moroccan
treaty in 1681, Pétis de La Croix fils accompanied most of the French
embassies to the North African powers in the following decades. For
example, in the brutal attacks on Algiers of 1683–4, he followed
the French commanders, helping negotiate the truce with the Dey,
producing a Turkish translation of the treaty, and accompanying the
Algerian delegation back to Paris. He performed similar services for
Jean d’Estrées in the naval expedition to Tunis (1685), and again for
the duc de Mortemart’s treaty with Morocco (1687). These services
were rewarded in 1692 with one of the chairs in Arabic at the Collège
royal; three years later when his father died he inherited the charge of
secrétaire-interprète au roi. He continued to perform sterling diplomatic
services: when a French envoy was sent to Persia in 1708, one of the
king’s many gifts to the shah was the book of the Histoire métallique
of Louis XIV’s reign, translated into Persian by Pétis de La Croix.⁶⁵ In
addition to his work as an official interpreter, though, he also produced
scholarly books: he edited his father’s life-work, a history of Genghis
Khan compiled from Oriental sources, whilst his own translation of a
history of Tamerlane was left to his son to edit after his death. His
best-known work, however, was a collection of Persian stories, the Mille
⁶⁴ On Pétis de La Croix fils, see Goujet, Mémoire, vol. 3, 296–319; P. Sebag, ‘Sur
deux orientalistes français du XVIIe siècle: F. Pétis de La Croix et le sieur de la Croix’,
Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 25 (1978), 89–117; and C. Balaÿ,
‘François Pétis de La Croix et les Mille et un jours’, SVEC, 215 (1982), 9–43.
⁶⁵ BN ms fr. 7200 (P.-V. Michel, ‘Mémoire . . . sur le voyage qu’il a fait en Perse dans
les années 1706–9’), pp. 127–9; Arsenal ms 5493 (list of works of Pétis de La Croix),
ff. 75–6; Goujet, Mémoire, vol. 3, 314. On this episode see A. Kroell, Louis XIV, la Perse
et Mascate (Paris, 1977).
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 29
The study of the Bible was part of ‘positive theology’, that branch
of theology concerned with establishing the texts of the authoritative
tradition (the Bible, the Councils, the Fathers) and the facts of doctrinal
history. The seventeenth-century rise of historical erudition was closely
bound up, in France, with the Counter-Reform revival in positive
theology, which centred around the need to return to the sources
of Catholic tradition in order to define Catholic teaching and reject
the claims of Protestants. Even though positive theology was not a
large part of college theology courses, it was one of the dominant
areas of work for the scholarly religious houses—most famously the
Benedictine Maurists and the Jesuit Bollandists—who rivalled each
other to produce the most authoritative editions of saints’ lives or
the works of the Church Fathers.⁷⁷ In seventeenth-century France,
ecclesiastical erudition was also tied up with the Gallican cause, whereby
the rights and privileges of the French Catholic Church were defended
on historical grounds against the claims of the papacy. All of these
currents contributed to the emergence of a new critical history, with
new methods of source criticism, which was to have a lasting effect on
the way historical research was done.⁷⁸
The erudite collection of philological facts provides the background
for another Oriental project that received Colbert’s support: Antoine
Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s Perpétuité de la Foi. This was an attempt to
refute the Protestant claim that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist
was a medieval innovation by finding evidence that it had been held
by the early church. Curiously, and no doubt partly in response
was not the only function of the library, though. In official rhetoric, the
‘curiosity’ of the king was the trope that justified the appropriation of
objects or texts to be sent from the Levant to Paris. Collectors would
ask Colbert whether this or that object was judged ‘digne de la curiosité
du roi’—if it was, then the purchase would go ahead. This rather elastic
notion of ‘royal curiosity’—which it is tempting to translate as ‘public
interest’—was used by Colbert to fund a policy of acquisition designed
to make the royal library a centre for the advancement of learning. In
keeping with Colbert’s concern that the savants under royal patronage
pursue studies that might yield useful results, one area of interest was the
discovery of techniques in the mechanical arts. These might be found
either in Arabic treatises, or by learning from Oriental artisans. For
example, one of the manuscripts acquired by Jean Foy-Vaillant in 1669
was al-Jazari’s Kitab al-hiyal, or Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices,
a classic work in the tradition of Hero of Alexandria, which included
descriptions of how to construct automata.⁸² Alongside texts by Arabic
authors, seventeenth-century savants knew it was possible that the lost
parts of ancient Greek writings might be found in Arabic translations.⁸³
Colbert, in the ‘mémoires’ he sent to collecting agents like Galland,
emphasized the importance of looking for Arabic translations of ancient
mathematical works. The best known example from the period were
the missing books of Apollonius of Perga’s treatise on conic sections,
but there was always the hope that other lost works might turn up in
Ottoman bookshops.⁸⁴ As a ‘mémoire’ from Colbert noted, ‘a noted
traveller affirms that he has seen in the Levant the missing books of Livy,
of Apollonius of Perga, of Diophantus of Alexandria, and many others,
translated into Arabic. There are a large number of these manuscripts in
the famous library of the king of Morocco’ (‘un illustre voyageur a assuré
avoir veu dans le Levant les livres de Tite-Live qui nous manquent, ceux
d’Apollonius Pergæus, de Diophante Alexandrin, et quantité d’autres
traduits en arabe. Il y a quantité de ces manuscrits dans la célèbre
bibliothèque du roy de Maroc’).⁸⁵ The library of the king of Morocco
⁸² See Collections de Louis XIV, 216–17; R. Schaer, ed., Tous les savoirs du monde:
encyclopédies et bibliothèques, de Sumer au XXIe siècle (Paris, 1996), 314; Al-Jazari, The
Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, ed. D. R. Hill (Dordrecht, 1974).
⁸³ L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission
of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1991), 55–8, 255–6 (bibliography).
⁸⁴ On Apollonius, see Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 229–43, and below, Chapter 2.
⁸⁵ ‘Mémoire des observations que l’on peut faire dans les voyages de Levant, remis à
M. Galland, lors de son voyage, par M. Colbert’ [1679], in Omont, Missions, 203–7,
36 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
S C H O L A R LY L I V E S A N D L E T T E R S
here 204. Cf. 28: an almost identical instruction was sent to an earlier collecting agent,
Monceaux.
⁸⁶ Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 19–20 n. 28; cf. Oldenburg, vol. 1, 269.
⁸⁷ J. A. Clarke, ‘Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon: ‘‘moderator of the academies’’ and Royal
librarian’, French Historical Studies, 8 (1973), 213–35; Barret-Kriegel, Les Historiens et
la monarchie, vol. 3.
⁸⁸ F. Bléchet, ‘Les interprètes orientalistes de la Bibliothèque du roi’, in Hitzel,
Istanbul et les langues orientales, 89–102. The best known interpreter at the library in the
Bignon era was Arcadio Huang (1679–1716, in Paris 1711–16): see J. D. Spence, ‘The
Paris years of Arcadio Huang’, Granta, 32 (1990), 123–32.
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 37
⁹² Lettres de Jean Chapelain, ed. J.-P. Tamizey de Larroque, 2 vols (Paris, 1880–3):
vol. 1 covers 1632–40, vol. 2 covers 1659–74; cf. B. Peyrous, ‘L’œuvre d’éditeur
scientifique de Tamizey de Larroque’, Revue française d’histoire du livre, 76–7 (1992),
219–34.
⁹³ The ‘Sainte-Beuve’ ms (from which the years 1641 to 1658 are missing) is now
BN n. a. fr. 1885–9. On Chapelain, see G. Collas, Jean Chapelain: 1595–1674 (Paris,
1912, repr. Geneva, 1970); C. Jouhaud, ‘Sur le statut d’homme de lettres au XVIIe
siècle: la correspondance de Jean Chapelain (1595–1674)’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences
sociales, 49 (1994), 311–47; re-used in Jouhaud, Les Pouvoirs de la littérature, 97–150.
⁹⁴ See the editors’ introductions in Chapelain, Lettere inedite a corrispondenti italiani,
ed. P. Ciureanu (Genoa, 1964); and Chapelain, Soixante-dix-sept lettres inédites à Nicolas
Heinsius (1649–1658), ed. B. Bray ( The Hague, 1966).
Introduction: Baroque Orientalism 39
than astronomers (as Justel put it), but nevertheless the royal institu-
tions—the Bibliothèque du roi, the Académie royale des sciences, the
Collège royal, and so on—became centres of scholarly activity during
Louis’s personal rule. Eventually, this process of cultural appropriation
was to produce unforeseen results. The French travellers and Oriental
scholars of the Louis XIV period left behind texts that were read by
eighteenth-century philosophes and mined for ethnographic information.
Montesquieu—who as a young man talked to a Chinese interpreter at
the Bibliothèque du roi—was eventually to use his knowledge of China
to make criticisms of the French polity.⁹⁵
However, this should not give the impression that Oriental learning
was anything other than a marginal presence in early Enlightenment
thought. If we look at seventeenth-century libraries, Oriental manu-
scripts make up a small fraction of total holdings; if we look at the
production of books in print, then materials printed in Oriental lan-
guages are an almost negligible proportion of the total output, and
Oriental erudition without the use of ‘exotic’ type is not much larger.
Only in the case of travel accounts (written by Europeans) can it be said
that literature on Asia occupied a significant place in the seventeenth-
century market for books.⁹⁶ As the case studies that follow will illustrate,
it was difficult for those interested in Asia to get access to the sources, the
expertise, and the printing facilities that they desired; and the number
of people with the necessary linguistic skills was low. However, such
practical difficulties were not limited to Oriental researchers: as Adrian
Johns has recently shown, very similar problems were also faced by those
pursuing the new natural philosophy in Restoration England.⁹⁷
All the chapters below deal with the making of texts, each of which had
a rich reception history across the eighteenth century: the Bibliothèque
orientale of Barthélemy d’Herbelot; the Voyages of François Bernier; the
⁹⁵ Spence, ‘The Paris years’; E. Carcassonne, ‘La Chine dans l’Esprit des lois’, Revue
d’histoire littéraire de la France, 31 (1924), 193–205; A. H. Rowbotham, ‘China in the
Esprit des Lois: Montesquieu and Msgr Foucquet’, Comparative Literature, 2 (1950),
354–9; L. Desgraves, ‘Notes de Montesquieu sur la Chine’, Revue historique de Bordeaux
et du département de la Gironde, 7 (1958), 199–219; Montesquieu, ‘Geographica’,
Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Masson (Paris, 1950), vol. 2, 923–63.
⁹⁶ These generalizations are based on H.-J. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au
XVIIe siècle (1598–1701), 2 vols (Geneva, 1969); C. Jolly, ed., Histoire des bibliothèques
françaises, vol. 2: Les Bibliothèques sous l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789 (Paris, 1988);
R. Chartier and H.-J. Martin, eds, Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 2: Le Livre
triomphant: 1660–1830, 2nd edn (Paris, 1990).
⁹⁷ A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chica-
go, 1998).
40 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
This chapter is concerned with the place of Oriental learning within the
late seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. ‘Place’ is meant here in
several senses: geographic, institutional, and discursive. What were the
settings in which Oriental studies could be pursued? How did Oriental
scholarship fit in to the institutional structure of learning in the period?
How did Orientalist scholars shape their identity in order to legitimize
their pursuits and gain scholarly authority? These issues can be explored
by following the case of Barthélemy d’Herbelot (1625–95), the French
érudit known to posterity for a single, vast, posthumous publication,
his Bibliothèque orientale, first published in 1697.¹ D’Herbelot’s case
affords us an entry point into the sociology of scholarship in the
late seventeenth century. The chapter will reconstruct d’Herbelot’s
patronage career, focusing on an episode in the late 1660s. Until then,
d’Herbelot had been remarkably successful, reaching a peak in 1666
when he arrived at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando
II de’ Medici. It was then that attempts were made to bring him
back to Paris. Colbert, acting via his patronage-brokers Jean Chapelain
and François Charpentier, wanted to lure d’Herbelot back to Paris by
offering him a place in a new academy of Oriental languages, a promise
that proved impossible to make good. This abortive academy had been
a part of Colbert’s ill-fated scheme for a ‘grande académie’, a group of
academies which would cover the whole ‘encyclopedia’ of disciplines.
What the d’Herbelot case offers is an insight into the changing patterns
in the patronage of learning in the mid-1660s, and the institutional
politics surrounding oriental studies within those broader structures.
T H E ELOGE G E N R E A N D D ’ H E R B E LOT ’ S
T R A J E C TO RY
² Useful contexts for d’Herbelot’s experience in Florence can be drawn from: P. Find-
len, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
(Berkeley, 1994), esp. 346–92; M. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in
the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993); ‘Etiquette, interdependence, and sociability in
seventeenth-century science’, Critical Inquiry, 22 (1996), 193–238; Galileo’s Instruments
of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago, 2006), 21–75; and C. Callard, ‘Diogène
au service des princes: Antonio Magliabechi à la cour de Toscane (1633–1714)’, Histoire,
économie et société, 19 (2000), 85–103. More generally, see A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning:
Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995).
³ L. Cousin, ‘Eloge de Monsieur Dherbelot’, first published in Journal des Sçavans,
3 Jan. 1696; reprinted at head of B. d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, 1697), sigs.
u 2v –3r . C. Perrault, Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle avec
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 43
its own particular agenda, as is well known, because the work was a
part of the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, a celebration of the
Age of Louis XIV—as Perrault puts it in the preface to Les Hommes
illustres, the whole point of the book was to ‘to establish the thesis that
I have always maintained, that we have the good fortune to have been
born in the finest of ages’.⁴ Even though we are able to supplement the
éloge tradition by means of independent sources, these also need to be
handled with care.⁵
Since d’Herbelot’s only publication was posthumous, there is a stark
contrast between his image for posterity, as the author of the Bibliothèque
orientale, and his image whilst still alive. For his contemporaries, his repu-
tation could rest only on factors other than published writings—to some
degree, perhaps, on unpublished writings; and beyond that, on word of
mouth. D’Herbelot’s case shows, then, how a scholar could still ‘fashion’
himself with remarkable success without needing any contact with ‘print
culture’. Rather than using print to establish a reputation or to claim
priority over an invention, d’Herbelot built his ‘aura’ through polite
sociability in courtly settings. Before we move on to the events of the mid-
1660s, though, a brief account of d’Herbelot’s earlier career is necessary.
D’Herbelot’s scholarly career is inseparable from his itineraries across
the Alps: his work was shaped by the periods he spent in Rome and
Florence. Although born in Paris and educated there (and possibly in
Lyons), his interest in Hebrew studies led him to Italy: he travelled to
Rome in 1655, in the hope of meeting native speakers of Levantine
languages (then more common in Italy than Paris), and perhaps also
leurs portraits au naturel, 2 vols (Paris, 1696–1700), vol. 2, 71–2; C. Ancillon, Mémoires
concernant les vies et les ouvrages de plusieurs modernes célèbres dans la république des lettres
(Amsterdam, 1709), 134–47; C.-F. Lambert, Histoire littéraire du règne de Louis XIV,
3 vols (Paris, 1751), vol. 3, 106–9; C. P. Goujet, Mémoire historique et littéraire sur le
Collège royal de France (Paris, 1758), vol. 3, 433–2.
⁴ Perrault, Les Hommes illustres, vol. 1, sig. a 5r (‘establir la these que j’ay tou-
jours soustenüe, que nous avions le bonheur d’estre nez dans le plus beau de tous
les siecles’); see B. Bernard, ‘ ‘‘Les hommes illustres’’: Charles Perraults Kompendium
der 100 berühmtesten Männer des 17. Jahrhunderts als Reflex der Colbertschen Wis-
senschaftspolitik’, Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 18/2 (1991),
23–46.
⁵ Particularly useful on d’Herbelot are the notes of the discalced Augustinian Léonard
de Sainte-Catherine, at BN ms fr. 22582, ff. 187–91, summarized in B. Neveu,
Erudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1994), 57. Equally important
additions include: L. M. Heller, ‘Le testament olographe de Jean de Thévenot’, XVIIe
siècle, 167 (1990), 227–34; M. Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland: sa vie et son œuvre (Paris,
1964), 85–8, 163–5.
44 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁶ Jean [de] Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant [part 1] (Paris, 1664), 3–4
(‘le comble de ma ioye fut lors que luy mesme délibera de faire le voyage, ie me repûs
long-temps du bon-heur que i’esperois d’vne compagnie si auantageuse’); the English
translation is J. Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant, tr.
A. Lovell (London, 1687), 1–2. Thévenot has a long éloge of d’Herbelot at this point.
⁷ W. Henkel, ‘The polyglot printing-office of the Congregation’, in J. Metzler, ed.,
Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum, vol. 1/1 (Freiburg, 1971),
335–49.
⁸ See R. Jones, ‘The Medici Oriental press (Rome, 1584–1614) and the impact of
its Arabic publications on Northern Europe’, in G. A. Russell, ed., The ‘Arabick’ Interest
of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, 1994), 88–108. On
Oriental studies in Italy, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of
Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), 20–5.
⁹ On scholars in Rome at this time, see E. Cropper, G. Perini, and F. Solinas, eds,
Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 45
VII (Bologna, 1992); A. Grafton, ed., Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance
Culture (Washington and New Haven, 1993); and Findlen, Possessing Nature, 380–92.
¹⁰ On Kircher see J. E. Fletcher, ed., Athanasius Kircher und seine Beziehungen zum
gelehrten Europa seiner Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1988); P. Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The
Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York, 2004).
¹¹ According to the éloges, the queen ‘fut ravie du choix qu’on avoit fait d’un homme
si universellement savant, & par consequent si capable de l’entretenir selon son goût &
son genie’: Perrault, Les Hommes illustres, vol. 2, 71; copied in C. Ancillon, Mémoires,
135.
¹² S. Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle: The Transformation of
a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden, 1991), 103–21. The queen was
herself a keen Hebraist.
¹³ D’Herbelot to Kircher, Aix, 5 Dec. 1657, in Rome, Archivio della Pontificia
Università Gregoriana, 568, f. 24 (available via the Kircher Correspondence Project now
hosted by Stanford University Library). My thanks to Michael John Gorman for help
with this.
¹⁴ U.-V. Chatelain, Le Surintendant Fouquet: protecteur des lettres, des arts et des sciences
(Paris, 1905), 167–70, 176–9, 299–329; see also D. J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status:
The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), 53–8.
46 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
B E T W E E N T H E C O U RT A N D T H E AC A D E M Y
²⁰ Francis Richard has identified this as a collection that had been passed down
from the Florentine brothers Giambattista and Gerolamo Vecchietti, who amassed
the manuscripts in the Levant between 1584 and 1608: Richard, ‘Le dictionnaire de
d’Herbelot’, 82 n. 10; cf. his ‘Les manuscrits persans rapportés par les frères Vecchietti et
conservés aujourd’hui à la Bibliothèque nationale’, Studia iranica, 9 (1980), 291–300.
²¹ Perrault, Les Hommes illustres, vol. 2, 71.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 49
For Perrault, whose text is designed to celebrate Louis XIV (and who
was himself a Colbert client), it was natural that Colbert should be the
hero of the story, and that the humbling of the Tuscan ruler should be
implied. In fact things were rather different.
The learned community of Paris were very soon made aware of the
reception their compatriot had received in Florence. This is revealed
in the letters sent by Jean Chapelain to the abbé Giovanni-Filippo
Marucelli, who had been the Tuscan representative in Paris, and was
at this point back in Florence.²² Chapelain wrote to Marucelli in
November 1666 that:
Mr d’Herbelot, dont vous me parlés, est en son genre un des ornemens de ce
royaume et presque l’unique pour les langues orientales. S’il eust eu le corps
aussi bon que le cœur, il eust accompagné Mr [Jean] Thevenot en son voyage
de l’Orient le plus reculé par la grande passion qu’il a pour les choses etrangères
et éloignées de nostre connoissance, afin d’en faire part à l’Europe. Je n’ay pas
d’habitude avec luy, mais ses amis qui sont les miens ont obligé il y a plus de
trois mois Mr son frère à m’apporter voir ce qu’il luy avoit escrit de votre ville
et des honneurs et régales excessifs qu’il avoit eus et qu’il avoit encore de la
magnificence de S. A. S. et de Mgrs ses frères, aussi bien que de la civilité de
tout ce qu’il y a de grand et de considerable dans vostre Cour dont il se trouvoit
comblé et avec des ressentimens extremes. Mr de La Croix, interprète du Roy
en langue turque, m’a communiqué une pareille relation de luy. Ces lectures et
sa réputation m’ont fait prendre part à toute la gloire que sa bonne fortune luy
a fait obtenir chés vous et souhaiter qu’il paye par quelque service signalé un
accueil et un traittement si humain et si noble.²³
[M. d’Herbelot, of whom you were speaking, is, of his kind, one of the
ornaments of this kingdom, and almost unique for Oriental languages. If he
had been in better health he would have accompanied [Jean de] Thévenot on
his voyage to the distant Orient, such is his passion for bringing foreign and
exotic knowledge to Europe. I do not know him well, but over three months
ago the friends we have in common sent his brother to show me his letters
from [Florence], and [I read of ] the excessive honours that he had received,
and continues to receive, by the magnificence of his Highness and his brothers,
as well as the civilities with which he was showered from all the great and
considerable persons of your Court, leaving him much obliged. Mr de La
²² The relevant letters are in J. Chapelain, Lettere inedite a corrispondenti italiani, ed.
P. Ciureanu (Genoa, 1964); most of them are omitted or merely summarized in Tamizey
de Larroque’s edition (Chapelain, vol. 2).
²³ Chapelain to Marucelli, 5 Nov. 1666. For the full text, Lettere inedite, ed. Ciureanu,
37–40, here 39–40; partially in Chapelain, vol. 2, 488–9 n. 1; both use the copy at BN
ms n. a. fr. 1888, f. 243v. The letters from d’Herbelot appear to be lost.
50 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
Croix, interpreter to the King for Turkish, sent me a similar report. These
readings and his reputation made me aware of the extent of the glory that his
good fortune has acquired for him in Florence, and made me hope that he
repay, by some signal service, such a humane and noble welcome and treat-
ment.]
Here Chapelain’s description of d’Herbelot as ‘un des ornemens
de ce royaume’ is telling, given his increasingly conspicuous absence
from France. Clearly, the honour bestowed on d’Herbelot (‘honneurs
et régales excessifs’) by the grand duke engenders the desire to win
him back. At this stage, Chapelain acknowledges that d’Herbelot has
fallen on his feet, and claims to ‘share his glory’, but also hints that
d’Herbelot’s treatment raises the expectation of his performing some
‘signal service’.
Later the same month, Marucelli requested more information on
d’Herbelot. Chapelain delayed for a week, in the hope of being able to
ask Melchisédech Thévenot, but since the latter had been at his country
house in Issy all that time, Chapelain had to offer his own conjectures:
Ou[tr]e ce que je croy vous auoir mandé de sa naissance qui est entre les bonnes
de nos honnestes Citoyens, il paroist bien, par l’entreprise du voyage des Indes
sur sa bourse seule, qu’il doit estre personne accommodée et qu’il ne pouuoit
auoir ni dependance ni pretention en Europe lorsqu’il se mit en chemin pour le
faire. D’au[tr]e costé, la maladie qui le separa de son Camarade et qui l’arresta à
Liuourne oste le soupçon qu’il eust rompu son dessein pour en suyure quelque
a[ut]re dans la veüe de s’establir de deça. Joint que je n’ay ouy dire a personne
qu’il ait esté appellé pour l’employer dans le genre de lettres qui regarde la
Nauiga[ti]on ou qui pourroit regarder le commerce d’affaires avec les Princes
de l’Orient à quoy seulement il seroit vtile. Je conjecture de tout cela qu’il n’a
rien qui l’oblige à repasser les Monts que des interests domestiques, lesquels vne
fois reglés ne l’empescheroit pas apparemment d’entendre à des propositions
honnestes, et qui pourroient luy donner de plus grands establissemens que ceux
qu’il possède en son païs.²⁴
[Apart from what I think I sent you about his birth, which is from among the
better part of our respectable [honnestes] citizens, it appears that by undertaking
the voyage to the Indies from his own pocket, that he must be a person of
means, and that he could not have had any dependencies or claims in Europe
when he embarked. On the other hand, the illness which separated him from
²⁵ Chapelain to Marucelli, 6 June 1667, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 516 (‘Il ne faut pas
vous envier Mr d’Erbelot tant que vous le pourrés retenir, ses talens ayant rencontrés
chés vous tant d’applaudissement et des traittemens si favorables, et il faudra que nous
reprimions le desir que l’on a icy de son retour’).
52 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
dangled with a certain amount of vagueness, because in fact the plan was
still at an early stage—and was, in the end, destined to fall through. The
putative academy—which I will be calling ‘the Bourzeis group’—was
an academy of history proposed in 1666 by the abbé Bourzeis, as part
of Colbert’s plan for an encyclopedic ‘grande académie’. This proposal
needs to be examined in some detail at this point, before we return to
d’Herbelot’s story.
C O L B E RT, B O U R Z E I S , A N D T H E AC A D E M Y
O F O R I E N TA L L A N G UAG E S
²⁶ D. S. Lux, ‘Colbert’s plan for the Grande Académie: royal policy toward science,
1663–67’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 12 (1990), 177–88; see also his ‘The
reorganisation of science, 1450–1700’, in B. T. Moran, ed., Patronage and Institutions:
Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750 (Woodbridge,
1991), 185–94. See also H. Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth-Century
France (1620–1680) (Baltimore, 1934), 147–9; A. J. George, ‘The genesis of the
Académie des sciences’, Annals of Science, 3 (1938), 372–401, esp. 395–6; F. A. Yates,
The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947), 304–5; R. Hahn, The
Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley,
1971), 11–14, 52–3.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 53
²⁷ [B. de Fontenelle], Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (Paris, 1733), which
forms vols 1 and 2 of Histoire et Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences depuis
1666 jusqu’à 1699, 11 vols (Paris, 1729–33). This passage is vol. 1, 5–6 (‘une
Académie composée de tout ce qu’il y auroit de gens les plus habiles en toutes sortes
de littérature . . . les savans en Histoire, les Grammairiens, les Mathematiciens, les
Philosophes, les Poëtes, les Orateurs’).
²⁸ ‘Note de Charles Perrault à Colbert pour l’établissement d’une Académie Générale’,
in Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Colbert, ed. P. Clément (Paris, 1861–70), vol. 5,
512–13. Clément dated this note to 1666, but no more precisely than that.
²⁹ Chapelain to Dati, 12 Nov. 1666; cited in A. J. George, ‘A seventeenth-century
amateur of science: Jean Chapelain’, Annals of Science, 3 (1938), 217–36, here 235 n. 106
(this letter, one of six in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Fondo Baldovinetti,
258, is not in Tamizey de Larroque’s edition of the Chapelain letters).
54 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
Séguier died in 1672, the king was made its new protector, and its
meetings were moved to the Louvre.³⁰
What of the section for ‘history’? What was its intellectual remit,
which scholars were suggested as members, and why did it collapse?
In answering these questions, it becomes clear that this section of the
‘grande académie’ was identical with the ‘Bourzeis group’ mentioned
earlier, the same ‘academy’ that was being held out to lure d’Herbelot
back from Florence. To go back to Fontenelle’s account:
Ce projet [for the grande académie] n’eut point d’execution. D’abord on
retrancha du corps de cette grande Académie le membre qui appartenoit à
l’Histoire. On n’eut pas pû s’empêcher de tomber dans des questions, où les
faits deviennent trop importans et trop chatouilleux par la liaison inévitable
qu’ils ont avec le droit.³¹
[This project was not carried out. First the section for history was cut off. It
had proven impossible to avoid falling into questions where the facts became
too important and too delicate (literally ‘ticklish’) by the inevitable connection
they have with the law.]
Fontenelle’s explication, written much later, is frustratingly vague, and
nods to the traditional legal distinction between matters of fact and
matters of right (ius and factum) which was familiar to contemporaries,
not least because it was so common in theological wrangles. We can
compare other accounts, such as Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel’s Latin history
of the Academy, which Fontenelle drew upon. Du Hamel gives a fuller
description of the ‘grande académie’, fleshing out that of Fontenelle,
and explains why the history section was suppressed:
Cum enim historia & Ecclesiastica maximè cum Theologicis quæstionibus,
iisque imprimis quæ ad publicum Ecclesiæ regimen spectant, arctissimè con-
juncta videatur, atque ex iis quæ sunt facti, persæpe quæ juris sunt deducantur,
periculum erat ne ille doctorum hominum congressus quos minimè opus erat,
offenderet.³²
[Since history and church matters were seen as very closely connected with
theological questions, especially those which touched on church government,
and since from facts/deeds (facti), matters of law (juris) are very often drawn
out, there was a danger lest that assembly of learned men, by straying out of
their province, might offend.]
⁴³ ‘D’abord le sage Ophis avoit resolu de faire une Société universelle. Il joignit
ensemble des Physiciens, des Mathematiciens, des Historiens, & des personnes versées
dans les belles lettres’: Bacon, La Nouvelle Atlantide . . . Traduite en François, & continuée:
Avec des Reflexions sur l’institution & les occupations des Academies Françoise, des Sciences, &
des Inscriptions. Par M. R. [G.-B. Raguet] (Paris, 1702), 238. On Raguet (1668–1748),
see DLF-18.
⁴⁴ Bacon, trans. Raguet, La Nouvelle Atlantide, 241.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 59
de Théologiens celebres que l’on forma en 1667 dans la Bibliotheque du Roi,
pour examiner divers passages de l’Ecriture, sur tout ceux dont les libertins se
servent pour détruire l’autorité des Livres divins.⁴⁵
[[Colbert] made him the head of an assembly of men of letters which was
formed in his hôtel (known as the ‘petite académie’), and of another assembly
of famous theologians, formed in 1667 at the royal library to examine various
passages of scripture, especially those which were used by the libertines to
destroy the authority of the divine books.]
⁴⁷ On Ogier (1597–1670) see DLF-17, and Chapelain, ‘Liste’, 347; on his panegyric
for Louis XIV see Chapelain, vol. 2, 405, 408, 649.
⁴⁸ See Brown, Scientific Organizations, 147–9; Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institu-
tion, 11–14, 52–3; and Lux, ‘Colbert’s plan’, 185.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 61
D ’ H E R B E LOT I N F LO R E N C E
The fact that Justel told Huet in 1667 that d’Herbelot had been named
a member of the Bourzeis group (along with Le Capelain, Cotelier, Pétis
de La Croix père, and ‘Monsieur de Launay’) does not mean that he was
ever physically present when the group met. From the extant letters it
seems clear that d’Herbelot remained in Florence throughout the period
of the Bourzeis academy’s short existence. Fortunately three letters have
survived, between d’Herbelot and François Charpentier, which shed
some light on the negotiations. The original letter from Charpentier
to d’Herbelot is lost, and we take up the dialogue with a letter from
d’Herbelot dated from Florence, 3 September 1666:
J’ay appris par les lettres de Mr de la Croix et par celles de mon frere toutes
les bontéz que vous avéz eu pour moy pendant mon absence. Je vous prie bien
fort de croire que ie n’en ay pas esté moins touché pour auoir differé iusques a
present a vous en tesmoigner ma reconnoissance. L’exces de la grace que vous
m’auez fait aussy bien que celuy de la ioye que iay ressenty d’auoir rencontré un
si bon Patron et un si parfait amy ont de besoin de quelque temps pour me faire
reconnoistre moy mesme, et pour me donner lieu de vous remercier auec plus
de connoissance . . . en effet ie ne vois pas ce qui vous a pu porter a me rendre de
si bons offices puisque ie ne m’apparois point encores d’auoir acquis ny aupres
de vous ny aupres du public aucun caractere de service qui m’en rende digne,
mais vostre generosité Monsieur, vous a fait passer sur ces considerations . . . Je
ne refuseray point d’engagement qui me soit procuré de vostre main, et quoy
que l’eloignement m’ayant fait prendre des pensées de ne pas quitter si tost une
conioncture assez fauorable a ma fortune, vous ne trouuerez point neantmoins
en moy de resistance en tout ce que vous m’ordonnerez . . . ⁵⁰
[I have learned, from the letters of M. de La Croix and of my brother, of all
that you have done for me during my absence. Please believe that I have not
been less touched for having so long delayed telling you how grateful I am. The
excess of grace that you have done me, as well as the joy that I have felt for
having met such a good patron and perfect friend, have taken some time for me
to appreciate, and to lead me to thank you all the more mindfully . . . Indeed
I do not see what led you to carry out such good offices for me, because I do
not see myself as having acquired, neither with you, nor with the public, any
character of service which would make me worthy of them; but your generosity,
Sir, has led you to pass over these considerations . . . I would not refuse any
the plans in Paris, although secret, were ‘in the best possible state’.⁵³
These cryptic remarks make sense only in the context of the ongoing
negotiations to offer d’Herbelot some kind of royal patronage.
D’Herbelot replied to Charpentier in June 1667, almost a year after
his arrival in Florence, complaining that he still did not know what
Paris was offering as an alternative to his position in Florence. Even
Pétis de La Croix, who had told d’Herbelot about the establishment of
‘an academy’, and of his nomination to it, had not been able to explain
in enough detail what the new position might involve, and whether
it would be enough to warrant giving up the ‘considerable advantage’
that d’Herbelot enjoyed in Florence.⁵⁴ Here, for the first time, the
‘academy’ (the Bourzeis group) is mentioned. If the relevant letters from
Pétis de La Croix (père) to d’Herbelot had survived, we might know
more about Colbert’s scheme for the ‘grande académie’, and about the
Bourzeis group that was a part of it.⁵⁵ Clearly, the plans looked vague
from d’Herbelot’s point of view, and he sensed—correctly, as it turned
out—that it was not necessarily going to offer better conditions than
those he had found in Florence. Being a member of a putative new royal
academy in Paris was not enough.
The degree to which d’Herbelot was able to resist the call from Paris
has not always been appreciated, partly because the length of his absence
has not been known.⁵⁶ As we have seen, Chapelain was still sending
⁶³ Findlen, ‘Controlling the experiment: rhetoric, court patronage and the exper-
imental method of Francesco Redi’, History of Science, 31 (1993), 35–64; Findlen,
Possessing Nature, 394; The Letters of Jan Swammerdam to Melchisedec [sic] Thévenot,
trans. G. A. Lindeboom (Amsterdam, 1975), 72.
⁶⁴ Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, 36–54; P. Findlen, ‘The economy of scientific exchange
in early modern Italy’, in Moran, ed., Patronage and Institutions, 5–24. On the importance
of the manner of giving and receiving, see the satirical comments in La Bruyère, Les
Caractères, ‘De la cour’, section 45.
⁶⁵ Biagioli, works cited in note 2.
68 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
the collapse of the Bourzeis academy at the protest of the Paris theology
faculty—although of course d’Herbelot could not have known of this
at the time that he moved to Florence. Nevertheless, finding a place
within the private coterie of the Medici princes provided a haven for his
pursuits.
What did the Medici get out of d’Herbelot? Nothing, of course, on
the surface level: the whole point of a princely gift was that it should
appear to be freely given. But as Chapelain noted, d’Herbelot’s generous
treatment could only mean that he would have to perform some ‘signal
service’ in return. The usual way for d’Herbelot to pay his patrons
back would be to produce an impressive work of scholarship (or at
least an occasional poem) which could be dedicated to the prince and
spread his reputation as a friend of learning. This d’Herbelot did not
do. He did not publish any books in his lifetime. Instead, it seems that
d’Herbelot was able to ignore the call of ‘print culture’ by successfully
mastering the art of courtly conversation. One of the features of scientific
life in the coterie of Prince Leopoldo was the importance attached to
rhetorical skill and polite conversazione.⁶⁶ Perrault and Magliabecchi
concur that the Medici princes were impressed at Livorno by their
‘frequent conversations’ with d’Herbelot, ‘dont ils furent si satisfaits’. At
the Florentine court in the 1660s the fashion was for exotica, delights,
and marvels: a taste the naturalists Redi and Steno had to cater for. It
seems likely that d’Herbelot was able to present the fruit of his Oriental
reading in a suitably elegant fashion.
The best evidence of this comes from a letter from Lorenzo Magalotti.
Just after the arrival of the French scholar, he wrote that:
io no ho veduto, in dieci anni che sono a questo paese, capitarvi un uomo e
mantenervisi per qualche tempo con aura maggiore e più universale di quella
ch’egli acquistò a Livorno subito che fu noto alla Corte, che portò, e che
conserva, anzi accresce ogni giorno in Firenze.⁶⁷
[I have not seen, in ten years in this country, anyone arrive and stay for a while
with a greater or more universal reputation [aura] than the one he acquired in
Livorno as soon as he became known to the Court; one that he maintains, and
which even increases every day in Florence.]
⁶⁶ J. Tribby, ‘Of conversational dispositions and the Saggi’s proem’, in Cropper, et al.,
eds, Documentary Culture, 379–90.
⁶⁷ This and the following passages from Magalotti to Alessandro Segni, Florence
24 Aug. 1666, in L. Magalotti, Scritti di corte e di mondo, ed. E. Falqui (Rome, 1945),
275–6.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 69
inevitable that they should come to Paris. In fact, these two cases were
exceptional—perhaps even exceptions that prove the rule. It needed
generous payments to keep the likes of Cassini and Huygens in France.⁷⁵
Besides the famous cases like Bernini, Huygens, or Cassini, if we
turn to the years just before the d’Herbelot case, further examples can
be found of the tension between Paris and Florence caused by Louis
XIV’s cultural policy. When the system of royal ‘gratifications aux gens
de lettres’ was set up, the question of foreign scholars’ loyalties had
arisen. In order to justify the idea that scholars serving foreign rulers
could accept Louis XIV’s ‘gratifications’ (usually given in return for a
book dedication or a published panegyric), Chapelain argued that they
could accept them in their capacity as a man of letters (‘en qualité de
lettré’) rather than as a servant of their ruler. For example, Chapelain
told Nicholas Heinsius, the Dutch scholar:
Ces grands hommes qui gouvernent chés vous sçavent bien qu’il y en a deux
en vous, et que vous estes homme de lettres avant que d’estre homme d’Estat
et leur ministre. Ils n’ont garde d’interpreter mal les bonnes intentions de ce
grand prince; au contraire ils reputeront à honneur pour leur république que
Sa Majesté y cherche et y trouve des sujets de sa munificence en matière qui ne
regarde aucunement les affaires publiques.⁷⁶
[These great men who govern in your country know very well that there are
two [men] in you, and that you are a man of letters before being a man of state
and their minister. They have no need to misinterpret the good intentions of
this great prince; on the contrary, they should consider it an honour for their
republic that His Majesty searches and finds subjects for his munificence in
matters which do not touch in any way upon public affairs.]
⁷⁵ Cassini’s gratification (of 9,000 livres) was far higher than that of other gens de
lettres except Huygens; see J.-J. Guiffrey, ed., Comptes des Bâtiments du roi sous le règne de
Louis XIV, 5 vols (Paris, 1881–1901), passim.
⁷⁶ Chapelain to N. Heinsius, 21 Sept. 1663, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 327–8. Two years
later, Heinsius was forbidden by the Dutch Estates General to accept a subsequent
gratification (400–1 n. 3).
74 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁷⁷ Chapelain, vol. 2, 305, 328, 336, 344; Guiffrey, Comptes, vol. 1, col. 62; R. Pintard,
Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943), 112. For other
cultural ramifications of the clash with Alexander VII, see Burke, Fabrication of Louis
XIV, 64–5.
⁷⁸ Chapelain to Colbert, 8 Jan. 1664, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 344 (also Lettres . . . de
Colbert, vol. 5, 595): ‘cela avoit fait un grand bruit à Rome, au grand honneur du Roy et
au vostre, et que le Grand Duc n’auroit eu garde d’empescher ses sujets de profiter d’une
pareille faveur, si le Roy en avoit regardé aussi favorablement quelqu’un, connoissant que
cela tourneroit à la gloire de sa nation et à la sienne propre.’
⁷⁹ Chapelain to Colbert, 26 Mar. 1665, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 390–1 (‘pour la part que
le propre Grand-Duc et les princes, ses frères, y ont prises, se l’appliquant comme faitte
à eux-mesmes . . . en sorte que le nom de Sa Majesté et le vostre y sont en bénédiction’).
Much the same sentiments are expressed in two letters of Jan. 1666 (434, 436–7).
Viviani, recommended for his work on Apollonius of Perga (which Chapelain judged
better than that of Borelli), later proposed to send Louis XIV his biography, and a bust,
of Galileo (492 n. 1, 493, 530). Because the king could not accept the return gift, the
life was not published, and the bust decorated the palace Viviani had built with his
gratification money.
⁸⁰ Chapelain, vol. 2, 493: ‘il [Viviani] se trouve tout à coup avoir l’obligation d’en
estre deschargé [from his former duties] par son prince, à l’exemple de la magnanimité du
Roy’; likewise 436: the Holy Roman Emperor, hearing of the liberality of Louis towards
J. H. Boecler, ‘s’est piqué par émulation de luy en faire une pareille’.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 75
hand was the model of scholarly sociability within the personal space
of a royal or aristocratic patron. This model might be exemplified by
Prince Leopoldo’s dealings with the Accademia del Cimento, but no
doubt other examples could be used. Here an individual aristocrat (in
Leopoldo’s case, a prince of the ruling family, but not the ruler) with
a personal interest in ‘letters’ takes scholars into his private space, and
interacts with them on a personal level. The work of the assembly has to
follow the patron’s whims and the etiquette of courtly discourse (which
often includes a tendency not to publish), and the scholar is always prey
to common pitfalls of court life, the death of princes and the jealousy of
rivals (as d’Herbelot’s case shows). On the other hand, in the model of
the nascent academies, associated with Colbert, the monarch remains
distant from the activities of each academy, partly because of a lack
of interest on the part of his private person, and partly because of the
requirements of the sovereign’s dignity in his public persona. Crucially,
the king’s patronage is left in the hands of his minister, Colbert, whose
success depended on not repeating the mistakes of his predecessor
Fouquet. Whereas Fouquet’s style of patronage was comparable to that
of Prince Leopoldo, with scholars chosen to adorn his private sphere,
Colbert had to find new methods. Although in fact the academic model
was not fully realized until the beginning of the eighteenth century,
under the reforms of the abbé Bignon, Colbert’s innovations certainly
departed from the model of the princely coterie.⁸¹ It is worth noting,
though, that even when the abbé Bignon managed to re-establish the
Académie des inscriptions, along with the other academies, at the turn
of the new century, he had to order that they abstain ‘from writing
and speaking of things which relate to theology, to politics, and other
similar matters, which are not under the academy’s remit’, showing that
it was still necessary to mark disciplinary boundaries in much the same
way as in the 1660s.⁸² Rather than meeting in the private space of the
prince, the Paris model has the academicians meeting in a semi-public
space, the Bibliothèque du roi. The new royal institutions of the Colbert
era assumed a very ambiguous position within the existing institutional
landscape; and this ambiguous status brought them into conflict with the
D ’ H E R B E LOT I N PA R I S , 1 6 7 0 – 9 5
⁸³ On the Académie des inscriptions, see DLF-17, and DLF-18, arts. ‘Académie’;
B. Barret-Kriegel, Les Historiens et la monarchie, 4 vols (Paris, 1988), esp. vol. 2: La
Défaite de l’érudition and 3: Les Académies de l’histoire; C. Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle
et l’antiquité en France, 1680–1789, 2 vols, SVEC, 330–1 (Oxford, 1995); J. G. A.
Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1999), 137–68.
Barthélemy d’Herbelot and the Place of Oriental Learning 77
how much the French crown could offer him, d’Herbelot did enjoy
some royal patronage when he came back. Shortly after his return, in
January 1672, he was included in Colbert’s list of ‘gratifications aux
gens de lettres’ for the first time. He received payments of 1,500 livres
somewhat irregularly over the succeeding years, his award being listed
as ‘in consideration of his deep knowledge of Oriental languages, and of
the various works on which he is working’.⁸⁴ It may be that the works
he was preparing—of which only the Bibliothèque orientale was to see
print after he died—were intended by Colbert to be ‘royal’ productions.
Alternatively, these ‘travaux’ may refer to the work he did to help with
the cataloguing of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque du roi.⁸⁵
In the archives of the library we can read entries recording payments to
porters (crocheteurs) for carrying Oriental manuscripts back and forth
between the library and d’Herbelot’s home.⁸⁶
As an extension of the world of the Bibliothèque du roi, d’Herbelot
frequented the erudite circles around such figures as Bossuet and
Mabillon. He was part of Bossuet’s ‘petit concile’, a group of churchmen
and biblical scholars that the then bishop of Condom gathered in
the mid-1670s at his rooms at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, while he was
preceptor to the Dauphin. The aim was to discuss the text of the Bible,
with a view to producing commentaries. The group sat around a large
Bible (possibly the Paris Polyglot), each member commenting in turn
on the text. A synthesis of the comments would then be written in to
the margins. The meetings of Bossuet and his ‘rabbis’ were designed
to further the cause of Controversy: to allow the French Church to
meet the challenge of libertins and Protestants on their own ground.⁸⁷
In that sense, it seems clear that Bossuet’s ‘petit concile’ was concerned
with much the same issues as the academy Bourzeis proposed in the
mid-1660s.
Most of the scholars listed by Justel as nominees to the Bourzeis group
were to find themselves, in the later 1670s and 1680s, attending the
scholarly assemblies that met at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.⁸⁸
The Maurists did not restrict their learning to members of their own
religious community; within the orbit of Mabillon came other scholars,
including secular clergy and laymen. Within this group d’Herbelot
mixed with other scholars, like Du Cange, Cotelier, the abbé Eusèbe
Renaudot and Antoine Galland.⁸⁹ In a later chapter we shall discover
the ways in which the methods of the erudite community were to shape
d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. As well as visiting the assemblées and
conférences of other scholars and curieux, d’Herbelot ran meetings of
his own. Sometimes, these meetings were held at d’Herbelot’s own
lodgings, in the evenings after seven o’clock.⁹⁰ On some occasions he
was so overwhelmed with visitors that he had to lead them off to a coffee
house called Makara’s in the rue Mazarine. These meetings stopped
after d’Herbelot suffered a series of robberies.⁹¹
It was not until 1692 that d’Herbelot was appointed to a chair
at the Collège royal, largely through the intervention of the minister
Pontchartrain. D’Herbelot was actually made professor of Syriac, a
function which had until then been attached to the second of the
two chairs in Arabic. When Pierre d’Auvergne, the incumbent of the
second chair since 1652, died in 1692, François Pétis de La Croix
fils succeeded him, whilst the Syriac chair was set up as a separate
appointment, and given to d’Herbelot. Two sources record, however,
that d’Herbelot never made his inaugural lecture (or ‘harangue’), and
so did not formally take possession of the chair, or give any lectures.
Royal Professors often found themselves without an audience at this
C O N C LU S I O N
In one sense, of course, the writers of the éloges for d’Herbelot were
right. He did not stay in Florence; he did return to France; and he did
receive patronage within the royal institutions of learning. Furthermore,
after his death, d’Herbelot continued to be remembered as a part of the
French erudite community. However, as his experiences in Paris proved,
d’Herbelot was also right to refuse to come back to Paris in 1666: Paris
was not able to offer him all that he had found in Florence. The closest
he came to the French court was his participation in Bossuet’s ‘petit
John Locke kept abreast of the scholarly news from France through
the regular correspondence of Nicolas Toinard, an antiquarian and
biblical scholar from Orleans. In the summer of 1680, a mutual
friend added an enquiry of his own. This friend was Melchisédech
Thévenot (c.1622–92), whom Locke had met during his years in
France (1675–9). Thévenot explained that, while reading the English
travel collection Purchas his Pilgrimes, he had found a reference to
some papers of Richard Hakluyt’s that had not been printed; Purchas
seemed to imply that these texts deserved to be made public, and
Thévenot asked Locke to make enquiries as to where these manuscripts
might be. Thévenot was already a reasonably well-known collector,
who had published a four-volume travel compilation, the Relations
de divers voyages curieux.¹ He hoped that the missing Hakluyt papers
might be found and printed, both for the benefit of the ‘Public’, and
as a tribute to Hakluyt, to whom posterity would always be grateful
for having brought so many texts to light which would otherwise
be lost.²
¹ M. Thévenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages curieux, qui n’ont point esté publiées; ou
qui ont esté traduites d’Hacluyt, de Purchas, & d’autres Voyageurs Anglois, Hollandois, Por-
tugais, Allemands, Espagnols; et de quelques Persans, Arabes, et autres Auteurs Orientaux . . .,
4 vols, large quarto (Paris, 1663–72); augmented reissue in 2 vols (Paris, 1696). There
was also a supplementary volume in octavo: Recueil de voyages (Paris, 1681; reissued
1682).
² J. Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford, 1976–89), vol. 2,
229–30 ( Toinard to Locke, 14/24 August 1680): Thévenot writes, ‘Purchas en parle
comme de pieces qui meritent d’estre données au public[.] Il faudroit s’informer en
quelles mains peuvent estre tombes ces ecrits, et sauver ces ouvrages en faveur du Public
et d’un homme [i.e. Hakluyt] dont on se souviendra tousjours pour l’obligation que
nous luy avons de nous avoir sauvé beaucoup de bonnes choses. Il a sauvé des pieces et
82 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
des ouvrages de quelques uns de nos conquerans François[.] Je vouderois bien estre assez
heureux pour luy rendre la pareille et sauver de l’oubly . . . quelques-uns de ses ouvrages.’
Toinard (or Thoynard, 1628–1706) was an antiquarian and biblical scholar, and one of
Locke’s most diligent correspondents.
³ On the ‘culture of curiosity’, see, amongst others: K. Pomian, Collectionneurs,
amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1987), 61–80; P. Findlen,
Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
(Berkeley, 1994); L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750
(New York, 1998), 215–328; N. Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France
and Germany (Oxford, 2004), 160–308.
⁴ Toinard to Locke, 24 Sept. 1680, in Locke, Correspondence, vol. 2, 256: ‘Mr Tevenot
m’a autrefois dit que l’on estoit tres persuadé en Holande qu’un particulier avoit trouvé
il y a du tems ce secret important [i.e. of making seawater potable] avec lequel il est mort,
parceque la compagnie des Indes Orientales qui s’en est bien repentie, luy avoit refusé
dix mille écus qu’il demandoit pour le dire.’
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 83
⁵ On ‘secrets’ and the ‘arts’ in the scientific culture of the period, see W. Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
(Princeton, 1994); P. O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the
Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001).
⁶ H. Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth-Century France (1620–1680)
(Baltimore, 1934), 135–60; D. J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the
Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), 16–21.
⁷ Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford,
1975), 71 (I.iii.9), 87 (I.iv.8). Locke’s notes on Thévenot are Bod. ms Locke f. 2,
pp. 246–58. See G. D. Bonno, Les Relations intellectuelles de Locke avec la France
(Berkeley, 1955), 83–4, 168; J. Lough, ‘Locke’s reading during his stay in France
(1675–1679)’, The Library, 5th series, 8 (1953), 229–58, at 239–40. See also D. Carey,
‘Locke, travel literature, and the natural history of Man’, The Seventeenth Century, 11
(1996), 259–80.
⁸ M. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1971), 486;
H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier, eds, Histoire de l’édition française, 2nd edn (Paris,
1989–91), vol. 2, 24 (Beckford’s copy).
84 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
T H EV E N OT ’ S T R A J E C TO RY
⁹ For humanist precedents, see J. Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel,
1550–1800 (Amsterdam, 1995), 95–153.
¹⁰ For a modern summary, see C. S. Gillmor in DSB, vol. 13, 334–7. The éloge
tradition begins with the unsigned ‘Eloge’ in Journal des Sçavans, 20 (17 Nov. 1692),
646–9, by either Louis Cousin or Jean Gallois. This is largely repeated in Moreri, vol. 10,
138–9. See also P. Colomiès, Gallia Orientalis: sive Gallorum qui linguam Hebræam
vel alias Orientales excoluerunt Vitæ ( The Hague, 1665), 265–6; and Condorcet, ‘Liste
alphabétique des membres de l’ancienne Académie’, in Œuvres, ed. A. Condorcet
O’Connor and M. F. Arago (Paris, 1847), vol. 2, 91.
¹¹ Thévenot’s autobiographical fragment is presented in Bibliotheca Thevenotiana sive
Catalogus impressorum et manuscriptorum librorum bibliothecae viri clarissimi D. Melchise-
decis Thevenot (Paris, 1694), unmarked sig., 2r–3v. For Galland as its editor, see
Daniel Larroque to Leibniz, 14 Nov. 1693 (Leibniz, A, 1/9, 614). Galland worked for
Thévenot as a translator at the Bibliothèque du roi in the years 1688–91: M. Abdel-
Halim, Antoine Galland: sa vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1964), 82 n. 6, 85 n. 21, 165,
476.
¹² e.g. le P. Léonard’s notes, BN ms fr. 22583, ff. 34–5, summarized in B. Neveu,
Erudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1994), 55.
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 85
¹³ On the family, see BN ms fr. 29303 (pièces originales, vol. 2819), dossier 62724
(‘Thévenot à Paris’), items 22–31 for Melchisédech Thévenot, ‘conseiller du Roy en
ses conseils d’estat’. His father Jehan (d. before 1633) had been ‘conseiller du roi
en son Châtelet’ in Paris (AN, Minutier Central, CXII–249, XII–37, XII–41). His
middle name was presumably given after his maternal grandfather, Melchissédec Garnier
(d. 1637) who had been ‘avocat au parlement de Paris’ (AN, Minutier Central, XIV–26).
¹⁴ Chapelain, vol. 2, 616: Chapelain to J. F. Gronovius, 5 Feb. 1669. Chapelain says
of Thévenot: ‘Son application a ceste sorte d’estude est d’autant plus noble qu’elle n’a
rien de sordide et qu’au lieu d’y chercher autre interest que celuy de l’avantage du genre
humain, il y employe avec son temps la richesse qu’il a héritée de ses pères.’ His mother,
Marie Garnier, had died in 1661; he was the sole heir (see C. H. Boudhors, ‘Une amie
de Pascal? Marie Perriquet et sa sœur Geneviève’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,
[in 4 parts:] 35 (1928), 321–53, 481–94; 36 (1929), 1–17, 355–87, at 324 n. 6).
¹⁵ J. Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant, 3 vols (Paris, 1664–84); ‘stand-
ard’ edition, 5 vols (Paris, 1689), reprinted (Amsterdam, 1727); translations: Dutch
(Amsterdam, 1681–8), English (London, 1687), German (Frankfurt, 1693). See also
L. M. Heller, ‘Le testament olographe de Jean de Thévenot’, XVIIe siècle, 167 (1990),
227–34.
¹⁶ See A. Ecchellensis, Semita Sapientiae (Paris, 1646), sig. ã iv r (where Ecchellensis
has used Arabic, Persian and Turkish books ‘apud clarissimum iuuenem, & literarum
86 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
²⁶ ‘La trop grande vivacité qu’il [Pascal] avoit luy donna une si grande légèreté d’esprit
que, pour chercher à se convaincre de la religion, . . . il s’abandonna à tout ce que la
curiosité a de plus affreux pour évoquer le diable des enfers par ce qu’il y a de plus noir
dans la science des [h]ommes, et pour voir des esprits, étonné qu’il étoit du profond
silence qu’il trouvoit dans toutes les créatures sur la religion. Ce fut là son occupation
pendant les premières emportemens de l’âge, et il eut pour compagnon de son égarement
le chevalier de Méré, Miton, Tevenot et d’autres, dont il eut tant de honte dans la
suite’; R. Rapin, Mémoires . . . sur l’Eglise, la Société et la Cour, la Ville, et le Jansénisme,
ed. L. Aubineau, 3 vols (Lyons and Paris, 1865), vol. 1, 214–15 (cf. Sainte-Beuve,
Port-Royal, vol. 1, 911 n.).
²⁷ Brown, Scientific Organizations; R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit dans la première
moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943; repr. Geneva, 1983).
²⁸ Erica Harth portrays him as one of Colbert’s ‘mandarins’, which is misleading:
Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1983), 243–50.
²⁹ Various sources portray Thévenot’s retreat to Issy as a form of scholarly retirement.
See, for example, Chapelain to N. Steno, 27 May 1667, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 514:
‘Mr Thévenot s’est opiniastré, depuis dix-huit mois, à ne prendre point de maison à Paris
pour philosopher et spéculer, dit-il, avec plus de liberté à la campagne.’
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 89
T H EV E N OT ’ S ‘A S S E M B LY ’ A N D T H E C O L L E C T I O N
O F T H E A RTS
on the Académie des sciences has led historians to ‘reify’ the private
academies of the period, to imagine them as ‘scientific organizations’,
with a greater degree of programmatic coherence than the sources really
support. In many ways, the ‘assemblies’ that met chez Montmor and
Thévenot were social settings resembling the other clubs and salons of
the mid-century, and to some degree sharing participants and projects
with them. It is important to distinguish between two different, though
overlapping, roles that Thévenot played in Parisian scholarly life: on
the one hand, he acted the cabinet host who welcomed visitors and
held occasional ad hoc meetings at his home (whether in Paris or in
Issy) both before and after 1666;³⁵ and on the other, he held slightly
more formalized sessions of the Montmor group at his Paris home
between 1663 and 1665.³⁶ But in both cases, there was an overlap
between the audiences attending different groups or clubs, and there
was always a close relationship between the twin senses of the term
‘cabinet’—the physical space in which objects and books were housed
and displayed; and the group of scholars who came to meet in such
places.³⁷
Thévenot’s group is best remembered today for the activities of
its most celebrated members, Steno, Jan Swammerdam, and Christiaan
Huygens. Steno’s dissections in particular caused a stir—as witnessed by
the letters that André Graindorge sent to Pierre-Daniel Huet describing
the spectacular dexterity of the Dane.³⁸ Jan Swammerdam, the Dutch
microscopist, was also Thévenot’s protégé at the same time, and collected
insects on the hill of Meudon whilst staying with Thévenot in Issy. They
stayed in contact, and Thévenot was later to inherit Swammerdam’s
papers.³⁹ Huygens was a regular visitor to the Paris group from the
mid-1650s, and his letters are a major source for its activities, including
the attempts in Paris to replicate experiments with the air-pump.⁴⁰
The presence of such canonical figures as Huygens, Steno, and
Swammerdam (and the likes of Reinier de Graaf, Ole Borch, and
Bernard Frénicle de Bessy) has meant that Thévenot’s group is usually
conceived as being exclusively concerned with experimental natural
philosophy.⁴¹ However, like most contemporary scientific groups, the
Thévenot circle set itself a wide remit, which included the improve-
ment of navigation and the use of travellers to collect observations.
It seems Huygens conceived of this as akin to a Baconian natural
history.⁴² We find evidence of Thévenot’s continued commitment to
collecting ‘the arts’ in the letters he exchanged with Leibniz, who
had made Thévenot’s acquaintance in Paris in the 1670s. As well
as their diplomatic experiences, the two scholars shared an eclectic,
polyhistoric curiosity.⁴³ Thévenot was among Leibniz’s more vocifer-
ous supporters in Paris, offering to help bring any of his projects to
completion, ‘sur toute l’Enciclopedie’; Leibniz, for his part, tirelessly
commended Thévenot to other correspondents, saying that he was
the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1968), 155–70; B. Papasoli, ‘Il soggiorno Parigino di
Niccolò Stenone (1664–65)’, in [anon., ed.,] Niccolò Stenone 1638–1686: due giornate
di studio (Florence, 1988), 97–117.
³⁹ J. Nordström, ‘Swammerdamiana: excerpts from the Travel Journal of Olaus
Borrichius, and two letters from Jan Swammerdam to Thévenot’, Lychnos, 15 (1954–5),
21–65; G. A. Lindeboom, ed., The Letters of Jan Swammerdam to Melchisédech Thévenot
(Amsterdam, 1975), in which much of the editorial information on Thévenot is
inaccurate.
⁴⁰ Huygens, esp. vols 3–5; S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump:
Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985), 265–76.
⁴¹ Among those known to have attended are: Henri Justel; Jean Chapelain; Henri-
Louis Habert de Montmor; Adrien Auzout; Bernard Frénicle de Bessy; Thomas de
Martel; Samuel Fermat; Etienne d’Espagnet; Pierre Borel; Pierre Petit; Isaac Vossius;
Jacques Rohault; Pierre Alliot; Claude Clerselier; Géraud de Cordemoy; Claude Tardy;
Martin Fogel; Coenraad van Beuningen; Corfitz Braem; and Vincent Hotman.
⁴² In a note for Colbert attributed to Huygens (c.1666), Bacon is mentioned as
a model for the then nascent Académie des sciences: Huygens, vol. 6, 95–6; also in
Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Colbert, ed. P. Clément (Paris, 1861–70), vol. 5,
523–4.
⁴³ On Leibniz and ‘curiosity’, see R. Ariew, ‘Leibniz on the unicorn and various other
curiosities’, Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998), 267–88.
92 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
‘one of the most universal [men] that I know; nothing escapes his
curiosity’ (‘un des plus universels que je connoisse; rien n’échappe à sa
curiosité’).⁴⁴
What Leibniz seems to have admired in Thévenot’s work was his
desire to compile and then preserve in printed form knowledge that
might otherwise be lost. One of the aims of Thévenot’s group in the
early 1660s had been the recovery of forgotten inventions.⁴⁵ Leibniz
seems to have associated Thévenot with this sort of work, as he explains
in a letter of 1678 to Henri Justel, another prominent Paris savant
and a friend of Thévenot’s (Justel, too, hosted an ‘academy’, edited
a collection of travel accounts, and kept up correspondence with the
learned community abroad). For some time, there had been rumours
that Justel was working towards a ‘history of commodities’.⁴⁶ This
prompted from Leibniz a long rhapsody on how useful it would be to
have a modern version of the elder Pliny’s Historia naturalis:
car on trouve dans Pline une infinité d’observations sur l’origine des arts . . . Il
y a quantité de choses qui sans Pline seroient perdues. C’est pourquoy je
souhaiterois qu’une personne capable voulut laisser à la posterité un pourtrait
fidele de nostre temps; à l’egard des mœurs, coustumes, decouuertes, monnoyes,
commerce, arts & manufactures; luxe, depenses, vices, corruptions, maladies
qui regnent, et leur remedes. Il negligeroit ce qu’on peut apprendre de l’histoire,
et il ne s’attacheroit qu’à ce qui s’oublie, et merite neantmoins de n’estre pas
oublié, plus peutestre que ce qui se remarque ordinairement. Mais il faut pour
cela une personne d’experience, consommée en mille belles connoissances. En
un mot je ne connois presque que vous [Justel] et Mons. Tevenot capables de
le donner.⁴⁷
[for one finds in Pliny an infinity of observations on the origins of the
arts . . . There are a great many things which, without Pliny, would be lost.
⁴⁸ Like the extraction of purple dyes described in Pliny, Natural History, book 9,
chapter 133, or the accounts of minerals, mining, painting, and sculpture that occupy
books 33–7.
⁴⁹ For instance, in 1693, Leibniz was excited to hear a rumour that the abbé Bignon
was planning to found a royal academy of arts in Paris, which would be a sister to
the Académie des sciences. One of the initial projects for this academy was to compile
a history of the arts—the first instalment of which was to have been the history of
printing. However, the results were so unsatisfactory that the project was shelved. See
Leibniz to Bossuet, 29 Mar. 1693 (A, 1/9, 88; Bossuet, Correspondance, ed. C. Urbain and
E. Levesque, 15 vols (Paris, 1909–25), vol. 5, 339); D. Larroque to Leibniz, 14 Nov. 1693
(A, 1/9, 614). See also C. Salomon-Bayet, ‘Un préambule théorique à une Académie
des arts’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 23 (1970), 229–50; A. Stroup, ‘The political
theory and practice of technology under Louis XIV’, in B. T. Moran, ed., Patronage
and Institutions: Science, Technology and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750
(Woodbridge, 1991), 211–34. On the history of trades idea, see W. E. Houghton, Jr,
‘The History of Trades: its relation to seventeenth-century thought, as seen in Bacon,
Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 33–60.
94 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
to work towards the perfection of the Sciences and the Arts, and to
search comprehensively for everything that could be of some utility or
convenience to the human race, and particularly to France’ (‘Le dessein
de la Compagnie est de trauailler à la perfection des Sciences et des Arts,
et de rechercher generalement tout ce qui peut apporter de l’utilité ou de
la commodité au Genre humain et particulierem[en]t à la France’). The
document then lists various desiderata: experiments will be done, using
instruments where possible, to make new discoveries in the heavens and
the earth; dissections carried out, to improve medicine; new machines
will be invented; the secrets of craftsmen and inventors will be made
public, and proposed inventions will be tested; and ‘finally, we will
make every effort to disabuse the World of all the Vulgar Errors that
have passed for so long as truths, for want of having tried the necessary
experiments to prove them false’ (‘enfin, on s’estudiera à detromper le
Monde de toutes les Erreurs Vulgaires qui passent depuis si long temps
pour des veritez, faute d’auoir faict une fois les experiences necessaires
pour en decouurir la fausseté’). The aim of disabusing the vulgar of their
errors—another familiar theme—is balanced by an emphasis on the
mechanical Arts, and the need to acquire and publicize the knowledge
of artisans (‘les Ouuriers’).
All this provides the framework for the next item, concerning travel:
‘we will apply ourselves to finding the means to facilitate navigation,
to allow the growth of Commerce, and to create the opportunities for
discovering the marvels which are found in unknown countries’ (‘on
s’appliquera à rechercher les moyens de faciliter la nauigation pour
augmenter le Commerce et pour auoir les occasions de decouurir les
merueilles qui se rencontrent dans les pays inconnus’). Once again there
is a rhetoric of utility—a standard feature of such documents, often
written for the benefit of potential patrons. Discovering new worlds is
described as profitable to the state because of the new mines that will
be discovered. Still, as we will see, the aim of facilitating navigation,
in order to improve French commerce with the Indies, could be used
as a justification for several of the group’s activities. Moreover, the
‘Project’ notes that ‘whenever curious persons travel to, or live in,
foreign countries, they shall be given questionnaires [mémoires], and
they will be asked to examine . . . whatever is judged to be remarkable
both in Nature and in the Arts’ (‘dans toutes les occasions ou des
personnes curieuses voyageront ou resideront dans des pays estrangers,
on leur donnera des Memoires et on les priera d’examiner les Lieux ou
ils iront ce qu’on jugera y estre remarquable tant dans la Nature que
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 95
dans les arts.’) (In a later chapter we will discover how this proposal was
carried through in the case of François Bernier, then living in Northern
India.) As well as sending questions to ‘curious persons’ who just happen
to be in foreign parts for other reasons, the ‘Project’ takes the obvious
next step, by suggesting that ‘experts’ should be sent out with any long-
distance voyages, and ‘even in long-distance voyages we will attempt to
send out intelligent persons specifically to remark all that is curious in
the New Lands, as much in metals, animals, plants, as in Inventions and
Arts’ (‘et mesmes dans les grandes navigations l’on taschera d’envoyer
esprés des personnes jntelligentes pour remarquer tout ce qu’il y aura
de curieux dans les Terres nouuelles, tant dans les metaux, les animaux,
et les plantes, que dans les Jnventions des arts’). These expert emissaries
should endeavour to exchange technical knowledge with the people they
encounter, and in order to improve the terms of artisanal trade, they
should take suitable gifts:
Et pour cela l’on portera dans les pays policez les modeles ou les desseins des
Machines dont nous nous seruons icy, à fin s’ils ne les ont pas de leur en
apprendre l’usage de quelques unes et de troquer les autres, contre celles que
Nous n’avons pas, ou contre les secrets de leurs arts que nous ignorons, que
l’on auroit peut estre difficilement pour de l’argent, ou par d’autres voyes. L’on
envoyera aussi touttes les curiositez de l’optique, Dioptrique etc. de l’aimant etc.
pour s’jntroduire par ce moyen et de faire estimer, puis que l’on scait que c’a esté
par de semblables voyes que l’on a eu entrée dans de puissans Royaumes.⁵⁰
[And to that end, when visiting civilized countries (les pays policés), travellers
will carry models or diagrams of the machines which we use here, so that if
the foreigners do not have them, we can teach them how to use some of them,
and exchange some of them for those which we do not have, or for the secrets
of their arts which we do not know—something which perhaps would be
difficult to get by paying money, or by some other means. Also, we will send
out [with travellers] all the curiosities of optics, dioptrics, etc., of the magnet,
etc., so that the travellers can introduce ourselves by these means, and make
themselves esteemed, since we know that it was by such means that entry was
gained into some powerful kingdoms.]
It seems likely that this was an imitation of the Jesuit mission to China,
which, as the century went on, made increasing use of ornate instrument-
gifts to improve their position at the Chinese imperial court.⁵¹ The idea
⁵⁰ All quotations from ‘Project de la Compagnie des Sciences et des Arts’ (?1663), in
Huygens, vol. 4, 325–9.
⁵¹ On the Jesuits’ use of instruments as gifts, see F. C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange
Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago, forthcoming).
96 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
T H E C U R I O U S VOY AG E S
⁶⁹ There was at least one other French travel compilation before Thévenot: see
R. O. Lindsay, ‘Pierre Bergeron: a forgotten editor of French travel literature’, Terrae
Incognitae, 7 (1976), 31–8.
⁷⁰ A.-G. Camus, Mémoire sur la Collection des grands et petits voyages [des de Bry] et
sur la collection des voyages de Melchisedech Thévenot (Paris, 1802), 279–341, with an
introduction (279–85), a list of the contents (286–92), and notes on each item, including
summaries of what P.-D. Huet noted in his copy (293–341). See also ‘Description of the
collection of the voyages of Thévenot’, Contributions to a Catalogue of the Lenox Library,
3 (New York, 1879).
⁷¹ ‘C’est à [votre majesté] à rendre [le genre humain] plus riche, plus abondant, plus
sçauant, & mieux informé de tous les secours que les hommes peuuent tirer des Arts ou
de la Nature’, Thévenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages curieux, part 2 (Paris, 1664), sig.
ä ijr –iijr (‘Au Roy’). In the original edition, this came after the title page for part 2, but
in the 1696 reprint it is moved to the start of the whole work.
102 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁷² See G. J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade
(DeKalb, IL, 1996).
⁷³ Recueil de voyages (Paris, 1681).
⁷⁴ On the latter, see Z. Shalev, ‘Measurer of all things: John Greaves (1602–52), the
Great Pyramid, and early modern metrology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2002),
555–75.
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 103
⁸¹ For example, in the ‘Avis’ to the first part, Thévenot claimed that his collection
would be ‘autant-plus fidele & plus exacte, que ie la feray sur de meilleurs Originaux, &
sur la foy de Personnes choisies entre ceux qui les ont couruës & obseruées auec plus de
soin’; in the ‘Avis’ for the fourth part, he added ‘j’ay fait chercher dans les plus fameuses
Bibliotheques les pieces qui pouvoient l’enrichir, & il y a peu de gens de cette erudition
que je n’aye entretenus & consultez sur ce dessein’.
⁸² Girard Garnier is named as beneficiary in the privilèges for all four parts (though in
the first it is misprinted as Garnel). A ‘Mr Garnier’ is identified as Thévenot’s uncle in a
note attached to Thévenot’s letter to Colbert (BN ms Mélanges de Colbert 152, f. 271r,
discussed below), and also in Chapelain’s letters (e.g. vol. 2, 640). Girard Garnier seems
not to have been a libraire, though: he is not listed in either P. Renouard, Répertoire des
imprimeurs parisiens: libraires et fondeurs de caractères en exercice à Paris au XVIIe siècle
(Nogent-le-Roi, 1995), or J.-D. Mellot and E. Queval, Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires
(XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): état en 1995 (4000 notices) (Paris, 1997). Why Garnier held the
privilège, and not Thévenot, is unclear.
⁸³ On the privilège system, see L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L’Apparition du livre, 3rd
edn (Paris, 1999), 338–46. This form of ‘package’ privilège is described in E. Armstrong,
Before Copyright: The French Book-Privilege System, 1498–1526 (Cambridge, 1990),
131–6.
⁸⁴ For Boyle, see Oldenburg, vol. 2, 430 (Oldenburg to Boyle, 4 July 1665: ‘Monsr
Thevenot hath sent you the 2d Tome of his Curious Voyages in folio, fairely bound,
wherein are contained, as far as my cursory perusall could informe me, severall things
not unpleasing, and instructive both for Navigation, Policy, and Natural Philosophy,
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 105
them further: Bernard, for instance, sent one copy to Job Ludolf, the
Frankfurt-based scholar of Ethiopic.⁸⁵ The recipients, if they were in
the position to do so, could then send copies of their own books
in return: Robert Boyle made sure Thévenot, along with Huygens,
got a copy of his Observations and Experiments about the Saltness of
the Sea.⁸⁶
What these examples underline for us is that the Relations were
produced by collecting texts sent ‘in’ to Thévenot by various cor-
respondents, and then (once translated and printed) circulated back
‘out’ again through the same network. In order to produce the series
in Paris and Issy, Thévenot and his associates had to make other
people, in remote locations, work for them. This is just one example
of how the Republic of Letters functioned: by a continual mutual
exchange of services, sustaining its sense of communal identity through
cooperation.⁸⁷
Thévenot’s collection of ‘curious voyages’ can be counted as one
of his successful projects. However, as any encounter with the book
makes plain, its success in bringing the series of texts together in
print was somewhat qualified by the practical effects of the publication
process. Firstly, the fact that the voyages were printed as independent
fascicles meant that the collection as a whole was only a series of discrete
fragments. Unlike later travel compendia, the accounts are not organized
(either by geography or by date), nor is there an index for retrieving the
information. As a result, Thévenot’s volumes are difficult for readers to
use. Thévenot did publish lists of the contents of the series, but these
were probably designed to allow the owner of a copy to check that no
parts were missing. Each fascicle of the series was printed separately, as
we have seen, and could be distributed as if it were an individual book.
though most of it be but Traduction’) and 444 (Boyle’s reply: ‘I have now Receiv’d
Monsr Thevenot’s Booke of Voyages, where I find some few things Curious enough, &
however should find cause to be sensible of the Givers Civilitys’). For Bernard and Hyde
see Bod. ms Smith 8, pp. 3–5 ( Thévenot to Bernard, 1673) at p. 4b; Smith 11, p. 15
(Hyde to Thévenot, 24 June 1673).
⁸⁵ Bod. ms Smith 5, p. 151 (Ludolf to Bernard, thanking him for Thévenot’s edition
of Intorcetta’s text, no date); p. 153 (Ludolf to Bernard, 15 Dec. ? 1677, again thanking
him: ‘pro libro La science des Chinois dicto gratias tibi ago . . .’). Ludolf was also
in contact with Thévenot (here pp. 155, 157, letters of 20 Mar. 1678 and 31 Dec.
1683).
⁸⁶ Oldenburg, vol. 10, 419–24, at 422: J.-B. Du Hamel to Oldenburg, 6 Jan. 1674.
⁸⁷ For further examples see Goldgar, Impolite Learning; also Lux and Cook, ‘Closed
circles or open networks?’
106 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
The bookseller goes on to assert that the disorder within the series is
not to be ascribed to moral failings on Thévenot’s part—in particular,
that ‘jealousy’ typical of the curieux (even if, as we shall see, this might
have been protesting too much). It seems clear that the writer wanted
to distance Thévenot from the more negative associations of the culture
of curiosity. The fact that he was engaged in commerce littéraire with
so many other respected members of the Republic of Letters is offered
as proof of his seriousness. Nonetheless, the problem of order remains,
and is explained by referring to Thévenot’s constant deferral of bringing
the book to a close.
Thévenot’s collection is a composite text that seems constantly to
be in danger of collapsing. The difficulties surrounding the ordering
of the information presented are inseparable from the text’s material
composition. Adrian Johns has emphasized the degree to which the
familiar bibliographic categories that we take for granted as modern
readers (author, text, publisher, date) become unstable when we consider
the world of early modern print. If such problems of textual stability were
particularly acute, as Johns shows, in the case of natural-philosophical
publishing, the Thévenot case reminds us that this is equally true of
travel-editing enterprises.⁹⁰
T H EV E N OT A N D A BU L F E D A
⁹⁰ A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chica-
go, 1998).
108 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
contained. Although John Greaves had already called into question the
reliability and usefulness of the Taqwı̄m al-buldān before Thévenot and
his colleagues began their project, the Parisian scholars seem not to have
been aware of such doubts.⁹⁹
As we have seen (in the Introduction), seventeenth-century savants
were well aware of the possibility that lost, or imperfectly transmitted,
ancient Greek texts might be restored if they had survived in Arabic
versions. One of the most notable examples was the hunt for the
missing books of Apollonius of Perga’s treatise on conic sections (which
occupied many scholars, including Jacob Golius, Christian Ravius,
Edmund Halley, John Pell, Edward Bernard, Isaac Barrow; and in Italy,
Viviani, Borelli, and Abraham Ecchellensis). The Parisians had been
aware of the planned Ecchellensis–Borelli edition, and Thévenot had
even offered to help.¹⁰⁰ In Oxford in the 1670s, Bernard projected
a vast edition of the ancient mathematicians, which was to include
Apollonius.¹⁰¹ In the case of Apollonius’ Conics, the point was to
restore three missing books of an ancient Greek text by using an
Arabic translation. In the case of Abū ’l-Fidā’, what seems to have been
uppermost in the minds of Thévenot and his colleagues was the desire
to collect figures for longitude and latitude for cities in the East. In
the Parisians’ hunt for ‘Abulfeda’, the authority of the medieval Arabic
author is largely taken for granted (despite the unnoticed warnings from
Greaves), and the coordinate figures are treated as the best available data
for the location of cities which, after all, few European travellers had
visited. Indeed, the authority of ‘Abulfeda’—and changing attitudes to
it—is the most important element in the story. Whether ‘Abulfeda’ was
treated with respect because of an awareness of his canonic status within
the Arabic scientific tradition, or because of the recommendations of
sixteenth-century compilers like Ramusio, is difficult to judge; it might
be that the figures for longitude and latitude were thought of merely
as data to be used faute de mieux. There were other medieval Islamic
texts that were at least as (if not more) respected by the European
¹⁰² For the use of Ulugh Beg and al-Battān ı̄, see Mercier, ‘English Orientalists and
mathematical astronomy’, and Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 170, 249–50.
¹⁰³ This tension between observation and textual authority in matters of geographical
fact was normal: see for example J. Greaves, ‘An account of the latitude of Constantinople,
and Rhodes’, Philosophical Transactions, 15 (1685), 1295–1300, in which Greaves
compares modern observations with the reported figures in traditional authors, including
Abulfeda.
¹⁰⁴ For Beuningen’s other scientific activities see H. J. Cook, ‘The new philosophy
in the Low Countries’, in Porter and Teich, eds, The Scientific Revolution in National
Context, 115–49, at 133.
¹⁰⁵ Chapelain to Vossius, 23 Apr. 1665, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 393 (BN ms n. a.
fr. 1888, ff. 74r–75r).
112 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
nous en désirons, qui est la position des Villes par leurs degrés de Longitude et
de Latitude.¹⁰⁶
[He [Thévenot] looked through it in the presence of Mr Steno and myself. I do
not know any Arabic, and he barely knows any more than I. Nevertheless, by
some conjectures, he convinced himself that this manuscript is not Arabic, but
Persian—to his great displeasure, for this language is much less known among us
than the other. Which means it will be difficult to find someone to translate what
we want, which is the position of towns by degrees of longitude and latitude.]
The fact that Thévenot and his associates did not know what
the Ulugh Beg manuscript would contain seems more surprising
than the fact that they did not know that it would be in Persian
(since versions of Ulugh Beg exist in both Arabic and Persian),
although both are indicative of the rudimentary level of Oriental
learning among the group, especially since the astronomer-prince
of Samarkand was rather better known to the seventeenth-century
Republic of Letters than he is in Europe today.¹⁰⁷ To make up
for this lack of linguistic skill,¹⁰⁸ Thévenot needed to make use of
the local Oriental linguists Claude Hardi (a mathematician), Pierre
Vattier (Royal Professor of Arabic), and the magistrate Gilbert
Gaulmin. Gaulmin was one of the few people in the Paris learned
world with any claim to know Persian, and so Chapelain planned
to ask him to look at the Ulugh Beg. Unfortunately, Gaulmin
died later the same year (1665).¹⁰⁹ With competent local help
thin on the ground, the Thévenot group had to mobilize more distant
contacts, while making use of the few Arabic-speaking travellers
and diplomats available in Paris. As Justel wrote to Oldenburg (in
September 1667), ‘M. Thevenot has translated the Abulfeda from
Arabic into Latin. He has redone it with a gentleman from Marseilles
who understands perfectly that language’ (‘Monsieur Thevenot a
traduit l’Abulfida de l’arabe en latin. Il la remit avec un chevalier de
Marseille qui entend parfaitement bien ceste langue là’). This ‘chevalier
de Marseille’ was one of those whom Thévenot employed, the traveller
and diplomat Laurent d’Arvieux.¹¹⁰
As we have seen, the communication with distant scholars was made
possible by intermediaries, like the diplomat van Beuningen, but also
by Chapelain’s network of correspondence, which had a wide European
range because of the recently established system of royal ‘gratifications
aux gens de lettres’. The incentive of royal reward was not enough for
Jacob Golius, though. The great Dutch Orientalist seemed unwilling to
let the Parisians have access to his manuscript of Abulfeda. As Chapelain
complained:
Ça esté vne fascheuse rencontre que M. Golius se soit emparé d’un tel
Exemplaire puis qu’il en envie l’vsage à la Société . . . je pense qu’il seroit bon
d’obtenir des Curateurs de l’Academie de Leyde, qu’on pust copier celuy de
la Biblioteque publique par vn Armenien qui est là, et qui s’en aquiteroit
très bien. Mr Thevenot fourniroit l’argent dont on seroit conuenu auec le
copiste pour sa peine. Il faudroit faire faire par le mesme vne Copie des Tables
¹¹¹ Chapelain to Vossius, 12 March 1665, BN n. a. fr. 1888, f. 62r (in Chapelain,
vol. 2, 386 n. 3). It is possible that Chapelain’s reference to ‘la société’ refers to Thévenot’s
scientific group, but in the context it seems more likely that he is referring to the public
at large.
¹¹² Chapelain to Vossius, 5 Nov. 1666, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 490: ‘sa bourse [i.e.
Thévenot’s] s’y est opposée à son grand regret.’
¹¹³ On Vattier (1623–67), Royal Professor of Arabic from 1658, see ABF ; DLF-17 ;
Colomiès, Gallia orientalis, 229–30; and C.-P. Goujet, Mémoire historique et littéraire
sur le Collège royal de France (Paris, 1758), vol. 3, 291–4.
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 115
pour ce que de son execution depend vostre honneur et que c’est le seul moyen
que j’auray de vous maintenir dans les gratifications que je vous ay procurées
auprès du Roy par Mr Colbert. Disposés vous y donc sérieusement et me faites
sçavoir quand vous pensés venir commencer à mettre la main à l’œuvre.¹¹⁴
[To this end, you must meditate carefully on the subject matter, as you are
reading the Greek and Arabic texts, and note on a separate paper the things you
find worthy of consideration, to compose the articles of an Introduction, which
will serve to direct the reader, and which will make plain at the same time your
erudition and judgement. I give you this advice, because it is on your execution
of this task that your honour depends, and because this is the only means I will
have to keep you in the gratifications that I have procured for you from the
King and M. Colbert. So, take this advice seriously, and let me know when you
think you will begin work on this.]
Vattier did not reply for several months, and when he did, said that he
was not coming to Paris until March 1667. This seems to have annoyed
Chapelain, who threatened him (once again invoking Colbert):
vous estes professeur royal et obligé de faire vos leçons, si vous ne voulés perdre
vos gages, et peut estre vostre gratification. Vous n’ignorés pas la séverité du
Ministre qui ne paye qu’à ceux qui s’aquitent de leur devoir, et qui a des
surveillans pour se faire instruire de ce qui se passe dans vos escholes.
[you are a royal professor, and obliged to give your lessons, if you do not wish
to lose your wages, and perhaps your gratification. You are not unaware of the
severity of the Minister, who only pays those who carry out their duty, and who
has overseers to keep him informed of what happens in your schools.]¹¹⁵
Vattier’s argument that the other Royal Professors did no more work
than him was not an acceptable excuse, nor was the fact that Vattier
was ill. Chapelain’s attempt to make Vattier toe the line was to no avail,
however, since the illness proved fatal: Vattier died on 7 April 1667.
This situation, in which the death of an Orientalist could put the whole
project at risk, only underscores the rarity of Oriental linguistic skill in
1660s Paris.¹¹⁶
In addition to these problems keeping their allies in line, there
were tensions within the Paris group. It seems that Thévenot fell out
with Colbert’s librarian, the mathematician Pierre de Carcavi, over the
project. Late in 1668, Thévenot had left France for the United Provinces,
after a disagreement with Carcavi over ‘quelque livre Arabe’.¹¹⁷ Some
observers thought that Thévenot had been sent to the Netherlands
to try to acquire Oriental books for Paris, perhaps to make offers
on behalf of the Bibliothèque du roi for the books of Golius (who
had died in 1667).¹¹⁸ However, the main purpose of the visit was
to find a bookseller willing to publish the Abulfeda.¹¹⁹ This proved
to be the biggest stumbling block of all. Following the standard set
earlier in the century by the Dutch and English Orientalists, Thévenot
had the ambition of printing the text of the Taqwı̄m al-buldān in
the original Arabic. Printing in Arabic was extremely expensive and
difficult, though, because the equipment and personnel needed were so
rare. It was not just that typesetters able to compose Arabic were in short
supply. Earlier in the century, Arabic texts had been printed in Paris,
the last occasion being perhaps the most famous, Le Jay’s Polyglot Bible
of 1645.¹²⁰ Indeed, the set of Arabic type owned by the Imprimerie
royale—known as the ‘Savary de Brèves set’ after the diplomat who
had had it made—was deemed one of the finest in Europe. This set
of Arabic type had been in the care of Antoine Vitré, who had been
since 1630 ‘imprimeur et libraire ordinaire du roy pour les langues
orientales’, and had been involved in the printing of the Paris Polyglot.
By the late 1660s it was thought to be lost, and when Joseph de Guignes
rediscovered the set, in the late eighteenth century, he reckoned it had
been missing for over a hundred years.¹²¹ Scholars are still unable to
¹¹⁷ Huygens, vol. 6, 344 (C. Huygens to L. Huygens, from Paris, 11 Jan. 1669): ‘Ie
n’avois pas sceu que Monsieur Thevenot estoit allè en Hollande et il a tort de m’avoir
pas dit adieu. Il est mal avec Monsieur de Carcavy pour quelque livre Arabe, et cela fait
qu’il evite cette maison icy [Huygens was lodged at the Bibliothèque du roi], dont je suis
bien faschè, car de l’aller voir a Issy ou il se tient tousjours, cela n’est pas commode. S’il
est encore la, vous luy ferez s’il vous plait mes baisemains et mes reproches.’
¹¹⁸ This was seen as a possibility by English scholars in Holland: Thomas Marshall
told Samuel Clarke, 12/22 Feb. 1669, that ‘This Gentleman [i.e. Thévenot] I look upon
as the French Agent for the Golian MSS’, BL ms Add. 22905, f. 90; cf. Toomer, Eastern
Wisedome, 227 and 252 n. 191. My thanks to G. J. Toomer for sending me his notes on
this.
¹¹⁹ As Chapelain told François Bernier in February 1669: ‘Il est présentement en
Hollande pour l’impression de l’Abulfeda, qu’il publie en arabe avec la traduction’,
Chapelain, vol. 2, 622.
¹²⁰ P. N. Miller, ‘Aux origines de la Polyglotte parisienne: philologia sacra, contre-
réforme et raison d’état’, XVIIe siècle, 194 (1997), 57–66.
¹²¹ The standard source is J. de Guignes, Essai historique sur la typographie orientale
et grecque de l’Imprimerie Royale (Paris, 1787); cf. C. F. Schnurrer, Bibliotheca Arabica
(Halle, 1811), 500–6. See G. Duverdier, ‘Les débuts de la typographie orientale: les
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 117
explain this disappearance: certainly the set was jealously guarded, partly
because of its rarity, and partly because of the fear that it would fall into
the hands of Protestants, who could use it to spread heresy in the Holy
Land. In the late 1650s, the Assembly of the Clergy paid 6,000 livres
to Vitré to reimburse him and to take charge of the type, with the idea
that printers could use them on the condition that the title page of any
book printed with them carry the words ‘ex Typis Cleri Gallicani’.¹²²
Although the type itself remained (as far as we know) in Vitré’s care,
no more books had been printed with it by the time of Thévenot’s
Abulfeda project, and the abbé Renaudot described them as lost in
1670.¹²³
This situation explains why Thévenot had to go to Holland to try to
print the Abulfeda in Arabic. Even there, problems remained. Edward
Bernard, who was in Holland in 1670, informed Edward Pococke
that ‘so great was the Decay of Oriental Learning’ in Holland that
‘Mr. Thevenot cannot find a Bookseller, either there [Leiden], or at
Amsterdam, to undertake his Abulfeda.’¹²⁴ Scholars of Bernard’s stamp
missed no opportunity to lament the decay of learning, and it seems more
likely that the Dutch printers were wary of taking on an unmarketable
Arabic edition during economically uncertain times. More importantly,
there seems to have been some objection from Paris against Thévenot
taking his work to Holland. This we learn from the only letter that
survives from Thévenot to Colbert, written from Amsterdam in spring
1669.¹²⁵ In this letter, Thévenot reminds Colbert of the aims of his
assembly:
Monseigneur, Vous m’aués fait l’honneur de m’ecouter plusieurs fois sur le
dessein de cette assemblée qui se tenoit chés moy, et sur vne tache particuliere
que Je me suis donnée il y a fort long temps de mettre en françois ce que les
autres nations ont de meilleur dans leur langue pour la nauigation, pour la
geographie, et pour les autres arts.
[Monseigneur, You did me the honour of listening to me several times on the
plan for that assembly which I hosted, and on a particular task that I gave
myself a long time ago to translate into French those things in which other
Nations surpass us in their language for navigation, geography and the other
Arts.]
This underlines once again that the work which produced the Relations
de divers voyages curieux was connected to the work of Thévenot’s
‘assembly’. Thévenot recalls that Colbert ordered him to meet with the
abbé de Bourzeis and Chapelain (no date is given) to discuss ‘what
could be done for the establishment of this assembly’ (‘ce qui se pouvoit
fair pour l’etablissement de cette assemblée’). Thévenot says that even
after ‘the measures which have since been taken’ (‘les mesures qu’on a
prises depuis’, presumably the foundation of the Académie des sciences
in 1666), he continued his own work, ‘even though I thought I should
discontinue this assembly out of respect’ (‘quoy que J’aye crû devoir
discontinüer cette assemblée par respect’). Crucially, he claims that his
trip to Holland is a continuation of the same programme (‘la passion
d’avancer ce dessein est le suiet du sejour que Je fais icy’). After briefly
reminding Colbert of his ‘recueil de voyages’ (the Relations), Thévenot
says that he has collected a number of manuscripts for the edition of
Abulfeda, ‘which is a supplement to what is lacking for the geography
of Asia’ (‘qui est vn supplément de ce qui manque à la geographie de
l’Asie’). He then moves on to the reason for his writing: to ask for
money.
¹²⁷ Chapelain to Thévenot (in Leiden) 4 June 1669, BN ms n. a. fr. 1889, f. 64, in
Chapelain, vol. 2, 651–2.
¹²⁸ Chapelain to Thévenot (now in Amsterdam), 8 Nov. 1669, n. a. fr. 1889,
f. 109r–110r, in Chapelain, vol. 2, 667–8.
122 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
trip to Holland, he did not abandon the project, but seems to have
pushed ahead on other fronts. As soon as the Leiden manuscript had
been obtained in 1666, the Paris group had taken steps to acquire other
copies of the text. They knew that a copy had been made for the German
mathematician Wilhelm Schickard from a manuscript in the imperial
library in Vienna. Schickard had also compiled his own notes on several
Abulfeda copies. Chapelain had asked Vossius in 1666 to look into
getting hold of the Schickard manuscript, by way of Golius, hinting
that Golius might be rewarded for a second favour to the Parisians.¹³³
The attempt to get hold of Schickard’s manuscript was to come to
fruition in 1671–2. By this point, it seems, Colbert was willing to back
the proposal to produce an edition at the Imprimerie royale (possibly
because Carcavi was now pursuing an Abulfeda project of his own). The
negotiations, lasting almost a year, were made possible by a fortuitous
series of connections.¹³⁴ The young Provençal Orientalist Louis Ferrand
(discussed above, in the Introduction) was in Mainz in the late 1660s,
studying the Hebrew Bible. At the court of the Archbishop-Elector,
he befriended the equally young Leibniz, who was looking for an
opportunity to move to Paris.¹³⁵ After his return to the French capital,
Ferrand stayed in touch with Leibniz, and kept him informed of literary
news whilst his own career advanced (he was soon in the service of
Colbert). Leibniz at this time was procuring books for the French in
order to curry favour with patrons, with a view to a possible move to
Paris. He happened to know that one Magnus Hesenthaler, a professor
at Tübingen, had acquired Schickard’s manuscript from his heirs.¹³⁶
When Ferrand became aware of Thévenot’s project to edit Abulfeda,
he seems to have suggested that a deal be struck with Hesenthaler,
¹³⁷ Cf. Guiffrey, Comptes, vol. 1, col. 503: 20 Nov. 1671, ‘au Sr Carcavy, pour
dépenses qu’il a payées, sçavoir, au Sr Gravelle, résident à Mayence, pour livres qu’il a
achetés en Allemagne, £3301.’ The Schickard copies had been made from what is now
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek ms Arabic 1265. The volumes procured by Leibniz
are now at BN ms arabe 2241–2.
¹³⁸ Thévenot to Oldenburg, 28 Oct. 1671, in Oldenburg, vol. 8, 310–13; Wallis to
Oldenburg, 23 Nov. 1671, ibid. 372–3, and 27 Nov. 1671, 387–9.
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 125
that noble Work; I wish you to bethink your self, whether your edition out of
severall good Copies, with Annotations &c would not more gratify the publick,
than this which supposedly will fall much short in the same particulars.¹³⁹
Clearly the Oxford scholars did not think Thévenot’s edition would be as
scholarly as their own. Despite the frequent invocations of international
cooperation for the good of the Republic of Letters, feelings of rivalry
simmered beneath the surface.¹⁴⁰ Once Clarke was dead, though, the
Oxford scholars might have felt they should support Thévenot. Edward
Bernard seems to have encouraged him to continue work on Abū ’l-Fidā’
in the early 1670s.¹⁴¹
These examples reveal that Thévenot and Carcavi were both able
to involve scholars with whom they were only remotely connected:
Hesenthaler in Germany (through the links of Ferrand and Leibniz);
or Pococke in Oxford (via Wallis and Oldenburg). Despite this success
on the organizational level, the Abulfeda project still did not have
enough momentum to reach completion. We know that Thévenot
remained interested in Abulfeda when he was running the Bibliothèque
du roi. In 1687, he drew up a list of manuscripts that should be
sought in the Ottoman empire for the French ambassador Girardin,
which included ‘the Geography of Abulfeda, because it is to be printed
here’ (‘la Géographie d’Abulféda, à cause qu’elle se doit imprimer icy’).¹⁴²
Also in his period at the library, Thévenot employed Antoine Galland
to work on translating Abū ’l-Fidā’ from Arabic into French (as opposed
to Latin). We learn from a letter to Leibniz written by one of Galland’s
friends after Thévenot’s death that the Latin translations were far from
complete:
[Galland] m’a dit qu’effectivement Mr Thevenot avoit fait une traduction latine
de la Geographie d’Abulfède, mais que cet ouvrage n’est qu’une ébauche qui
demanderoit autant de soins qu’on en a pris pour la tracer. Ce même Mr Galand
m’a dit qu’il a traduit cet autheur en françois, mais qu’il avoit omis tout ce qui
¹³⁹ Marshall to Clarke, 22 Feb. 1669, BL ms Add. 22905, f. 90, as cited in Toomer,
Eastern Wisedome, 227. Clarke’s work on Abū ’l-Fidā’ is now at Bod. ms S. Clarke 1–4.
¹⁴⁰ See works cited above, note 56.
¹⁴¹ Thévenot to Bernard, 18 [?] Feb. 1673, Bod. ms Smith 8, p. 3–4, here p. 3:
‘. . . Pour l’Abulfeda ie ne le quitte point de veuë, et vostre aprobation me donne un
nouueau courage d’en acheuer l’entreprise. J’ay bien des remarques que i’y puis adjouter,
qui uiennent du mesme pays.’
¹⁴² Thévenot’s memoire to Girardin, 5 July 1687, from BN ms fr. 7169, ff. 347–50,
cited in H. A. Omont, ed., Missions archéologiques françaises en Orient aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles (Paris, 1902), 257–8 (my emphasis).
126 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
regardoit les longitudes et latitudes des lieux, parce qu’il avoit moins dessein de
s’en servir pour la topographie, que pour cette histoire des Turcs à laquelle il
travaille par ordre de feu Mr de Louvois.¹⁴³
[Galland told me that indeed Thévenot had done a Latin translation of the
geography of Abulfeda, but that this work was only an outline, which would
need as much work as it had already taken to sketch it out. The same M. Galland
told me that he had translated this author into French, but that he had omitted
everything to do with the longitudes and latitudes of places, because he had less
interest in using it for topography, than for the history of the Turks on which
he was working by order of the late Mr de Louvois.]
The whole point of translating Abū ’l-Fidā’ had been to obtain the
data for latitude and longitude, and yet the first time Thévenot had an
experienced student of Arabic at his disposal, these tables had been left
out. Nothing more became of Thévenot’s efforts, although they lived
on in the memory of his friends: long after Thévenot’s death, Leibniz
continued to think of Abulfeda as Thévenot’s old project.¹⁴⁴ Some
Orientalists were sceptical of the merit of the whole enterprise and were
critical of Thévenot’s efforts. Eusèbe Renaudot, surveying the history of
the European obsession with Abulfeda from Ramusio onwards, gave a
summary of Thévenot’s work:
Feu M. Thevenot s’estoit engagé a donner Abulfeda au public: en Arabe et en
Latin: et il avoit en achevé la traduction, ou pour mieux dire, il en avoit une a
laquelle plusieurs persones auoit travaillé, elle estoit neantmoins fort imparfaite
et il n’avoit joint aucunes notes, ny preface sans quoy elle n’eust pas esté fort
utile. Apres sa mort la copie qui se trouva parmy ses papiers a esté achetée par
des Estrangers et on ne scais pas encore ce qu’elle est devenue, Ainsi ceux qui
n’ont pas fait une estude particuliere des auteurs Arabes ne connoissent encore
pas Abulfeda, mais il en ont une grande idee sur le temoignage de la plupart des
sçavants des deux derniers siecles.
[The late M. Thévenot had committed himself to giving Abulfeda to the
public, in Arabic and in Latin, and he had finished the translation, or to be
more precise, he had one which had been the work of several people. It was
nevertheless still very imperfect, and he had added no notes and no preface,
without which it could not have been very useful. After his death, the copy
¹⁴³ Daniel Larroque to Leibniz, 14 Nov. 1693, in Leibniz, A, 1/9, 614–15. In 1713
Galland rediscovered the translations he had done for Thévenot, when cataloguing
Thévenot’s manuscripts for the Bibliothèque du roi (Galland, Journal parisien, 132).
¹⁴⁴ A. Birembault, P. Costabel, and S. Delorme, ‘La correspondance Leibn-
iz–Fontenelle et les relations de Leibniz avec l’Académie royale des sciences en
1700–1701’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 19 (1966), 115–32, esp. 118 and 129.
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 127
which was found among his papers was bought by foreigners, and we still
do not know what became of it. Thus, those who have not made a special
study of Arabic authors still do not know [of ] Abulfeda, but they have a grand
idea of him, based on the testimony of most of the savants of the last two
centuries.]
He concluded: ‘It seems that there is some curse on the publication of
this author, since for so many years, none of those who have promised a
translation have given it, which has augmented still further the curiosity
which exists about it.’¹⁴⁵
The Paris project to edit Abū ’l-Fidā’ is far from being a unique
case. Frustrations of a practical nature were probably the rule rather
than the exception in natural-philosophical printing. There are some
close parallels between Thévenot’s Abū ’l-Fidā’ experiences and the
Royal Society’s project to publish Ulugh Beg’s star catalogue (again,
envisaged as an international ‘prestige’ edition), which ran into the
problem of the scarcity of suitable type. While the Royal Society got
tied up in monopoly disputes, Thomas Hyde produced an edition at
his own expense.¹⁴⁶ Similarly, in the 1640s, it was only with difficulty
that John Greaves found the type needed for his works, and he was
driven to the extreme of stealing the Oxford University Press type
and having an illegal copy of it made in London.¹⁴⁷ Likewise, the
fact that Thévenot tried to get the Abū ’l-Fidā’ printed in Holland
is representative of the book trade as a whole at the time. There are
numerous examples of English ‘scientific’ publishing projects being
forced to try Holland (usually Amsterdam) as a cheaper alternative to
English printing, including Moses Pitt and his English Atlas, and John
Wallis, who found that ‘even the Dutch were loath to undertake his
book’ on algebra.¹⁴⁸
Above all, the case of the Paris Abū ’l-Fidā’ project highlights the
fragile state of Oriental learning in Paris in the 1660s. The people
with the linguistic skills needed to carry out these ambitions projects
were thin on the ground; and as with so many other scholarly and
¹⁴⁵ BN ms n. a. fr. 7478, f. 7 (‘Il semble qu’il y ait eu quelque fatalité sur l’edition
de cet auteur, puisque depuis tant d’années aucun de ceux qui en avoient promis la
traduction ne l[’]a donnée, ce qui a encore augmenté la curiosité sur son sujet’); compare
Renaudot, Anciennes relations, xii–xiij.
¹⁴⁶ Johns, Nature of the Book, 496–7; on Hyde’s edition, see also Toomer, Eastern
Wisedome, 249–50.
¹⁴⁷ Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 171–2.
¹⁴⁸ Johns, Nature of the Book, 447–52. See also 170–1 for Dutch pirating of English
Bibles and 515–18 for attempts to pirate the Philosophical Transactions.
128 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
C O N C LU S I O N
¹⁴⁹ Leibniz to M. Thévenot, 23 Mar. 1691, in Leibniz, A, 1/6, 410: ‘vous deuvriés
estre centimanus comme ce Briarée de la fable. C’est à dire vous deuvriés avoir une
centaine de gens propres à executer les mille belles veues que vous avés.’
‘Toutes les Curiosités du Monde’ 129
help.’¹⁵⁰ This was the negative side of curiosity—that there were always
too many projects and too little time.
Concerns of a different nature were voiced by other former members
of Thévenot’s circle. In 1678, Thévenot received a letter from his
old friend Steno. Writing on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint
Paul (25 January), Steno—who had recently become a Catholic and
a missionary bishop in Hanover—was inspired to reflect on his own
conversion. Marvelling at how much his life had changed since his Paris
days, Steno thanked his former host for having introduced him to Marie
Perriquet, one of Thévenot’s cousins, and via her, to the devout life.¹⁵¹
For this, Steno said, he gave daily thanks to God. He pressed the point:
‘Alas, Monsieur, all the curiosities of the world are but vanities, and
what there is that is solid is so little in comparison with what we will see
in our first glimpse of the divine essence’ (‘Helas Monsieur, que toutes
les curiositez du monde ne sont que vanitez, et ce qu’il y a de solide est
si peu à l’égard de ce que nous verrons à la première œillade que nous
donnerons à la divine essence!’).¹⁵²
The identification of curiosity with vanity was a commonplace
with a very long lineage.¹⁵³ Steno’s warning was probably a sincere
one. Unfortunately, we have no evidence of how Thévenot—who
was still interested in the things Steno had left behind—received this
potentially hurtful communication. A constant element in the discourse
on curiosity in the period was the sense that curiosity was dangerous,
although the danger could be expressed in secular or religious terms.
Leibniz seemed aware that Thévenot’s eclecticism was a hindrance to
his productivity, even if his projects were laudable. Steno echoed the
more traditional theological argument, that curiosity was a vice because
it could lead one to place too great a confidence in the capacities of
¹⁵⁰ Leibniz to E. Spanheim, 16 Apr. 1696, in Leibniz, A, 1/12, 541: ‘M. Thevenot
avoit trop de belles choses à donner, il luy est arrivé ce qui arrive à des femmes qui sont
en travail de plus d’un enfant, c’est que souvent l’un empeche l’autre sur tout quand il y
a faute d’assistance.’
¹⁵¹ On Marie Perriquet (1624–69), also known to Huygens, see Boudhors, ‘Une
amie de Pascal?’
¹⁵² N. Steno to M. Thévenot, 4 Feb. [25 Jan. OS] 1678, in Steno, Epistolae et epistolae
ad eum data, ed. G. Scherz, 2 vols (Copenhagen and Freiburg, 1952), vol. 1, 371–2.
¹⁵³ Pascal uses the phrase ‘curiosité n’est que vanité’ in the Pensées (Laf. 77/Brg. 152).
For Patristic sources, see P. Sellier, Pascal et saint Augustin (Paris, 1970), 175–82;
G. Defaux, Le Curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde (Lexington, 1982), 69–110. On
the meanings of the term ‘curiosity’, see N. Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe:
Word Histories (Wiesbaden, 1998).
130 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
human learning, thereby falling into the sin of pride, and that it might
lead the unwise reader into heresy. Sometimes both arguments were
made at once: Claude Fleury argued that excessively curious pursuits
required disproportionate effort for little scholarly profit, while noting
that the study of Oriental languages was probably ‘the most dangerous’,
since it also led the student into sinful pride.¹⁵⁴
Jean de La Bruyère, in a now-famous satire on curiosity in the
Caractères, included a passage that some contemporaries decoded as a
reference to Thévenot:
Quelques-uns, par une intempérance de savoir et par ne pouvoir se résoudre à
renoncer à aucune sorte de connaissance, les embrassent toutes et n’en possèdent
aucune; ils aiment mieux savoir beaucoup que de savoir bien, et être faibles
et superficiels dans diverses sciences que d’être sûrs et profonds dans une
seule . . . ils sont les dupes de leur [vaine] curiosité . . .¹⁵⁵
[Some, by an unchecked desire to know, and by an inability to renounce any
kind of knowledge, embrace them all and end up possessing none. They prefer
to know a lot rather than to know well, and to be weak and superficial in
various sciences than to be sure and deep in one . . . they are the dupes of their
[vain] curiosity.]
It may be that Thévenot was, in the end, duped by his own curiosity,
and that the ‘curious’ way of pursuing knowledge that he embodied
led him to underestimate the difficulties of editing and translating Abū
’l-Fidā’. In this sense, at least, Leibniz, Steno, and La Bruyère were right.
¹⁵⁴ C. Fleury, Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (Paris, 1686), 249: ‘La
curiosité la plus dangereuse en ce genre [i.e. learning languages], est celle des langues
orientales’, cited by Kenny, Uses of Curiosity, 216.
¹⁵⁵ The word ‘vaine’ was added by La Bruyère to later editions. La Bruyère, Les
Caractères, xiii (‘De la mode’), §2; the Coste ‘key’ names ‘MM. Thévenot et [Pétis de]
La Croix’: La Bruyère, Œuvres, ed. G. Servois, 4 vols (Paris, 1865–78), vol. 2, 139, 358.
3
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s
Geography of Knowledge
Roy . . .; and Evenemens particuliers . . .) (Paris, 1670); followed by tomes 3 and 4 as Suite
des Memoires . . . (Paris, 1671). The whole set was quickly pirated at The Hague (1671);
and translated into English (London, 1671–2), Dutch (Amsterdam, 1672), Italian (Mil-
an, 1675), and German (Frankfurt, 1672–3). The French was later republished as Voyages
de François Bernier, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1699), and reissued in 1709–10, 1711, and
1723–4. A good bibliography is in Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, trans. A. Con-
stable, 2nd edn, revised by V. A. Smith (London, 1914), xxv–xlii. For convenience,
references will be given to the Amsterdam editions of the French text (since they have
identical pagination), to the Oldenburg translations (available readily via Early English
Books Online), and to the 1914 translation (available in modern reprints). I have not been
able to consult this new edition: Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole: les voyages de François
Bernier (1656–1669), ed. F. Tinguely, A. Paschoud, and C.-A. Chamay (Paris, 2008).
³ J.-B. Tavernier, Les Six Voyages, 2 vols (Paris, 1676–7); J. Chardin, Journal du
voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes orientales (London, 1686); both with
numerous translations and reissues. See C. Joret, ‘Le voyage de Tavernier (1670–89)’,
Revue de géographie, 12 (1889), 161–74, 267–75, 328–41; C. R. Boxer, ‘Jean-Baptiste
Tavernier, controversial Huguenot traveller and trader, 1605–89’, Proceedings of the
Huguenot Society of London, 24 (1985), 202–9; L. Labib-Rahman, ‘Sir Jean Chardin, the
great traveller (1643–1712/3)’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 23 (1981),
309–18; D. Van der Cruysse, Chardin le Persan (Paris, 1998). For Jean Thévenot see
Chapter 2.
⁴ M. Dodds, Les Récits de voyages: sources de L’Esprit des lois de Montesquieu (Paris,
1929); M. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières: Buffon, Voltaire,
Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris, 1971), esp. 65–136.
⁵ Montesquieu, ‘Geographica’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Masson (Paris, 1950),
vol. 2, 923–63, esp. 953–5 on Bernier. ‘Ce livre est bien & judicieusement écrit & fait
souhaiter que l’on fasse des voyages avec autant de talens, de sçavoir & d’esprit pour en
profiter’ (955). Bernier is used, for instance, in De l’Esprit des lois, Book 14, chs 3 and
10; Book 24, chs 24 and 26 (Œuvres complètes, ed. R. Caillois (Paris, 1951), vol. 2, 478,
482, 733, 734).
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 133
The case of how Marx read Bernier has become well known because
of its importance in the history of the concept of ‘Oriental despotism’.⁶
Marx made notes on Bernier’s Voyages whilst he and Engels were
brushing up their Oriental reading in order to meet the demand for
newspaper comment on British policy in India, between March and May
1853.⁷ At the time, Marx and Engels were in the process of developing
the concept of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, which allowed them to
incorporate their hastily garnered Oriental expertise into their schema
of history. They turned to what was already the most famous part of
Bernier’s book: the ‘letter to Colbert’ on the size of Hindustan, on the
circulation of gold and silver, and so on, topics designed to appeal to
Louis XIV’s contrôleur général des finances.⁸ Here they thought they had
found evidence of the absence of private land ownership in the Mughal
empire—which then became a basic tenet of the ‘Asiatic mode of
production’. Bernier was, for Marx as for so many others, a transparent
window onto the reality of seventeenth-century India, read with a naivety
that is surprising when we consider how, by the late eighteenth century,
Bernier’s reliability had already been called into question. Perhaps the
most important of the critics to do so was the French Orientalist
Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who as early as 1778 had
realized the importance of Bernier in Montesquieu’s construction of
‘Oriental despotism’.⁹ What is remarkable is that Marx was able to ignore
Anquetil-Duperron, in that he provided a new economic account of the
¹⁰ For earlier links between ‘Oriental despotism’ theory and the justification of British
rule, see K. Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800
(Delhi, 1995), 113–14. For an example of how Bernier’s book could be sold as an
apology for the ‘clemency’ of British rule see Bernier, The History of the Late Revolution of
the Empire of the Great Mogol (Bombay, 1830), ‘Prospectus’ (sep. pag.), 4–6, reprinted
in Bernier, Travels (London, 1914), xxxiv–vi.
¹¹ Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. W. Crooke (London, 1925); Indian Travels of
Thevenot and Careri, ed. S. Sen (New Delhi, 1949). English versions of Bernier were
published: London, 1671, 1676, 1684, 1745, 1808, 1826, 1891, 1914; Calcutta, 1826,
1866, 1904; Bombay, 1830.
¹² See S. Murr, ‘Le politique ‘‘au Mogol’’ selon Bernier: appareil conceptuel,
rhétorique stratégique, philosophie morale’, Purusartha, 13 (1990), 239–311; Teltscher,
India Inscribed, 28–34. See also S. J. Tambiah, ‘What did Bernier actually say? Profiling
the Mughal empire’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s., 32 (1998), 361–86; and
P. Burke, ‘The philosopher as traveller: Bernier’s Orient’, in J. Elsner and J.-P. Rubiés,
eds, Voyages and Visions: Towards A Cultural History of Travel (London, 1999), 124–37.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 135
travels will provide a basis for an exploration of how Bernier’s text can
be connected with other aspects of his life. Bernier is, like Thévenot,
a hybrid figure in historiography, because he appears on two distinct
stages which are rarely connected: the history of travel and the history
of philosophy. As well as being the author of his Voyages, Bernier was
a pupil of the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and dedicated much of his
later life to the promotion of his master’s thought.¹³ This means that
there are two separate traditions of work on Bernier, one focusing on his
book on the Mughal empire, the other on his role as a member of the
Gassendist circle.¹⁴ Although the two ways of approaching Bernier are
understandably separated by historians with different interests, if we are
attempting to follow Bernier’s itinerary (and to understand his writings
contextually), then we need to keep both aspects in view. While it is
true that most of Bernier’s publications after he had written his Voyages
were to be expositions of Gassendi, Bernier’s writings do not in fact
keep his two interests completely distinct: on the one hand, his Abrégé
de la philosophie de Gassendi is larded with references to his experience
in India; on the other, there is a section of the Voyages that expounds
Bernier’s views on atomism and on human understanding.¹⁵
However, for the purposes of this chapter, the passage that allows us
to explore the relationship between the two halves of Bernier’s hybrid
image is the description of Hindu religion and philosophy in the ‘Letter
to Chapelain’.¹⁶ This section of the Voyages sets out, as its title puts it, to
represent the ‘Superstitions, étranges façons de faire, & Doctrine’ of the
‘gentiles’ of India (a then standard way to denote the Hindus), to prove
to the reader that ‘there is no opinion so ridiculous and so extravagant
that the human mind is incapable of holding it’ (‘il n’y a Opinion si
ridicules & si extravagantes dont l’Esprit de l’homme ne soit capable’).
The bulk of the letter is concerned with discussion of Hindu beliefs,
with some account of the Vedas, a portrayal of the brahmins, pandits,
and yogins, and also certain aspects of Hindu practice that had already
become stock features of travel texts on India, such as the ‘juggernaut’,
or the self-immolation of widows (sati).¹⁷ Even though there are passing
references in other parts of the book to religious phenomena, it is this
section of the Voyages that is devoted to the description of beliefs,
specifically those of Hindus. Indeed, it has not always been noted that
the whole basis of the ‘Letter to Chapelain’ is the distinction between the
Muslim Mughals and the Hindu populace. The unstated assumption
is that Islam is already sufficiently familiar to the European reader, and
that (in contrast) there is a premium attached to descriptions of the
‘Gentiles’ or ‘idolaters’ of Hindustan.¹⁸ What Bernier does not make
explicit, however, is the degree to which his description of Hinduism
might have been shaped by his own position as a retainer in a Muslim
court. By picking up the clues left in Bernier’s text we can put Bernier
back into the context of his position in India. This means that Bernier
is not simply writing from a European or Christian viewpoint, but that
his text, in spite of itself, also incorporates something of the Muslim
perspective on Hinduism.
¹⁹ Bernier, Voyages, vol. 2, 97–101; the English translation is from Travels in the
Mogul Empire, 300–2; cf. Oldenburg translation in ‘A letter written to Mr Chapelain’,
in A Continuation of the Memoires of Monsieur Bernier, Concerning the Empire of the Great
Mogol (London, 1672) [vol. 3 of 4], 103–73, here 103–7.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 139
with a single cloth. Persons of rank or wealth, such as Rajas (Gentile sovereign
princes, and generally courtiers in the service and pay of the King), Serrafs
or money-changers, bankers, jewellers, and other rich merchants, crossed from
the opposite side of the river with their families, and pitching their tents fixed
kanates or screens in the water, within which they and their wives washed and
performed the usual ceremonies without any exposure. No sooner did these
idolaters perceive that the obscuration of the sun was begun than they all raised
a loud cry, and plunged the whole body under water several times in quick
succession; after which they stood in the river, lifted their eyes and hands toward
the sun, muttered and prayed with seeming devotion, filling their hands from
time to time with water, which they threw in the direction of the sun, bowing
their heads very low, and moving and turning their arms and hands, sometimes
one way, sometimes another. The deluded people continued to plunge, mutter,
pray, and perform their silly tricks until the end of the eclipse. On retiring they
threw pieces of silver at a great distance into the Gemna, and gave alms to the
Brahmens, who failed not to be present at this absurd ceremony. I remarked
that every individual on coming out of the water put on new clothes placed
on the sand for that purpose, and that several of the most devout left their old
garments as presents for the Brahmens. In this manner did I observe from the
roof of my house the solemnisation of the grand eclipse-festival . . .]
Other scholars have drawn attention to this passage as an example of
Bernier’s position in a sceptical tradition connecting Montaigne with
the Montesquieu of the Persian Letters.²⁰ However, the example of the
twin eclipses can also be interpreted in another way, one which places
Bernier in both of his social contexts, Paris and Mughal India. So, at
the same time, the two eclipses allow us to bridge the divide between
those two aspects of Bernier’s life usually treated separately: his role
as a disciple of Gassendi, and his role as a visitor to Mughal India.
It becomes possible, then, to construct a commentary on this opening
passage of the ‘Letter to Chapelain’ that can serve as an interpretation
of Bernier’s work as a whole.
T H E PA R I S E C L I P S E : LIBERTINAGE V E R S U S
S U PE R S T I T I O N
temporarily, he did not leave France for the East until two years
later—since he tells us he was back in Paris for the eclipse of August
1654, and since he claims to have attended Gassendi’s deathbed in
October 1655.²⁵ Nevertheless, the Paris of Mazarin was a threatening
place for Bernier, and he left France soon after his master’s death. Rather
than using the quarrel between Morin and Gassendi as a motive for
Bernier’s departure, we should bear it in mind as the background to the
events of 1654.
The solar eclipse of 12 August 1654 excited a great deal of con-
troversy among European intellectuals.²⁶ As was usual, prognosticatory
pamphlets circulated in the months before the celestial event. One of
these in particular, which interpreted the eclipse as a herald of the
apocalyptic Deluge of Fire, drew forth a host of refutations. Whilst
numerous Jesuits and Protestant writers used theological arguments
against the millenarian significance of the eclipse, Gassendi and Pierre
Petit—though not Roberval, as Bernier says—used arguments based
on natural philosophy. As Bernier put it: ‘this eclipse was of the same
nature as so many others which had preceded it without mishap, and
that it was a known, expected and ordinary event’ (‘cette Eclipse étoit de
même nature que tant d’autres qui avoient precedé sans aucun malheur,
& que c’étoit un accident connu, preveu & ordinaire’). Meanwhile,
Bernier’s friend Chapelle wrote private verses satirizing the behaviour
of the ordinary Parisians. The reference in Bernier’s passage to buying
a ‘drug’ against the effects of the eclipse seems not to be exaggerated:
prophylactic candles were sold by the Lyons-based physician Lazare
Meysonnier.²⁷ Bernier’s description of the behaviour of the people of
Paris as ‘folle’ and ‘enfantine’ rhetorically places astrological superstition
on a level with the beliefs of children and madmen. This was typical
of the libertine attitude to marvels and prodigies.²⁸ Moreover, he also
points the finger of blame at the ‘trickery of some charlatan astrologer’
³³ See F. Venturi, ‘Was ist Aufklaerung? Sapere aude!’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 71
(1959), 119–28, and L. Firpo, ‘Ancora a proposito di ‘‘Sapere aude!’’ ’, Rivista Storica
Italiana, 72 (1960), 114–17, esp. 116; cf. Pintard, Libertinage érudit, 152.
³⁴ See Murr, ‘L’image de François Bernier’, Corpus: revue de philosophie, 20/21 (1992),
211–13. La Bruyère’s quip that ‘quelques-uns [des esprits forts] achèvent de se corrompre
par de longs voyages, et perdent le peu de religion qui leur restait’, could be a reference
to Bernier: Les Caractères, xvi. 4, in Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Benda (Paris, 1951), 470.
³⁵ The standard study is Pintard, Libertinage érudit; see the reappraisal in R. H. Popkin,
The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1979), 87–109;
and Pintard’s response in Libertinage érudit, xiii–xliii. See also J. S. Spink, French Free
Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London, 1960); L. Godard de Donville, Le Libertin
des origines à 1665: un produit des apologètes (Paris, Seattle, and Tübingen, 1989).
³⁶ E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols ( The Hague, 1963–4). This point is made for
Bernier in Burke, ‘The philosopher as traveller’.
³⁷ ‘La ‘‘Requeste des Maistres ès Arts’’ et l’ ‘‘Arrêt burlesque’’ ’, ed. Murr, in
Corpus: revue de philosophie, 20/21 (1992), 231–9; T. McClaughlin, ‘Censorship and
defenders of the Cartesian faith in mid-seventeenth-century France’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 563–81; E. Magne, Molière et l’Université: documents
inédits (Paris, 1922), 99–109; R. Ariew, ‘Damned if you do: Cartesians and censorship,
1663–1706’, Perspectives on Science, 2 (1994), 255–74. On Bernier’s role see A. Galland,
Journal . . . pendant son séjour à Constantinople, ed. C. Schefer (Paris, 1881), vol. 1, 165.
144 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁴⁵ Pintard, Libertinage érudit, 328–9, 384–6, 409–12, 424, 429, 432. For a synthesis
of his life see Murr, ‘Bernier et Gassendi’, 74–8. Still useful is T. Morison, ‘Un Français
à la cour du Grand Mogol’, Revue historique, 156 (1927), 83–97.
⁴⁶ Castonnet Desfosses, François Bernier: ses voyages (1888), 1 n. 1, cites a baptismal
certificate dated 25 Sept. 1620, at Joué, near Chemillé, in the Anjou.
⁴⁷ Including a repeat performance of Pascal’s 1648 Puy-de-Dôme experiment on a
hill overlooking Toulon (5 Feb. 1651), according to Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de
Gassendi, vol. 4, 395.
⁴⁸ He matriculated at Montpellier on 5 May 1652, took the licence in medicine on
3 Aug., and proceeded to the MD on 26 Aug. (praising Epicurus in his disputation:
see the ‘Eloge’ read 9 Jan. 1689 at the Angers Academy by Nivard, in Lens, ed.,
Documents inédits ou peu connus). The speed of Bernier’s progress through these degrees
has sometimes been seen as evidence that he was no real physician; in fact, such speed was
common for those who had already studied elsewhere: L. W. B. Brockliss and C. Jones,
The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997), 195.
⁴⁹ On the ‘Montmor academy’, see H. Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth-
Century France (1620–1680) (Baltimore, 1934; repr. New York, 1967), 64–134; and
D. J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members of the Académie des Sciences,
1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), 16–24.
146 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
In his dialogue ‘De la vie privée’ (that is, concerning otium)—in which
the art of speculation itself is compared to a voyage of discovery—La
Mothe Le Vayer described the time he had spent travelling around
Europe as ‘the best-spent period of my life’ (‘le temps de ma vie que
j’estime avoir le mieux employé’), and portrayed travel as a kind of
regimen for the mind, a spiritual change of air. By experiencing the
variety of customs in the world, the traveller was able to see which parts
of his own mental make-up were inherited blindly from the past, so
that the true philosophy could break free from them: ‘the wishes of my
parents had bound me to a thousand servitudes; Philosophy gave me a
full and true liberty’ (‘Les vœux de mes parens m’y avoient attaché à mille
servitudes, la Philosophie m’y a mis en pleine et veritable liberté’). The
bondage of custom, or what he calls ‘la violance des mauvaises habitudes,
la tyrannie des coustumes’, is clearly identified with ‘le torrent de la
multitude’, thereby opening up a distinction between those who have
the good fortune to guide their minds properly and the vast flock of
ordinary people.⁵⁵ All these themes and images, themselves developed
from ancient sources, find their echoes in Bernier’s writings.
As the passage from La Mothe Le Vayer implies, the sceptics’ interest
in the diversity of customs combined a curiosity for the peoples of newly
discovered worlds with a sense of the distance between the philosopher
and the ‘vulgar’ within Europe. In spite of their reputation as enemies
of the church, the libertins érudits actually shared a certain amount of
common ground with those elements of the hierarchy moved by the
ideals of Catholic Reform. Both groups were, after all, drawn largely
from the same social elite. In particular, we can see such shared values in
the attitude of both Catholic reformers and freethinking savants to what
can be called ‘popular culture’.⁵⁶ Indeed, these categories—Catholic
reformers and libertins érudits —collapse into each other when we
but because Ethiopia was considered too dangerous he boarded an Indian vessel taking
pilgrims from Mocha to Surat. Perhaps because there were many other accounts of these
areas in print, he rarely refers to these experiences in his books.
⁵⁵ F. de La Mothe Le Vayer, Dialogues faits à l’imitation des anciens, ed. P. Pessel (Paris,
1988), 144–8. This argument inherits the theme that the ‘vulgar’ were always closer to
their soil, and therefore geographically ‘determined’, whereas the civilized humanist was
cosmopolitan, and free from customary habits (hence, in one sense, libertin).
⁵⁶ On the historiography of ‘popular culture’ in early modern Europe, see C. Ginzburg,
‘Preface’ to The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans.
J. and A. Tedeschi (Harmondsworth, 1992 [f. p. 1976]), xiii–xxvi, 129–34; and
P. Burke, ‘Introduction to the revised reprint’ of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
(Aldershot, 1994 [f. p. 1978]), xiv–xxvii.
148 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
described the Paris eclipse means that any stable dualism between
Europeans and ‘Indians’ has already been undermined. Although it
is possible to read Bernier’s book as an early sign of the emerging
European sense of superiority (scientific, technological, medical),⁶⁴ this
disturbance of the East–West division seems too important to ignore.
Just as Bernier’s account of the Paris eclipse can be related to a
specific context within his own experience, the reference to the eclipse
in Delhi can also be related to his life in India. Admittedly, it is not
possible to give a completely symmetrical account of the two eclipses.
For Bernier’s readers, there was a sharp imbalance between his reference
to the Paris eclipse (which some readers may have remembered, and the
context for which Bernier suggests by mentioning Gassendi) and his
mentioning the Delhi one, where the local situation would have seemed
unfamiliar and exotic. There is also a similar imbalance at the level of
historical interpretation of the two events. We are able to reconstruct
the context for the 1654 eclipse because of the detailed researches of
historians interested in the seventeenth-century ‘decline of magic’; this
wealth of supporting research does not exist for the Delhi context of
the 1666 eclipse. However, by reading Bernier’s Voyages alongside other
sources, it not only becomes possible to construct a historical context
for Bernier’s experience in India, but also to suggest that this context
for the second eclipse is actually implied in Bernier’s own text.
Astrology and astronomy were very important parts of Indian life.
Just as in seventeenth-century Europe, almanacs were among the most
widespread form of books, and astronomical knowledge, because of its
centrality to the religious calendars for both Muslims and Hindus, was
intimately bound up with social and political order.⁶⁵ In the Voyages,
Bernier drew attention to the importance of astral knowledge: he noted
by way of an example that military commanders would not begin
battles unless an auspicious conjunction (the ‘sahet’ or sa’at) had been
Pour Léon Poliakov. Le racisme: mythes et sciences (Brussels, 1981), 187–200; available as
‘Montaigne’s ‘‘Of Cannibals’’: the savage ‘‘I’’ ’, in Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the
Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), 67–79.
⁶⁴ M. N. Pearson, ‘The thin end of the wedge: medical relativities as a paradigm
of early-modern Indian-European relations’, Modern Asian Studies, 29 (1995), 141–70,
esp. 165–7. See also D. V. S. Reddy, ‘François Bernier: a French physician at the Mogul
court in India in the seventeenth century and his impressions of Indian medicine’, Annals
of Medical History, 3rd series, 2 (1940), 225–33; and M. Adas, Machines as the Measure
of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989), 55–7.
⁶⁵ I follow the account given in C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence
Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 247–52.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 151
⁷⁰ For the identification with Kavindracarya, see S. Pollock, ‘The death of Sanskrit’,
Comparative Studies of Society and History, 43 (2001), 392–426, at 407–8. Various other
literary and philosophical figures have also been suggested, but conclusive evidence is
wanting.
⁷¹ This and the previous quotation from Bernier, Voyages, vol. 2, 133–4 (cf. 147); A
Continuation [vol. 3 of 4], 103–73, here 143–4.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 153
chief employment for five or six years) that Pendet was our refuge, and then he
was obliged to discourse, and to relate unto us his stories, which he deliver’d
seriously and without ever smiling. ’Tis true, that at last we were so much
disgusted with his tales and uncouth reasonings, that we scarce had patience
left to hear them.]
Far from being an idealized portrayal of a three-way colloquy between
Muslim, Christian, and Hindu, Bernier clearly describes a hostility
shared by Muslim and Christian to the ‘fables’ of the pandit. This
characterizes the model that recurs most often within Bernier’s text.
We can find further examples of this process of identification between
Bernier and his Muslim patrons. At several points in the ‘Letter
to Chapelain’, there are references to the political tension between
the Muslim rulers and the Hindu populace. Bernier states that the
Mughals permit the ‘superstitious practices’ of the Hindus, as if in
tolerance of religious diversity, but at the same time records that they
did ‘all in their power’ to suppress sati.⁷² In his pages on widow
burning, Bernier quite clearly allies himself with the Muslims: he even
claims that, when he himself went to dissuade a sati from suicide,
he was called to the scene in his capacity as servant to Danishmand
Khan.⁷³
The identification of the Hindus with ‘fable’, in contrast to a
rationality shared by Muslim and Christian, is one of the overall themes
of the ‘Letter to Chapelain’, and this distinction clearly echoes that
between the humanist philosopher and the ‘vulgar herd’ that Bernier
uses in reference to the Parisians. The rhetorical association made in the
eclipse passage—by which the suspicions of the ‘vulgar herd’ are put on
the same level as that of the Hindu populace—is found repeated in other
parts of Bernier’s text. Bernier distinguishes between doctrines found in
the Hindu scriptures and the ‘Tradition vulgaire’, which he even calls
‘mother goose tales’.⁷⁴ The folklorization of superstition that Bernier
encountered in India reproduces the processes at work in Europe—as we
found earlier, Bernier identifies astrology with ‘children’s tomfoolery’
⁷² Bernier, Voyages, vol. 2, 101 (‘Le Grand Mogol, quoique Mahumetan, permet ces
anciennes superstitions aux Gentils, parce qu’il ne veut, ou n’ose pas les choquer dans
l’exercice de leur Religion’); on sati, 106–7 (‘les Mahumetans, qui tiennent à present
le Gouvernement, sont ennemis de cette barbare coûtume, & l’empéchent tant qu’ils
peuvent’). Bernier notes that Mughals do not totally suppress sati ‘de crainte de quelque
Revolte’.
⁷³ Ibid. 108.
⁷⁴ Ibid. 142 (‘une Tradition vulgaire qu’on ne trouve point dans leurs Livres’); 142–3
(‘contes de ma mere l’Oye’).
154 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
and ‘old wives’ tales’.⁷⁵ At the same time, he identifies some of the
elements of Hindu mythology with classical mythology, suggesting
that—‘to speak as our ancient idolaters did’—the Deutas might be the
same as the Romans’ numina, genii, demons, or even fairies.⁷⁶
Bernier seizes every opportunity to implicitly identify Gassendi’s
vanquished philosophical foes with Hinduism. He uses the same terms
(‘les Mysteres de la Cabale’) to describe Morin’s astrology and the
teachings of the yogins.⁷⁷ When describing the mystic ecstasies of the
yogins, he adds that perhaps they resemble those of Girolamo Cardano
(the sixteenth-century philosopher used by Bernier elsewhere as a
representative of astrology). Later, Bernier notes that the idea of the
‘world-soul’ was shared by ancient philosophers, Hindu pandits, Muslim
sufis, and the English hermeticist Robert Fludd—whose doctrine,
Bernier reminds us, ‘our great Gassendi has so learnedly refuted’.⁷⁸
Years later, Bernier was to continue to use his Indian knowledge to
score points in French debates: just before his death, at the beginning of
the vogue for Quietism in France, he published a mémoire comparing
the European mystics of the school of Molinos to the mystics of India.
What is new here is the degree to which Bernier skates across multiple
Asian religions, lumping together a variety of spiritual traditions (which
he knew to be different) in order to identify them with the Quietists:
Muslim Sufi fakirs, Hindu yogins, and even the Buddhist ‘bonzes’
of China, whom Bernier had read about in the introduction to the
recent book Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687). After establishing
the similarity between these exotic mystics and those closer to home, he
reproduces a familiar judgement: ‘since, all over the world, men have
more or less the same temperament, and consequently the same bodily
illnesses, they also have more or less the same maladies of the mind, the
same thoughts, the same madnesses, the same extravagances.’⁷⁹
It is also worth noting that Bernier’s texts show signs of how the
alliance of savants against the vulgar was susceptible to fracture. In
much of the ‘Letter to Chapelain’, he explains the prevalence of Hindu
‘superstition’ with reference to the conniving brahmins, invoking the
Lucretian argument against priestcraft (in which priests deceive the
ordinary people for political purposes, and do not believe the doctrines
they teach). After all, this is the tenor of the passage from Lucretius
which Bernier cites at the climax of his description of sati —the lines
which end ‘tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!’ (‘such are the evils
to which men are driven by religion’).⁸⁰
This section has tried to suggest how we might be able to understand
Bernier’s attitude to Hinduism within the context of his position in the
household of Danishmand Khan. Although the debt that Bernier owed
to that context is not acknowledged in explicit terms, through a close
reading of Bernier’s text it can be traced.
B E R N I E R A N D T H E T H EV E N OT G RO U P
So far we have seen how the making of Bernier’s book can be understood
within two local contexts of knowledge production, conveniently repres-
ented by the twin eclipses that Bernier uses at the opening of his ‘Letter
to Chapelain’—the France of the 1650s and the Mughal empire of the
1660s. In this section we move on to consider the production of Bernier’s
book, which involves bringing him into a closer relation with the circle
around Melchisédech Thévenot. The book can arguably be thought of
as a product of that group. However, when Bernier came back to Paris
and saw his Voyages through the press, he seems to have moved into new
territory, pitching his book towards a more fashionable readership. We
have seen how Bernier achieved the status of a ‘classic’ travel author in the
centuries after his death. The correspondence of his patrons and advisors
reveals that this was not just a posthumous accident, but something
striven for, and for which models and methods were prescribed.
Jean Chapelain had been connected with Gassendi since the 1630s,
and perhaps took it upon himself to look after the philosopher’s pupils
du corps, ils ont aussi à peu prés les mêmes maladies d’esprit, les mêmes pensées, les
mêmes folies, les mêmes extravagances’).
⁸⁰ Bernier, Voyages, vol. 2, 119, citing Lucretius, De rerum natura, bk 1, lines 82–6,
101. The passage was already a commonplace for sceptical thinkers: cf. Montaigne,
‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’ (bk. 2, ch. 12) in Œuvres complètes, 502.
156 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
after his death. He wrote to Bernier whilst he was in India, to keep him
up to date with developments in Europe but also to urge him to make
the most of this opportunity.⁸¹ It is clear from Chapelain’s earlier letters
that he was writing to Bernier on behalf of the group that met chez
Habert de Montmor, a group that Bernier had of course attended before
leaving Paris. We learn from his first letter that Bernier had written
to Montmor, and Chapelain tells him to address his letters either to
Montmor, to Thévenot, or to Cureau de La Chambre. Thévenot, who
had heard about Bernier from Chapelain, sent a series of questions for
Bernier, along with some jewellery that he could use as gifts to impress
possible patrons (‘quelques bijoux et quelques bagatelles de peu de conte
de deça, mais qui pourront servir à vous faire vostre cour de delà auprès
des personnes de qualité curieuses’) (170).⁸² For the same purpose,
Chapelain sent political news from Europe (171).
As well as news, the Parisian group sent packets of books to India.
Bernier had heard about the edition of Gassendi that appeared in Lyons
in 1658 under Montmor’s patronage, and so asked for a copy to be
sent. The thought of consigning the precious volumes to so risky a
voyage proved too much for Montmor (620), who sent him a life of
Epicurus instead. Several times, Gassendi sent him manuscripts of La
Pucelle, his (famously bad) epic poem on the life of Joan of Arc (170).
Sending such packages so far involved great uncertainty. The route from
Marseilles via Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, and Surat was long enough for
Chapelain to have to write four letters without having heard any reply.
Even if a package reached its destination, Chapelain could not be sure
that Bernier would still be there when it did. He mentions that Bernier
had considered travelling to China, after all (171). When possible, a
messenger was used: one letter was carried by Tavernier, at the request
of La Mothe Le Vayer (265), and another was conveyed by Chardin
(621).⁸³ The advantage of using travellers was that information too
secret to be written down could also be conveyed (266).
Chapelain’s letters, especially the lengthy first one, fall into the
contemporary genre of ‘advice to travellers’.⁸⁴ Imagining the ‘gloire’
that might accrue to Bernier upon his return, Chapelain writes: ‘you
could be the classic author of this famous part of the world’ (‘vous
seriés l’autheur classique de cette fameuse partie de la terre’, 172).
The theme of literary immortality returns frequently in Chapelain’s
letters, but—crucially—this gloire will only be won if Bernier’s writing
conforms to a méthode (‘escrire méthodiquement’). In order to become
the classic author ‘of’ Hindustan, Bernier is urged to fashion his text
according to Chapelain’s advice. Chapelain even suggests specific authors
as models (referring to the accounts published by Adam Olearius and
the Jesuit Martino Martini),⁸⁵ and spells out, perhaps needlessly, that
Bernier should send his reports back by way of the Dutch and English
merchants, sending one copy back and keeping one for himself (‘à
mesure que vous avancerés, envoyés-nous une copie de ce que vous
aurés appris et remarqué, gardant l’original par devers vous’, 170).
There is an urgency in Chapelain’s letters that stems from his sense
of who Bernier was—a man who held an ‘honourable rank among
men of letters’ (‘un rang honnorable parmi les lettrés’) because of
his ‘talents naturels’ and ‘sciences acquises’ (167). The travel accounts
from India that were already available left something to be desired,
in Chapelain’s estimation, having been written by ‘ignorant merchants
or biased missionaries’ (‘marchands ignares ou par des missionnaires
intéressés’, 221). Bernier had the potential to produce something better,
especially if he followed Chapelain’s advice:
ayés une particulière attention à vous bien éclaircir de tous les chefs que je vous
ay marqués, et d’escrire méthodiquement vos descouvertes pour nous envoyer
⁸⁴ On this genre, see J.-P. Rubiés, ‘Instructions for travellers: teaching the eye to see’,
History and Anthropology, 9 (1996), 139–90; and J. Stagl, K. Orda, and C. Kämpfer,
Apodemiken: eine räsonnierte Bibliographie der reisetheoretischen Literatur des 16., 17., und
18. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn, 1983).
⁸⁵ Adam Olearius, mathematician and Kunstkammer-curator to the court of Gottorp
in Schleswig-Holstein, accompanied an expedition to Russia and Persia. A. Olearius,
Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der Muscovitischen und Persischen Reyse, 2nd expanded edn
(Schleswig, 1656 [f. p. 1645]); trans. A. de Wicquefort as Relation du Voyage . . . en
Moscovie, Tartarie, et Perse (Paris, 1659). See T. Strack, Exotische Erfahrung und Intersub-
jektivität: Reiseberichte im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Genregeschichtliche Untersuchung zu
Adam Olearius, Hans Egede, Georg Forster (Paderborn, 1994), 57–122. The writings of
Martino Martini SJ (1614–61) dominated European knowledge of China in the period
1654–87. Extracts were translated in Thévenot’s collection, part 3. See F. Demarchi and
R. Scartezzini, eds, Martino Martini: A Humanist and Scientist in Seventeenth-Century
China ( Trent, 1995).
158 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
des copies qu’on puisse monstrer de deça à vostre gloire, et qui sentent l’homme
de lettres, comme celles d’Olearius de la Moscovie et de la Perse . . . (171–2)
[take especial care to find out about all the headings that I have given you, and
to write up your discoveries methodically, so as to send us copies that we can
show over here, to your greater glory, and which reveal you to be a man of
letters, like those of Olearius on Muscovy and Persia . . .]
Since not all travel accounts are equal, Chapelain urges Bernier to
write a ‘relation’ that fulfils certain requirements: ‘une très curieuse
relation’ (621), ‘une description exacte et authentique’ (622), and ‘une
relation exacte et capable de vous donner l’immortalité’ (264). These
requirements should be fulfilled in Bernier’s case, since he is a ‘sçavant’
and a ‘curieux’ (169) with ‘un esprit autre que de marchand’, writing
‘en philosophe et en homme de sens’ (622); but his text should still
cover certain topics if it is to qualify—hence the list of ‘heads’ for
investigation that Chapelain includes: ‘enrich yourself with all the
knowledge that you can, be it about the political state of this great
Empire, or about the nature of the arts that they have which are
different to ours’ (‘enrichissés vous y de toutes les lumières qui vous
sera possible, soit concernant l’estat politique de ce grand Empire, soit
concernant celui de la nature et des arts qui y sont differens des nostres’,
168). Bernier is advised to learn Persian, the language of the Mughal
court, in order to familiarize himself with their written culture:
Il seroit bon encore que vous recouvrassiés tous les livres principaux et estimés
parmi ces peuples, d’où vous tireriés de notables instructions pour toutes leurs
sortes de connoissances, et qui passeroient dans l’Europe pour un trésor, en les
y apportant (168–9).
[It would also be good if you good recover all of the principal books esteemed
among those peoples, from which you could draw notable information on all
their kinds of knowledge, and which would pass for a great treasure when
brought back to Europe.]
Chapelain was of course aware of the premium placed on the collection
of Oriental manuscripts, and hoped that Bernier would bring back
manuscripts of the best Persian poets, historians, and philosophers,
which ‘le Roy pourroit acheter chèrement pour en orner sa bibliothèque’
(225). He went on:
Par là vous auriés moyen de faire voir en combien de sortes de disciplines
ils sont instruits, et jusqu’où ils ont poussé leurs connoissances; comment ils
conduisent leur raisonnement, de quelle morale ils [se] servent; quelle est leur
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 159
religion gentile ou mahométane, ou toutes deux; comment ils contemplent les
choses de la nature, soit pour la physique simple, soit pour la médecine; quelles
observations ils font des astres, et s’ils y suivent la doctrine Grecque ou l’Arabe,
ou quelque autre qui leur soit particulière . . . (169)
[In that way, you will have a way of showing the different disciplines in
which [the Indians] are knowledgeable, and how far they have pushed their
knowledge; how they conduct their reasoning; what moral system they use;
what their religion is, gentile or Mahometan, or both; how they contemplate
the things of Nature, either in natural philosophy or for medicine; what
observations they make of the stars, and whether [in astronomy] they follow
the Greek or Arabic doctrine, or some other of their own . . .]
⁸⁶ Chapelain writes: ‘car cela sert fort à rendre les langues polies, à cause qu’on leur veut
plaire, et à cause que, dans la communication avec elles [women], les hommes apprennent
à adoucir la rudesse de la pronontiation, que la mollesse naturelle des organes des femmes
ammollit et facilite insensiblement’ (169). On the connection between language and the
salons, see I. Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652
(Oxford, 1977), 141–52; see also DLF-17, articles ‘Langue classique’, ‘Galant, galanterie’,
‘Préciosité’, and ‘Honnête homme’. On salons see C. C. Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes:
Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976).
160 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
T H E M A K I N G O F T H E B O O K : GALANTERIE OV E R
E RU D I T I O N
⁹³ On Barbin see G. E. Reed, Claude Barbin: libraire de Paris sous le règne de Louis
XIV (Geneva, 1974). His widow published, along with Perrault’s Contes and Fénelon’s
Télémaque, Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits (1704–17).
⁹⁴ On the Angers academy, founded in 1685, see D. Roche, Le Siècle des Lumières
en province: académies et académiciens provinciaux 1680–1789, 2 vols ( The Hague/Paris,
1978), vol 1: 15–31, vol 2: 7–12, and bibliog., 214–18.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 163
obstacle. After all, Bernier was spending quite a lot of time in the south
of France after his return. Another factor may well have been the death
of La Mothe Le Vayer (1672), Chapelain (1674), and the retreat of
Melchisédech Thévenot to his country house at Issy. However, by far
the simplest explanation would be that Bernier did not need to seek
patronage because he had brought back from India a gift from his patron
of ten thousand rupees, the equivalent of fifteen thousand livres (662).
The signs of divergence between Bernier’s writings and the methods
of the Thévenot group can be seen, once again, in the Chapelain
correspondence. When Chapelain told Merveilles in April 1662 that
Bernier’s letters were to be published by Thévenot, he added that ‘I
would take care to purge them of their impurities of language and
their too-familiar gaities which could rob them of the authority and the
gravity which are necessary for the public in such matters’ (‘j’auray soin
de les purger de leurs impuretés de langage et gayetés trop familières qui
leur pourroient oster l’authorité et la gravité qui sont nécessaires pour
le public en de semblables matières’, 221). Here, Chapelain is not just
playing the stylistic purist of the Académie française; he recognizes that
a particular style of language has to be used (appropriate to the subject
matter) in order to maintain authority in the eyes of the readership.
The difference in genre between Thévenot’s collection and Bernier’s
book is quite clear: Thévenot’s collection was printed as a series of
large quarto volumes, and included some untranslated texts. Bernier’s
book, in contrast, was printed by Barbin as a fashionable duodecimo.
Similarly, Bernier’s book carried few signs of having been modelled on
the examples Chapelain offered (Martini and Olearius).
Through his association with Boileau and other writers published by
Claude Barbin, he identified his book with the galant literary milieu,
based in polite salons like those of Mme de La Sablière. This makes
more sense when we note that Barbin was associated with the vogue
for galanterie, to the extent that publications in the galant style were
sometimes called ‘barbinades’.⁹⁵ The style of language, the epistolary
format, and the way the text is presented in dedications and other para-
text can be identified with galanterie, and thereby with a social group and
a particular ethos of intellectual activity.⁹⁶ It seems clear from Bernier’s
career after 1670 that he took his vocation as a salon guest seriously: his
connection with Mme de La Sablière was the occasion for most of his later
publications, including his large-scale exposition of his teacher’s thought,
the Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi. If Bernier had decided that this
was the path he wished to follow, it no longer seems strange that his
book did not appear in Thévenot’s collection, or that Chapelain felt that
Bernier’s text would have needed revision. Within a more erudite genre,
the ‘impuretés de langage et gayetés trop familières’ would jeopardize
the text’s authorité and gravité; whereas the same features might be the
hallmarks of ‘galanterie’. An histoire written in the galant mode would
function within the generic conventions of that style. It would seem,
then, that Bernier had opted for eloquence over erudition. In this way,
the assessment of Bernier that was to be made by Friedrich Engels—‘old,
matter-of-fact, clear French, which hits the nail on the head throughout,
without seeming to be aware of so doing’—proved to be right, albeit
for social reasons that Engels seems not to have considered.⁹⁷
This shift in the cultural space occupied by Bernier’s text did
not, however, mark any complete break with the Thévenot circle
that had supported him. On the contrary, learned correspondence
was crucial in the distribution of the book. The English translation
of Bernier’s book—which was to inspire Dryden’s tragedy Aureng-
Zebe (1676)—was made by none other than Henry Oldenburg, the
secretary of the Royal Society, with whom the Thévenot group had
long been in contact. The book was first sent to Oldenburg by André
de Monceaux, another curieux who had travelled in the Levant.⁹⁸ In
his letter, which later appeared as a preface to Oldenburg’s translation,
Monceaux praised Bernier’s qualities as a writer: namely, that he was
‘un tres galant homme’, and a pupil of Gassendi.⁹⁹ Monceaux hoped
that the Royal Society would pass judgement on the book. Oldenburg,
clearly, was sufficiently impressed to translate the work himself (whilst
C O N C LU S I O N S
¹⁰⁰ Bernier, The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol
(London, 1671); A Continuation of the Memoires of Monsieur Bernier, Concerning the
Empire of the Great Mogol (London, 1672).
¹⁰¹ A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago,
1998), 68; cf. 111 n. 102, 145, 447–53, 498 n. 108. Pitt later published Bernier with
Tavernier in Collections of Travels through Turky into Persia, and the East-Indies (1684);
and also the first edition of Chardin’s travels (1686).
¹⁰² Bernier, Travels in Hindusthan: Or The History of the Late Revolution of the
Dominions of the Great Mogol, from 1655 to 1661, trans. H. Oldenburg (Calcutta, 1904).
Preface, i–iii, and Introduction, v–xiii, here xi–xii. Copy seen is at BL 09057 a.10.
166 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
The preface goes on to point out that Bernier did not learn Sanskrit,
and that most of his information on Hinduism must have come to him
through Muslim intermediaries.
In some ways, the judgement of this 1904 Calcutta preface to
Bernier anticipates, and supplements, the argument of this chapter.
At the very least, it shows that the scientific authority of Bernier’s
text (so important for Marx, for example) could be challenged by
Indian voices. However, it could be argued that, in spite of the clear
affirmation of difference within their text, the Calcutta editors had
appropriated—along with the Kipling—certain narratives (of climatic
determinism; of the identification of mysticism with the East and science
with the West) that had been developed by Europeans like Montesquieu
partly on the basis of sources like Bernier.
The author of the Calcutta preface was not the first to raise the
problem of how Bernier’s information was mediated. By the late
eighteenth century, Bernier’s authority had already been called into
question. Among these critics was the aged Voltaire, who wrote to
Jean-Sylvain Bailly (the astronomer, and later mayor of Paris), who had
just adressed to him his Lettres sur l’origine des sciences, et sur celle des
peuples de l’Asie (1777):
Si un Bernier indou était venu à Paris ou à Rome entendre un professeur de
la Propagande, ou du collège des Cholets, & s’il jugeait de nous par ces deux
animaux, ne nous prendrait-il pas tous pour des fous et des imbéciles?¹⁰³
[If a Hindu Bernier had come to Paris or to Rome and heard a professor of the
Propaganda Fide, or of the college des Cholets, and if he formed his judgements
on us based on these two animals, would he not take us for madmen and
imbeciles?]
As Europe’s Sanskrit renaissance was dawning, it became more apparent
to Enlightened readers that perhaps Bernier had been talking to the
wrong people.
In this chapter we have seen something of the processes lying behind
the making of Bernier’s Voyages. In one sense, we have turned the tables
on Bernier, using the arguments that he used to denigrate astrology
¹⁰³ Voltaire to J.-S. Bailly, 9 Feb. 1776, letter D 19912 in Voltaire, Correspondence,
ed. T. Besterman, 51 vols (Geneva and Oxford, 1968–77), vol. 42, 394. On Bailly’s
history of Indian astronomy, see D. Raina, ‘Nationalism, institutional science and the
politics of knowledge: ancient Indian astronomy and mathematics in the landscape
of French Enlightenment historiography’ (Göteborgs Universitet, doctoral dissertation,
1999), 133–81.
The Double Eclipse: François Bernier’s Geography of Knowledge 167
¹⁰⁴ See Latour, Science in Action, 179–213 (ch. 5); cf. 258–9: ‘Irrationality is always
an accusation made by someone building a network over someone else who stands in the
way.’
¹⁰⁵ Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, 217.
¹⁰⁶ Pearson, ‘The thin end of the wedge’; Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men.
4
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque
orientale
¹ H.-L. Castonnet Desfosses, François Bernier, ses voyages dans l’Inde (Angers, 1888),
78 (no reference is given for the document). The date of the burial was 23 Sept. 1688.
St Barthélemy’s church no longer stands.
² Some have speculated that d’Herbelot and Bernier were in close contact: see
R. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950), 152.
³ B. d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionaire universel contenant généralement
tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l’Orient, ed. and preface by A. Galland
(Paris, 1697).
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 169
⁴ See for instance J. W. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des
20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1955), 98–100; and M. Rodinson, La Fascination de l’Islam
(Paris, 1982), 70.
⁵ R. Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Harmondsworth, 1994), 19.
⁶ On d’Herbelot in general, the only extended account is H. Laurens, Aux sources de
l’orientalisme: La Bibliothèque Orientale de Barthélemi d’Herbelot (Paris, 1978).
⁷ Voltaire to R.-L. de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, 11 Dec. 1742, letter
D 2698 in Voltaire, Correspondence, ed. T. Besterman, 51 vols (Geneva and Oxford,
1968–77), vol. 8, 310.
⁸ E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womers-
ley, 3 vols (Harmondsworth, 1994), vol. 3, 541 n. 41 [ch. 57]. Gibbon is referring to
J. de Guignes, Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres Tartares
occidentaux, &c. avant et depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent, 4 vols (Paris, 1756–68). See
R. Minuti, ‘Gibbon and the Asiatic barbarians: notes on the French sources of The
Decline and Fall’, in D. Womersley, ed., Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, SVEC,
355 (Oxford, 1997), 21–44. Gibbon relies heavily on d’Herbelot in chs 42, 46, 50–2,
57, 65.
170 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
alphabetical order’.⁹ The tension between the desire for narrative history
and the frustrations of alphabetic order—summed up in the contrast
between Voltaire’s assessment and that of Gibbon, and found repeatedly
in responses to d’Herbelot—provides a framework for discussing the
relationship between how the Bibliothèque orientale is structured and
how it represents the Orient.
The Bibliothèque orientale had an even warmer reception at the
close of the eighteenth century. Then, novelists and poets like William
Beckford and Robert Southey plundered it, lending authority to their
Oriental tales with quasi-erudite footnotes, and lifting plots, like that
of Vathek.¹⁰ However, these examples should not lead us to think of
the Bibliothèque orientale as a reference work consulted throughout the
eighteenth century, like the dictionaries of Moreri or Bayle. After the
first edition of 1697, there were no further editions of d’Herbelot’s
work until the late 1770s; ‘Moreri’, first published in 1674, was in its
twenty-first edition by 1759. The story of how d’Herbelot was read in
the eighteenth century has not yet been told, but it seems likely that the
publishing history of the book would be an important part of the tale.
The second edition produced a pirated version, a popularized version,
and a German translation, all within a decade.¹¹ It is not clear what the
relationship was between this rebirth of the Bibliothèque orientale and
the vogue for Oriental reading of the late eighteenth century, but the late
eighteenth-century editions certainly seem to have made d’Herbelot’s
work better known. By the early nineteenth century, it was possible for
a would-be English translator to write: ‘it may be a matter of surprise
that a Work so frequently cited by Lord Byron, and many of our most
popular Writers[,] should never yet have been presented to the Public
in an English Dress.’¹² Clearly the later editions had allowed the work
to reach a wider and less scholarly public, who were able to appropriate
what they read in ways rather different from the book’s earlier and more
erudite users.
Despite this late burst of popularity, it needs to be emphasized that
eighteenth-century readers of d’Herbelot did not always accept what
they read. Even before the second edition came out, many scholars who
consulted the book left notebooks filled with criticisms, in the hope that
one day a corrected edition could be produced: in Paris, members of the
Académie des inscriptions, like Fourmont, Leroux Deshautesrayes, and
Bréquigny;¹³ in England, the physician Joseph Letherland.¹⁴ Indeed,
when the second edition was produced, it incorporated the additions
and corrections of Johann Jakob Reiske and Hendrick Albert Schultens,
and was usually accompanied by a Supplément (1780), which grouped
together texts by Antoine Galland and Claude de Visdelou. Visdelou
(1656–1737)—who had been one of the six Jesuit ‘Mathématiciens
du roi’ sent to China in 1685—wrote his comments on d’Herbelot
while living in exile in Pondichéry after being forced to leave the Society
of Jesus because he disagreed with its line in the Rites Controversy.
His remarks attempt to redress the imbalance in d’Herbelot’s treatment
of Chinese and Indian matters.¹⁵ All these examples show that the
Bibliothèque orientale of the Beckford period was already a multi-
voiced text, laminated with commentaries and supplements. It had
been removed from the context of its production, stripped of some
of its idiosyncrasies, brought up to date. Far from reproducing the
first edition, it was—to adopt a phrase used on the title page of the
popularizing version—both ‘reduced and augmented’.
Above all, the reception of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale should
not be thought of as a continuous line of descent connecting him with
Gibbon. In fact, some commentators have been led into confusion by
the hundred-year gap between the book’s appearance (in 1697) and its
apparent heyday (c.1780–1810), and the corresponding chasm between
d’Herbelot’s supposed intentions and the ways his text was used by later
readers. For instance, while Ahmad Gunny has insisted that the work
really ‘belongs’ to the Enlightenment, Henry Laurens has emphasized
that the book must be considered a product of the Catholic erudition
of the grand siècle.¹⁶ Now, while this recognition problem is itself of
historiographical interest, there are ways of avoiding such a polarization.
Any theory of reception must surely allow that readers appropriate the
text they are reading and turn it to their own ends.¹⁷ It is not necessary
to infer from the fact that d’Herbelot’s work bore ‘enlightened’ fruit
that he was somehow a philosophe in disguise. (The same argument
was made in the previous chapter on François Bernier.) Many of the
works of scholarship gleefully plundered by a Gibbon or a Voltaire were
actually produced by the most orthodox ecclesiastical érudits. Diderot
cribbed Dom Montfaucon; the Deists made use of Denis Petau, SJ;
Gibbon relied on the Jansenist church historian Sébastien Le Nain de
Tillemont: it seems to be a general feature of philosophe reading, at least
in history and theology, that they appropriated and gave new sense
to materials furnished in the previous century by writers with quite
other intentions.¹⁸ So we should not assume that when it first appeared
the Bibliothèque orientale had the impact that its later incarnations had
for Beckford’s generation. Likewise, there should be nothing confusing
about asserting that d’Herbelot’s work was turned to ‘philosophic’ ends
by later readers, while in life he had been associated with the learned
Benedictines of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
There are, in fact, reasons for thinking that when the book first
struggled into print it was met with muted incomprehension. For
¹⁹ M. Abdel-Halim, Antoine Galland: sa vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1964), 87 n. 39, citing
a letter of the abbé Longuerue to J. A. Turretini, 30 Aug. 1697. Léonard also records
that it did not sell well (passage cited below, at note 83).
²⁰ C. Perrault, Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle avec leurs
portraits au naturel, 2 vols (Paris, 1696–1700), vol. 2, 71–2. The phrase ‘a new heaven
[and] a new earth’ alludes to apocalyptic biblical passages (Isaiah 65: 17 and 66: 22;
2 Peter 3: 13; Rev. 21: 1) and implies early modern topoi of discovery and instauration.
174 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
not intend to ‘revise the commonly received ideas about the Orient’: the
work therefore ‘confirms’ readers’ prejudices, setting forth the Orient
for the European reader to behold: it creates ‘the Orient’ as an enclosed
‘stage on which the whole East is confined’. This sense of confinement,
or mastery, suggests that the Bibliothèque orientale allowed European
readers to discover their ‘capacities for encompassing and Orientalizing
the Orient’—by means of the Orientalist’s expertise. In Said’s view,
d’Herbelot’s book expresses the efficacy of the discipline of Orientalism,
‘the triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the
Orient and making it systematically, even alphabetically, knowable by
Western laymen’. The fact that the work is organized as a series of
articles arranged alphabetically is, for Said, important: ‘what may have
been a loose collection of randomly acquired facts . . . were transformed
into a rational Oriental panorama, from A to Z.’ As an example, Said
takes the article on Muhammad, and argues that the very fact that the
information is presented in article form serves to delimit the image of the
Prophet, reducing it almost to a generic type, by a process of ‘discursive
confinement’. Moreover, Said’s emphasis on the alphabetical ordering
(‘what the printed page delivers is an ordered, disciplined judgment of
the material’) presupposes a conception of the Bibliothèque orientale as
a stable typographic unit.²¹
As his use of terms like ‘disciplinary order’ and ‘discursive confine-
ment’ reveals, the interpretation Said offers of d’Herbelot, like much
of Orientalism, is inspired by Foucault, especially the Foucault of the
period 1970–5 (from L’Ordre du discours to Surveiller et punir). It seems
fair to suggest that Said’s view of the Bibliothèque orientale can be encap-
sulated in the Foucauldian emblem of the ‘Panopticon’. Although he
does not explicitly invoke Bentham’s famous prison design in reference
to d’Herbelot, Said does use the metaphor when discussing Sylvestre de
Sacy (who was roughly the Panopticon’s contemporary).²² Nevertheless,
the picture Said paints of the Bibliothèque orientale is of a well-tempered
instrument of the Western will to represent the East (which is, in his
overall argument, intimately bound up with power relations). Not only
does this model assume that a book like d’Herbelot’s effortlessly imposes
its meaning upon a body of docile readers, it also implies that all agency
is gathered in the hands of European scholars in their metropolitan
BU I L D I N G T H E BIBLIOTHEQUE
The first edition of 1697 was a large folio volume of over a thousand
pages. Even by seventeenth-century standards, the title page made rather
impressive claims. The long list of topics covered was clearly supposed
to suggest an encyclopedic classificatory scheme:
BIBLIOTHEQUE / ORIENTALE, / ou / DICTIONAIRE / UNIVERSEL, /
contenant generalement / Tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des Peuples /
de l’Orient. / leurs histoires et traditions / veritables ou fabuleuses.
/ leurs religions, sectes et politique. / Leurs Gouvernement, Loix, Coûtu-
mes, Mœurs, Guerres, & les Révolutions de leurs Empires; / leurs sciences
et leurs arts, / Leur Théologie, Mythologie, Magie, Physique, Morale,
Médecine, Mathématiques, / Histoire naturelle, Chronologie, Géographie, Ob-
servations Astronomiques, / Grammaire, & Rhétorique. / les vies et actions
remarquables de tous leurs saints, / Docteurs, Philosophes, Historiens,
Poëtes, Capitaines, & de tous ceux qui sont rendus illustres / parmi eux, par
leur Vertu, ou par leur Savoir. / des jugements critiques, et des extraits
de tous leurs ouvrages. / De leurs Traitez, Traductions, Commentaires,
Abregez, Recüeils de Fables, de Sentences, de Maximes, de Proverbes, / de
Contes, de bons Mots, & de tous leurs livres écrits en Arabe, en Persan, ou en
²⁴ The dedication occupies the first unmarked signature; Galland, ‘Discours pour
servir de preface à la Bibliothèque Orientale’, sigs. a 1r –u 2r ; L. Cousin, ‘Eloge de
Monsieur Dherbelot, fait par Monsieur Cousin, President à la Cour des Monnoyes’,
sig. u 2v –unmarked sig. 1r . On Regnier and Commire see DLF-17 ; translations of the
poems are given in Laurens.
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 177
In fact, Galland may have been the first Western European to become
aware of the Kashf al-zunūn and to realize its importance. How he first
discovered it is not certain, but it is seems likely that he was introduced
to it by a scholar in Istanbul called Hezarfenn.³⁶ Galland’s excitement at
his discovery of the Kashf al-zunūn is revealed in his correspondence. He
immediately realized the importance of the discovery, since it represented
a vast increase in the number of Oriental works known to Europeans,
especially in Persian and Turkish. He wrote to his antiquarian friend
Jacob Spon that the list contained some thirty thousand titles—twice
the actual amount—which would make up more than forty thousand
volumes, and that he had made a translation of a small selection of
titles (some sixteen hundred), mainly concerning history, to send back
to Colbert with the full Arabic manuscript. Galland emphasizes that
Istanbul is the best place to collect ‘a great mass of all these history
books in very little time’ (‘un grand amas de tous ces livres d’histoire en
fort peu de temps’), adding that the Kashf al-zunūn was a ‘unique means
for enriching the royal library with a more or less complete corpus of
Mahometan history’ (‘il est certain que je donne l’unique moien pour
enrichir en moins de rien la Bibliotheque du Roy d’un corps assez
complet de l’histoire mahométane’).³⁷
As this indicates, one of the reasons Galland was so excited by the
Kashf al-zunūn was that it could be used to facilitate the collection of
Oriental books. In a note prefacing his initial, select translation, Galland
makes this explicit: to avoid the collection of books that are ‘only good
to look at’, Kātib Chelebi’s bibliography will help the minister to be
‘well informed as to the number and quality of these manuscripts’, and
to decide more easily what to ask his agents to look for (‘il [Colbert]
pust estre bien informé du nombre et de la qualité de ces manuscrits et
prescrire ensuite plus facilement ce que l’on en devoit choisir ou laisser’).
³⁶ This is argued in Wurm, Der osmanische Historiker, 86. Oddly, when Galland
encountered the work in Istanbul in 1682, it seems that it was new to him, which
suggests that he had not known that Nointel had already sent one copy back to
Paris.
³⁷ Galland to Spon, Istanbul, Oct. 1682, in Omont, Missions, 218–19. Much of this
is repeated in his letter to Edward Bernard, dated Istanbul 15 Apr. 1683: Bod. ms Smith
72, ff. 37–40. Galland’s translations: BN ms fr. 6131, ‘Catalogue des histoires en arabe,
en persan, et en turc tiré de la bibliothèque orientale de Mustaphe Hadji Kalfa’; a copy at
fr. 14892; Galland’s preface is printed in Omont, Missions, 216–18. Another copy with
a different preface is at fr. 6130. Galland also translated titles on the arts and sciences
(BN ms latin 11408).
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 181
G E N E R I C C O N T E X TS : I N S T RU M E N TS
O F E RU D I T I O N
⁴⁰ Although studies of Galland continue to focus on the Mille et une nuits, Abdel-
Halim does bring out his antiquarian interests: see his Galland, 51–65, 337–92, and
his ‘Correspondance d’Antoine Galland: édition critique et commentée’ (Université de
Paris, thèse complémentaire, 1964); see also M. Veillon, ‘Antoine Galland, ou la vie d’un
antiquaire dans la ‘‘République médallique’’ ’, in Trésors Monétaires, supp. 2: Médailles et
antiques, 1 (1989), 31–48.
⁴¹ A. Momigliano, ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’, in his Studies in His-
toriography (London, 1966), 1–39; first published in Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), 285–315. For docte vs. éloquent, see O. Ranum, Artisans
of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill,
1980).
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 183
written in the docte rather than the éloquent mode. Just as antiquarian
manuals helped scholars to read Livy or Tacitus, the Bibliothèque
orientale invited its readers to use it as a supplement to other historical
texts—for example, those histories of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane
compiled at about the same time by the Pétis de La Croix, and later to
be used by Voltaire and Gibbon.⁴²
One characteristic of the erudite mode of history was the collection
and definition of a body of trustworthy documents, which created
a place for probable histories. The seventeenth-century library was
conceived of as a collection that had to be assembled and arranged,
something well captured by the French verb dresser, meaning both to
collect and to organize, as in the title of Gabriel Naudé’s Advis pour
dresser une bibliothèque of 1627.⁴³ Galland himself says as much in a
text on numismatics: before one could begin analysis, one needed to
amass a large enough corpus of medals and coins—and for this purpose,
catalogues and inventories of various cabinets were an essential tool,
allowing the constitution of a virtual médaillier. But in order to carry
out the work of comparison, further tools were required, instruments
to navigate across the sea of data. As Galland goes on to say, ‘it is not
enough to clear a patch of ground: one must try to make the most
of all the advantages that one can get out of it’ (‘ce n’est pas assez
de défricher une terre: il faut tascher de profiter de tous les avantages
que l’on en peut tirer’).⁴⁴ To this end, Galland himself produced
a ‘Dictionnaire historique et numismatique’ based on the cabinet of
Nicolas-Joseph Foucault (one of his patrons), although this remained
unpublished.
An array of antiquarian data was often described in the erudite
community as a ‘corps d’histoire’: a ‘body of history’, or a ‘historical
corpus’. For example, a numismatic club hosted by the duc d’Aumont
gave itself the task of collecting a complete series of medals of Roman
que veritables, & de ces dernieres, tant anciennes que modernes de toutes les Nations
du Levant, de la Geographie de leurs Pays, de leur Theologie, & des Sciences & des
Arts ausquels elles se sont appliquées. Aprés avoir assemblé de si riches materiaux, il fut
long-temps a determiner quelle forme il leur donneroit. Enfin, aprés avoir long-temps
balancé, il les separa en deux corps, à sçavoir en celui-ci, auquel il a donné le titre de
Bibliotheque Orientale, & son intention estoit de faire paroistre l’autre sous celui de
Florilege, ou d’Anthologie.’
⁵³ Galland, Les Paroles remarquables (Paris, 1694); reprinted ( The Hague, 1694),
(Lyons, 1695); under title Orientaliana (Paris, 1708; and Amsterdam, 1730); trans.
English (London, 1695), German (Leipzig, 1787); included in the Supplément volume
to d’Herbelot ( The Hague, 1779); modern edition with preface by Abdelwahab Meddeb
(Paris, 1998).
⁵⁴ ‘Eloge de Monsieur Dherbelot, fait par Monsieur [Louis] Cousin’, in Bibliothèque
orientale (Paris, 1697), sig. u 2v –3r . Cousin writes: ‘D’abord il la composa en Arabe,
& Monsieur Colbert avoit resolu qu’elle fût imprimée au Louvre, & qu’on fondît pour
cet effet des caracteres en cette Langue. Mais cette resolution n’ayant pas été exécutée,
M. Dherbelot mit en François le même ouvrage.’ I have found no other evidence of
Colbert’s support for this scheme.
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 187
⁵⁵ See A. Blair, ‘Reading strategies for coping with information overload, ca.
1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 11–28; and Blair, ‘Note
taking as an art of transmission’, Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004), 85–107.
⁵⁶ Furetière and Naudé cited in Chartier, ‘Bibliothèques sans murs’, in Culture écrite
et société, 107–31, here 110; Naudé, Advis, 57. A teston was an obsolete ten sous piece,
so the ratio in Naudé’s metaphor is one to six (an écu normally being worth three
livres).
188 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁶⁰ See Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe; P. Rétat, ‘L’âge des diction-
naires’, in R. Chartier and H.-J. Martin, eds, Histoire de l’édition française, 2nd edn (Paris,
1990), vol. 2, 232–41; J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 134–7.
⁶¹ A. Furetière, Dictionaire universel contenant generalement tous les mots françois tant
vieux que moderne, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts, preface by P. Bayle, 3 vols
( The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690); P. Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique, 4 vols
(Rotterdam, 1697). On Leers see below, note 84.
⁶² A. Galland, et al., eds, Menagiana: ou les Bons mots et remarques critiques, historiques,
morales et d’érudition, de Monsieur Menage, recueillies par ses amis, 3rd edn, 4 vols (Paris,
1715), vol. 1, 137.
⁶³ Bod. ms Smith 47, p. 60, Bernard to T. Smith, 1 Feb. 1689: ‘I have seen ye
Dictionaire Univselle of Furetiere but find nothing in it to commend him or ye Society
of Good Spirits: it is meant, & fit for such as had rather be in an Academy & Dancing
house yn an university & study of ye lett. & Arts.’
⁶⁴ A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters,
1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995), 54–5, citing P.-D. Huet.
190 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
the later seventeenth was the trend to cast more general reference works
into dictionary form, although the move from ‘significant ordering’ to
the arbitrary non-logic of alphabetical order was never fully completed
(witness the Encyclopédie méthodique in the late eighteenth century,
which regrouped materials from Diderot’s alphabetic Encyclopédie along
subject lines). However, at the time d’Herbelot’s book appeared, the use
of alphabetic order for anything other than language dictionaries was
still sufficiently novel, at least for non-scholarly readers, for it to require
comment and justification.⁶⁸
A L PH A B E T I C D I S O R D E R
⁶⁸ On this question for the later period see R. R. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific
Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2001).
192 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
that is incomplete. It forces us to believe 1) that this woman judged the case
of Uthman and condemned him for impiety; 2) that she declared that his
penitence should be accepted. Mr d’Herbelot should have connected these two
facts in the article ‘Aischah’, and in the article ‘Othman’, and not left them
disconnected in both.]
⁷³ The main text runs pp. 1–940; then comes a ‘Supplement: les lettres ou portions
des lettres qui suivent, lesquelles ne doivent faire qu’un corps avec tout l’Ouvrage, seront
mises au rang qu’elles doivent tenir’, 941–1032. There are no DH- words under D and
no K- words at all in the main series.
⁷⁴ On ‘ilm, see F. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in
Medieval Islam (Leiden, 1970). Diderot wrote articles for his Encyclopédie with headings
like ‘Arabes: Etat de la Philosophie chez les anciens Arabes’ (Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1, 566); ‘Sarrasins ou Arabes, philosophie
des’ (vol. 14, 663); ‘Chaldéens (Philosophie des)’ (vol. 3, 20); ‘Orientale, Philosophie’
(vol. 11, 642); and ‘Perses, Philosophie des’ (vol. 12, 420).
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 195
Likewise to read about China, the relevant heading is ‘Sin’; for Mecca,
it is ‘Omm Alcora’ (Umm al-Qura, ‘the Mother of Cities’). The entry
‘Cabil’ (Qābı̄l) reveals what Islam teaches about Cain; ‘Cadha & Cadr’
refers to what d’Herbelot calls ‘le Decret Divin et la Predestination’
(qadā’ and qadar); the article ‘Engil’ deals with Muslim attitudes to
the gospels (al-Injı̄l). The title ‘Esma Allah’ concerns the ninety-nine
names of God; the Muslim concept of faith or the spiritual sphere
is described in the article ‘Din’.⁷⁵ As a scholarly convention within
European Orientalism, the use of untranslated terms seems familiar
today, and can certainly be found in the nineteenth century. Still, no
European work on Islamic culture before d’Herbelot had attempted to
apply this principle so thoroughly. D’Herbelot’s decision to organize
his material in this way—which almost negates the decision to put the
articles in alphabetical order—is almost certainly to be understood in
the light of his debt to Kātib Chelebi, and his reading of other Arabic,
Turkish, and Persian source texts. It can also be understood as reflecting
the conventions of the érudits, in attempting to remain close to the
sources. To a certain extent, the entry-headings in the Bibliothèque
orientale give place to the concepts and categories of Islamic culture.
But at the same time, they function as a badge of specialist expertise, a
rhetoric of ‘authenticity’; they create a distance between the European
reader and the material, forcing the reader to trust the mediation of the
Orientalist scholar.
What allows the non-specialist reader to access the book is the
presence of ‘finding devices’ like the cross-references between articles
and the index at the back. Galland explained in his preface how this
shifted the terms of the main text into those of European conventions
(‘nos Auteurs’):
On trouvera dans la Table qui est à la fin, les noms propres, & les noms des lieux
Orientaux, tels qu’on les prononce ordinairement, ou qu’on les trouve dans nos
Auteurs, avec le chiffre des pages où il en est parlé, pour la commodité de ceux
qui seront curieux d’apprendre ce qui est dit dans la Bibliotheque Orientale.⁷⁶
[In the table at the end of the book will be found the Oriental proper nouns
and place-names, as they are pronounced ordinarily (in French) and as we find
them (spelled) in our authors, with the number of the page where they are
⁷⁷ Later readers were aware of the importance of finding aids. The late eighteenth-
century editions not only improved the alphabetical ordering of the main text but
also improved the index. The German translator announced the intention to add a
new index, but in the end this did not appear: Orientalische Bibliothek, vol. 1, 5 (‘das
Real-Register, das in der ersten Ausgabe nur sehr kurz, und in der Quartausgabe schon
um ein Ausehnliches vermehrt war, in dieser teutschen Ausgabe noch um ein gutes Theil
erweitert worden, da durch dasselbe der recht nuzbare Gebrauch des ganzen Werks gar
sehr vermehrt wird’).
The Making of d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale 197
G E T T I N G I N TO P R I N T
⁸³ Neveu, Erudition et religion, 57, citing the file at BN ms fr. 22582, 187–91, here
187 (‘Barbin’) and 190 (‘Sur la fin’). I have restored the spelling of the original.
⁸⁴ On Reinier Leers, see Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 2,
412–13; and O. S. Lankhorst, Reinier Leers (1654–1714): uitgever en boekverkoper
te Rotterdam (Amsterdam, 1983). In the ‘Preface’ to his Dictionaire historique et
critique, Bayle says he will avoid repeating material forthcoming in d’Herbelot’s work
(‘Preface’, 2).
200 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
once again, how much the contingent and fortuitous elements that went
into the making of the book were hidden and obscured by the rhetoric
of the dedication and the éloge tradition.
The dark hints from le Père Léonard’s notes about the problems
that occurred in the attempt to get d’Herbelot’s book printed can be
juxtaposed with evidence from the letters between Leibniz and one
of his contacts in Sweden, the scholar Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld.⁸⁵
Sparwenfeld had been commissioned to write a history of Scandinavian
languages, and his dogged researches into early Gothic had led him
down through the Levant, along the Barbary coast, and up to Spain.
Back in Sweden, he corresponded with Leibniz on matters linguistic,
and exchanged scholarly news. At one point, expressing his doubts about
the reliability of certain French scholars, including Thévenot and the
Jesuit Pierre Besnier, he went on:
Ces eclaircissement[s] me sont arrivé de temps en temps malgré moy, ils se sont
offert sans le chercher. [I]l m’arriva de meme avec Mr d’Erbelot qui est mort,
qui nous a voulu deguiser d’où il avoit tiré l’essentiel de sa bibliotheque orientale,
qui s’acheve d’imprimer. [M]alheureusement pour nous deux, l’auteur arabe en
plus de 20 volumes, je dis le bibliothequaire meme en arabes MS me tomba en
main à Tunis, j’en donnay avis à l’Abbé de Dangeau, Ma lettre fu lue au plain
congres, et cella me couta son amitié, et son livre courut risque de n’estre plus
achevé chez Barbin.⁸⁶
[These insights [about Thévenot and Besnier] came to me piecemeal and
by accident, without me looking for them. I had the same experience with
Mr d’Herbelot, who has just died, who wanted to disguise the source from which
he drew most of his Bibliothèque orientale, which is now printed. Unfortunately
for both of us, the Arabic source (in 20 vols), I mean the Librarian himself, in
Arabic MSS, fell into my hands in Tunis, and I told the abbé Dangeau about
it. My letter was read out in a full session, and this cost me his friendship, and
his work was almost discontinued chez Barbin.]
The point of Sparwenfeld’s story is not merely that the Bibliothèque
orientale was in large part drawn from an Arabic source (which, as we
have seen, is true) but that d’Herbelot had wanted to keep his source
C O N C LU S I O N
⁹¹ This point, dissolving the division between ideal and material conceptions of the
book, is one that historians of the book have long been making. See D. F. McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999 [f. p. 1986]).
⁹² On civility and the scholarly world more generally, see Goldgar, Impolite Learning.
204 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
¹ Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 4 Sept. 1687, Bod. ms Smith 47, pp. 46–7.
Bernard writes ‘Monday about 9 the King touched againe . . . & will heale againe before
he leaves Oxford.’ The king arrived in Oxford on Saturday, 3 Sept. 1687.
² On Hyde, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), 248–50, 295–8.
206 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
European philosophy’. Whereupon his Majesty asked whether ‘the Chinese had
any divinity?’ To which Dr Hyde answered ‘Yes, but ’twas idolatry, they being
all heathens, but yet that they have in their idol-temples statues representing
the Trinity, and other pictures, which shew that antient Christianity had been
amongst them’. To which he assented by a nod. After that, his majestie left off
asking any more questions.³
It seems that the Catholic king was haunted by an encounter with
a young Chinese Jesuit novice, Michael Shen Fuzong, who had visited
England earlier in the year.⁴ The portrait that James mentions was by
Godfrey Kneller, and became known as The Chinese Convert.⁵ Shen
had come to Europe with the Flemish Jesuit Philippe Couplet, who
had been sent back as a ‘procurator’ to muster support for the Chinese
mission and to supervise the publication of various Jesuit texts, including
the translations from Confucius—the book James mentions—which
appeared in 1687, under the title Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, sive
Scientia Sinensis Latinè exposita (‘Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese;
or, the Chinese Science set out in Latin’).⁶ The presence of a real Chinese
convert in Europe was rare (though not unprecedented), and it certainly
lent Couplet’s tour of the Catholic courts of Europe the desired éclat.
After visiting James II’s court in London (having already met the Pope,
Queen Christina of Sweden, Louis XIV, and Victor Amadeus II of
Savoy) Shen Fuzong had visited Oxford, where he had helped Hyde to
catalogue the Chinese manuscripts in the Bodleian.
Wood’s account of the conversation is useful, because it brings into
play some of the issues surrounding the appearance of Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus. James asks whether the Bodleian had a copy, perhaps to test
whether Oxford was abreast with the latest scholarship from Catholic
Europe, and finds that it did, barely three months after it came off the
press.⁷ Hyde replies that ‘it treated of philosophy, but not so as that of
³ A. à Wood, The Life and Times, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1894), vol. 3, 226–39.
Although Bernard’s letter to Smith does not refer to the conversation with Hyde,
Bernard closes the letter by asking Smith to buy him ‘Confusii Sinica fol◦ about 14 or
15 s[hillings]’ (Bod. ms Smith 47, p. 47).
⁴ T. N. Foss, ‘The European sojourn of Philippe Couplet and Michael Shen Fu-Tsung
(1683–1692)’, in J. Heyndrickx, ed., Philippe Couplet, S. J. (1623–1693): The Man
Who Brought China to Europe (Nettetal, 1990), 121–42. Couplet had left China with
two novices, but the name of the second, who turned back at Batavia, is not known.
⁵ The painting is now in the Royal Collection at Kensington Palace.
⁶ P. Intorcetta, C. Herdtrich, F. Rougemont, and P. Couplet, Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinensis Latinè exposita (Paris, 1687), henceforth CSP in these
notes.
⁷ The date for ‘achevé d’imprimer pour la première fois’ in CSP is 28 May 1687.
Printing Confucius in Paris 207
European philosophy’, but the king jumps to the top of the disciplinary
hierarchy by asking whether ‘the Chinese had any divinity’. James must
have known that he was steering the conversation into difficult waters.
One of the most bitter controversies in the Catholic Church of the
day was the long-standing debate about the Jesuit mission in China, a
debate that was about to reach new levels of ferocity (partly in response
to the very book James mentions). This controversy had begun earlier
in the century with the question of whether the Jesuits were right to
allow their Chinese converts to continue certain ritual practices, but
soon grew to encompass related issues—how to translate Christian
terms into Chinese, for instance—until it became an argument about
an even more difficult problem, the interpretation of Chinese culture
and its place in world history.⁸ With Hyde’s response (‘Yes, but ’twas
all idolatry, they being all heathens’) we are already close to the heart of
the debate—these were the very questions that occupied committees of
censors in Rome and Paris, revolving around the Jesuits’ interpretation
of Chinese religious thought: had the ancient Chinese known of God,
and if so, was this ‘the God of the philosophers’, or the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Joseph? Did the Confucian texts reveal remnants of an ancient
theology? Were Confucian concepts compatible with Christian ones?
Hyde’s telescopically condensed analysis of religion in China (present
idolatry, despite some Christianity in the past) reveals a cautious reading
of the available sources, and one that was common among Protestants.
His caution, and the tension underlying his conversation with the
Catholic king, exemplifies the problem of confessional difference within
the Republic of Letters: the unresolved dissonance between the respect
for a supposedly international ethic of scholarship and the suspicion
that scholars of other religious persuasions might not have lived up to
that ethic.⁹
Given the public nature of the occasion, and the intensifying political
feeling surrounding James’s policy toward Oxford, it is no surprise that
every gesture of the king was observed and interpreted: this, after all,
might explain why we have such a detailed account from Wood. As on
so many other occasions, the king seems to have misjudged the timing of
his gesture. At the very moment when all eyes were upon him, anxious
about rumours that he was to introduce Jesuit colleges into Oxford,
James insisted on discussing the latest high-profile publication of the
Society of Jesus. It was not James II’s interest in things Chinese that was
per se provocative—after all, as Voltaire later quipped, ‘if he had been
a Mahometan, or of the religion of Confucius, the English would never
have troubled his reign’ (‘s’il eût été mahometan, ou de la religion de
Confucius, les Anglais n’eussent jamais troublé son règne’)—but rather
the fact that he brandished the Jesuit book as a Catholic monarch with
a Jesuit confessor visiting a hostile Protestant university.¹⁰
The conversation between James II and Thomas Hyde introduces
many of the themes that will run through this chapter. First of all, it
reminds us that the appearance of this book was newsworthy. European
scholars had been able to read about ‘the philosopher of the Chinese’
since the Jesuit reports earlier in the century, but this was the first
time that a substantial body of Chinese philosophical texts had been
presented to European readers. The book therefore aroused a great deal
of interest among the learned. It was given a much longer review in
the Journal des Sçavans than another book of that year, Isaac Newton’s
Philosophiae naturalis Principia mathematica (‘Mathematical Principles
of Natural Philosophy’).¹¹ But the arrival of the Jesuits’ Confucius was
inevitably greeted with some controversy, since by 1687 the laudatory
image of China which the Jesuit accounts conveyed was already the
subject of intense scrutiny and debate, both within and without the
Catholic fold. Perhaps of most concern, their reports of the Chinese
annals posed a challenge to biblical chronology.¹² Those who distrusted
the Jesuits, such as the Port-Royal Jansenists in France, tended to treat
what the Jesuits wrote about China with suspicion, and to assume that
¹⁰ Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. 15, in Œuvres historiques, ed. R. Pomeau (Paris,
1957), 760.
¹¹ In the Journal des Sçavans, Newton’s Principia received one page (2 Aug. 1688,
128, Amsterdam edn), while CSP received seven, probably written by Louis Cousin
(5 Jan. 1688, 5–12), followed later by Bernier’s ‘Introduction à la lecture de Confucius’
(7 June 1688, 15–22, Paris edn), discussed below. Other reviews of CSP include:
Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (Aug. 1687), 910; Bibliothèque universelle et
historique, 7 (Dec. 1687), 387–455; Acta Eruditorum (May 1688), 254–65; Philosophical
Transactions, 189 (Sept.–Oct. 1687), 376–8; Histoire des Ouvrages des Sçavans, 1
(Sept. 1687), 65–79 (which notes that the book was available from Reinier Leers in
Rotterdam).
¹² E. J. Van Kley, ‘Europe’s ‘‘discovery’’ of China and the writing of world history’,
American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 358–85.
Printing Confucius in Paris 209
the Chinese annals were mere fable.¹³ The scholarly readers of Europe
were therefore inevitably predisposed to treat with some scepticism the
reliability of the translations, the interpretative introduction, and the
chronological appendices presented in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.
Of all the texts studied in this book, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus
has attracted the most scholarship. Historians of sinology have unearthed
both the complex evolution of the translation and the long chain of
communication that brought it from China to Europe.¹⁴ The aim of
this chapter, however, it to situate the appearance of Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus within its Parisian context, and to view the publication of
the book from the point of view of the Parisian scholarly community.
As in previous chapters, the questions that concern us here are those
of patronage and publication, the support for, and the practical limits
to, Oriental research. In a sense, then, the point is to take seriously a
rhetorical question posed by the Hungarian Jesuit György Pray in 1789:
‘Quid regi Galliarum cum Confucio?’ (‘What has the French King to
do with Confucius?’).¹⁵ In keeping with the approach used in previous
chapters, we should not assume that the site of the book’s production
was an indifferent matter, nor that the Jesuits’ translations of Confucius
would have found their way into print without difficulty. It may well
be true to say, as one scholar has done, that the book ‘would have been
published in Europe eventually, regardless of Louis XIV’s patronage’,
but to do so is to ignore firstly the lessons of historical bibliography
(there are always contingencies involved in the making of any book); and
secondly the particular situation in late seventeenth-century France, a
¹³ See for example Pascal, Pensées, Lafuma 822; and J. Lesaulnier, ed., Port-Royal
insolite: édition critique du Recueil de choses diverses (Paris, 1992), 567.
¹⁴ Pinot, La Chine, 151–8; D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation
and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart, 1985), 247–99; K. Lundbaek, ‘The image of
Neo-Confucianism in CSP’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 19–30, reprinted
in J. Ching and W. G. Oxtoby, eds, Discovering China: European Interpretations
in the Enlightenment (Rochester, NY, 1992), 27–38; L. M. Jensen, Manufacturing
Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC, 1997),
77–133; N. Golvers, ‘The development of the CSP reconsidered in the light of new
material’, in R. Malek, ed., Western Learning and Christianity in China: The Contribution
and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, SJ (1592–1666), 2 vols (Nettetal, 1998),
vol. 2, 1141–64; N. Standaert, ‘The Jesuits did not manufacture ‘‘Confucianism’’ [review
of Jensen]’, East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, 16 (1999), 115–32.
¹⁵ G. Pray, Historia controversiarum de Ritibus Sinicis ab earum origine ad finem
compendio deducta (Budapest, 1789), xxiii: ‘Rursus inquirere debuisses, quo modo
Jesuitæ edendo Confucium, regem Galliæ deceperint? quid, quæso, regi Galliarum cum
Confucio?’ This alludes to Tertullian’s ‘quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?’ (‘what has
Athens to do with Jerusalem?’).
210 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
& le tres pieux Pere Tachart, Ambassadeur de sa Majesté Siammoise. Dans lequel on decouvre
Les principaux moyens dont ces Reverends Peres pretendent se servir pour la Conversion des
Heretiques d’Angleterre, & des Idolatres de Siam . . . (n. p., 1688). Cf. English trans. 1689.
²⁴ P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), 102–5.
²⁵ CSP, sig. A ij r–B ij v. See for example sig. B i v: ‘Hinc ejusdem ea vox, hodieque
inter Sinas celebratissima: Cum hu y tuon, Oppugna heretica dogmata. Quantam igitur
afferret homini pietatis amantissimo lætitiam, siquidem ad hæc felicissima legis gratiæ
tempora pertingere potuisset, tua ille Rex tutandæ & amplificandæ Religionis, extirpandæ
hæreseos, pietatis propagandæ cura?’
²⁶ Gerhard Wolter Molanus (a friend of Leibniz’s), cited in Mungello, Curious Land,
249, from a copy in the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hanover.
²⁷ The evidence of this comes from notes added to the manuscript, BN ms latin 6277
(2 vols). See Pinot, La Chine, 152–8; cf. A.-G. Camus, Mémoire sur la Collection des
grands et petits voyages [des de Bry] et sur la collection des voyages de Melchisédech Thévenot
(Paris, 1802), 329; Mungello, Curious Land, 292–6. In BN ms n. a. fr. 1216, f. 238r,
a list of items stolen by Aymon mentions ‘deux petits porte-feuilles couverts de tafetas
bleu de la Chine, le 1er contient deux cahiers, Entretiens familiers de Confucius. Le 2e
six cahiers, Arithmetique chinoise; et un cahier separé d’un porte feüille de Geographie
chinoise’. On Aymon’s theft, see A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community
in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995), 174–83. On the idea that
CSP misrepresented its own manuscipt, see A. Brou, ‘Les jésuites sinologues de Pékin et
leurs éditeurs de Paris’, Revue d’histoire des missions, 11 (1934), 551–66.
Printing Confucius in Paris 213
the close identification of the Jesuits’ Confucius with the king of France
mattered a great deal to contemporaries in the age of the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes. For most readers around the European Republic
of Letters, the theological implications of the Jesuit portrayal of China
were probably paramount; at the same time, those writing in the name
of humanist scholarship and natural philosophy needed to carefully
distance themselves from matters of faith.²⁸ The fundamental question
of trust—could the Jesuit account of China be trusted?—was one that
resonated throughout the ‘documentary culture’ of the period. At the
same time, as with other branches of scholarly ‘critique’ in the period,
Oriental erudition was deeply implicated with contemporary religious
ideology.
FAT H E R C O U P L E T ’ S TO U R
²⁸ In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, for example, the reviewer
concluded, ‘’Twill be needless to advertise, that this Account places the beginning of the
Chinese Empire long before the Deluge, according to the Holy Scriptures; wherefore if this
be to be wholly rejected, as fabulous; or if not, how it is to be reconciled with the sacred
Chronology, belongs more properly to the Disquisition of the Divines’: Philosophical
Transactions, 189 (Sept.–Oct. 1687), 378.
²⁹ Golvers, ‘The development’, 1160, 1144.
³⁰ Ibid. 1145–50, brings out the involvement of Kircher and the Bollandists.
On Kircher and his printers, see John E. Fletcher, ‘Athanasius Kircher and the
distribution of his books’, The Library, 23 (1968), 108–17, and O. Hein, Die
Drucker und Verleger der Werke des Polyhistors Athanasius Kircher S.J. (Cologne,
1993).
214 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
Couplet had left China in 1681 and had arrived in his native province
of Flanders, accompanied by Michael Shen Fuzong, in October of 1683.
They toured the Spanish Netherlands until the summer of 1684, and
then travelled to France. Their visit to Versailles in September 1684
was a triumph: the king was fascinated by Shen Fuzong, and paid
him the honour of inviting him to eat at his table, and having the
fountains in the garden turned on. After a month in Paris, Couplet and
Shen moved on to Rome, where they were to stay for the next twelve
months. It so happened that in October and November of the same year
(1684), an embassy from Siam visited Versailles, which fuelled further
enthusiasm for things Oriental among the courtiers.³¹ It also inspired
a return embassy, which provided an occasion for the expedition of six
French Jesuits as mathématiciens du roi, who were to make astronomical
observations on the voyage to China before joining the French Jesuits
in Beijing. A second Siamese embassy arrived in Paris in August 1686,
followed by another return French mission.³²
The fact that the publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus came
hard on the heels of this new burst of travel between France and the Far
East, not to mention the attendant vogue for chinoiserie at court, may
have affected Couplet’s decision to return to Paris to have it printed.
Of course, Couplet could not have known about the Siamese embassies
in advance; but he certainly seems to have profited from this sudden
new interest in the East at the court. The whole point of Couplet’s
European tour as procurator for the Jesuit mission in China was to
raise awareness of the successes of the mission, with a view to raising
funds and support. This had never been more necessary, given the
escalating polemic against Jesuit missionary methods. Constantly under
attack from all sides—from the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in
Rome (and its agents, the Vicars Apostolic); from the secular hierarchy
³¹ Foss, ‘The European sojourn’; on Siam, see D. Van der Cruysse, Louis XIV et le
Siam (Paris, 1991) and R. Vongsuravatana, Un jésuite [G. Tachard] à la Cour de Siam
(Paris, 1992).
³² On the six Jesuit ‘mathématiciens du roi’ (Fontaney, Gerbillon, Visdelou, Le
Comte, Bouvet, Tachard), see Pinot, La Chine, 15–70; C. Jami, ‘From Louis XIV’s
court to Kangxi’s court: an institutional analysis of the French Jesuit mission to China
(1688–1722)’, in K. Hashimoto, et al., eds, East Asian Science: Tradition and Beyond
(Osaka, 1995), 493–9; F. C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their
Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago, forthcoming); I. Landry-Deron, ‘Les
mathématiciens envoyés en Chine par Louis XIV en 1685’, Archives of the History of the
Exact Sciences, 55 (2001), 423–63. For chinoiserie at court see H. Belevitch-Stankevitch,
Le Goût chinois en France au temps de Louis XIV (Geneva, 1970 [f. p. 1910]).
Printing Confucius in Paris 215
T H EV E N OT, T H E B I B L I OT H E QU E D U RO I ,
A N D T H E J E S U I TS ’ C O N F U C I U S
After his return from the Netherlands (where he failed to get his Abulfeda
printed), Thévenot disappeared from the Paris scene, spending most of
the years 1671–84 in rural retirement at Issy. His isolation from the
Paris learned world, though, was not complete: he was asked, along
with Claude Hardy, to catalogue the library of Chancellor Séguier when
the latter died in 1672.³⁵ Nevertheless, he spent most of his time at
his Issy home until the death of Colbert in 1683. Thévenot’s fortunes
then changed, as the marquis de Louvois succeeded to the position of
surintendant des bâtiments du roi.³⁶ The following year, 1684, was a
year of four librarians at the Bibliothèque du roi. With the death of
Carcavi, who had been Colbert’s client, as the library’s garde, Louvois
appointed his youngest son, the abbé de Louvois (Camille Le Tellier).
Since Camille was only 9 years old, though, the overall control of
the library was in the hands of his uncle, Charles-Maurice Le Tellier,
Archbishop of Reims, while the library’s day-to-day administration
was consigned to the ‘commis à la garde’.³⁷ The first holder of this
post, the abbé Gallois, was quickly replaced, and the second, the abbé
Varès, quickly died. After the death of Varès, both Thévenot and
the abbé Eusèbe Renaudot campaigned at court to obtain the library
post, and Thévenot was appointed in December 1684.³⁸ Thévenot’s
return to the Paris learned world was made complete a month later
by his appointment to the Académie des sciences, a vacancy having
emerged with the death of Samuel Du Clos.³⁹ News of the two
appointments spread. Leibniz wrote to congratulate his old friend,
suggesting that Thévenot was finally getting his due: ‘it seems to me
that it was time to repair the fault that had been done before’ (‘Il
³⁵ BN ms latin 11877–8; the printed catalogue did not appear until 1686: see below,
note 89. For Thévenot’s involvement see V. Conrart, Lettres à Lorenzo Magalotti, ed.
G. Berquet and J.-P. Collinet (Saint-Etienne, 1981), 157; and Bod. ms Smith 8, pp. 3–4:
Thévenot to Edward Bernard, Paris 18 [? Feb./June] 1673.
³⁶ On the patronage ‘reshuffle’ that took place after 1683, see Burke, Fabrication of
Louis XIV, 91–7; for the sciences in particular, see A. Stroup, A Company of Scientists:
Botany, Patronage and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of
Sciences (Berkeley, 1990), 51–6; and D. J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status: The Members
of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, 1995), 214–20.
³⁷ C. Jolly, ed., Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, vol. 2: Les Bibliothèques sous
l’Ancien Régime, 1530–1789 (Paris, 1988), 225.
³⁸ See Bossuet, Correspondance, ed. C. Urbain and E. Levesque, 15 vols (Paris,
1909–25), vol. 3, 16 n. 3, 24–5 n. 6: the charge was worth 3,000 livres a year plus
free lodgings. Renaudot was the preferred candidate of both Claude Fleury and Charles-
Maurice Le Tellier (21 n. 14); what seems to have counted against him was that the
court thought he was ‘jansénisant’.
³⁹ AAS, Registres des Procès-Verbaux, vol. 11, f. 115r. Thévenot was presented
10 Jan. 1685 by Henri de Bessé de La Chapelle-Milon [known as M. de La Chapelle],
Louvois’ spokesman in the Academy.
218 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
an Italian version later as: Notizie varie dell’imperio della China e di qualche altro paese
adiacente, con la vita de Confucio (Florence, 1697). A modern Italian edition exists:
Relazione della Cina, trans. T. Poggi Salani (Milan, 1974). On Grueber and d’Orville,
see C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603–1721 ( The Hague, 1924),
164–204.
⁴⁹ These letters are in BN ms n. a. fr. 7497 (formerly catalogued as Renaudot 42); a
nineteenth-century copy, by P. Margry, is also at n. a. fr. 9335.
⁵⁰ On Renaudot, see ABF, DLF-17 ; A. Villien, L’abbé Eusèbe Renaudot: essai sur sa
vie et sur son œuvre liturgique (Paris, 1904); his later diplomatic career is dealt with in
P. Burger, ‘Spymaster to Louis XIV: a study of the papers of the abbé Eusèbe Renaudot’,
in E. Cruickshanks, ed., Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759
(Edinburgh, 1982), 111–37; and Burger, ‘L’abbé Renaudot en Italie (1700–1701)’,
Dix-huitième siècle, 22 (1990), 243–53. For Renaudot as ‘jansénisant’, see above,
note 38.
⁵¹ Christophe Brosseau told Leibniz that Thévenot ‘n’a pas fait la moindre démarche
pour l’obtenir’ (15 Dec. 1684, in Leibniz, A, 1/4, 487). Compare La Bruyère, Les
Caractères, ‘De la cour’, section 42. Bernou mentions Renaudot’s complaints in BN ms
n. a. fr. 7497, f. 193v (Bernou to Renaudot, 27 Jan. 1685).
Printing Confucius in Paris 221
⁵⁴ See below, Epilogue. This project is first mentioned as early as Jan. 1685 (BN ms
n. a. fr. 7497, f. 192r, Bernou to Renaudot, 20 Jan. 1685). Bernou writes: ‘uous prenez le
bon parti de uous uanger a force de faire suer les imprimeurs’; and encourages Renaudot
to publish ‘ces uoyages [qui] n’ont pas été écrits en langue Cretiene’.
⁵⁵ BN ms n. a. fr. 7497, f. 243v (Bernou to Renaudot, 7 Aug. 1685); Bernou expands
on this in a later letter (f. 249r, 28 Aug. 1685).
⁵⁶ BN ms n. a. fr. 7497, f. 205v (Bernou to Renaudot, 10 Mar. 1685).
⁵⁷ G. de Magalhães’s Nouvelle Relation de la Chine, trans. C. Bernou (Paris, 1688);
Bernou dedicated this (his only published work) to Cardinal d’Estrées.
⁵⁸ BN ms n. a. fr. 7497, f. 205v and f 218r. This fragment, ‘Synopsis Chronologica
Monarchiae Sinicae’, appeared in the posthumous 1696 edition of Thevenot’s Rela-
tions.
⁵⁹ BN ms n. a. fr. 7497, f. 218, Bernou to Renaudot, 8 May 1685; f. 232v (26 June
1685), Renaudot did send extracts, and Couplet sent comments (f. 239r–40v, 24 July
1685).
Printing Confucius in Paris 223
⁶³ Bod. ms Smith 46, p. 408, Justel to Smith, 16 Aug. 1685; see also pp. 455–6, Justel
to Smith (undated), relating that Couplet had sent Thévenot the whole of Confucius
with a Latin paraphrase.
⁶⁴ Jean Durand to Charles Bulteau, Rome 15 Oct. 1685, in J. Mabillon and B. de
Montfaucon, Correspondance inédite de Mabillon et de Montfaucon avec l’Italie, ed.
P. Valéry, 3 vols. (Paris, 1846), vol. 1, 147: ‘Le P. Couplet . . . qui attendait ici la fin
du procès pour retourner en la Chine, doit, à ce qu’on m’a dit, aller en France pour
travailler à la bibliothèque du Roi à traduire des livres chinois en langue latine.’ Note
also the letter of Schelstrate to Christian Menzel, 20 Oct. 1685: ‘At Pater Coupletus
misit Lutetiam Parisiorum ad Clarissimum Dominum Tavenot, bibliothecae regiae
custodem, omnia opera eiusdem Confusii, latinitate donata, quae modo sub proelo
sudant’, in La Correspondance d’Emmanuel Schelstrate, préfet de la Bibliothèque vaticane
(1683–1692), ed. L. Ceyssens (Brussels and Rome, 1949), 183; cf. 229, Schelstrate
to Ludolf, Dec. 1686: ‘Audio eumdem P. Coupletum post suum ex Urbe discessum
Lutetiam petiisse, ibidemque iussu regis omnes Confusii libros in latinum transtulisse
qui una cum historia sinensi eodem auctore conscripto, brevi typis edentur.’
⁶⁵ Correspondance inédite de Mabillon et de Montfaucon, vol. 1, 178: Dom Claude
Estiennot to Charles Bulteau, Rome 4 Dec. 1685: ‘Le P. Couplet, missionnaire de la
Chine, va en France. Je crois que les décisions de la Propaganda Fide, qui n’ont pas été
fort favorables à la Compagnie et à ses missionnaires dans la Chine, lui ont fait penser
à cette honnête retraite.’ On 11 Oct. 1685, the Propaganda Fide had issued another
directive against the Jesuits’ missionary methods, after which Couplet asked permission
to return to Paris: Foss, ‘The European sojourn’, 134.
⁶⁶ ‘[Couplet] est arrivé a Rome dans un temps bien [inserted above line: peu]
favorable’, La Chaize to Verbiest, 15 Jan. 1688 (cited above, note 33).
Printing Confucius in Paris 225
⁶⁷ Louvois to La Chapelle, 1 Apr. 1686: ‘Je v[ou]s enuoye une lettre du Sr Theuenot
concernant le Pere Couplet jesuite arriué depuis peu de Rome . . . et vous prie trouver
ensuite de ma part le pere de la Chaise p[ou]r luy dire q[ue] le Roy me commande
de l’aduertir que Sa Maté sera très agreable quil fasse en sorte que le dit Pere Couplet
puisse aller loger a la bibliotheque pour y travailler a la version de quelque livres [chinois,
inserted] qui y sont’, SHAT, A1 764, f. 3; cf. A. Mallon, ‘Science and government in
France, 1661–1699’ (Queen’s University, Belfast, Ph.D. thesis, 1983), 358.
⁶⁸ BN ms Archives de l’Ancien Régime 1 (register of expenses of the Bibliothèque du
roi, 23 Apr. 1684 to 31 Dec. 1689), ff. 71v, 73v, 74r. The total outlay on Couplet was
269 livres, 5 sous.
⁶⁹ J.-J. Guiffrey, ed., Comptes des Bâtiments du roi sous le règne de Louis XIV, 5 vols
(Paris, 1881–1901), vol. 2, cols 1084 and 1140 (‘la depense qu’il [Thévenot] a cy-devant
faite pour eux par ordre de S[a] M[ajesté]’).
⁷⁰ Guiffrey, Comptes, vol. 2, cols 1087 and 1141 (Mar. 1687, 2,000 livres ‘en
consideration des divers ouvrages qu’il compose, de la traduction de l’Histoire chinoise
qu’il donne au public’); then 1097 and 1141 (25 Nov./7 Dec. 1687, 3,000 livres ‘par
gratification, en consideration du travail qu’il a fait a la bibliothèque de S. M.’).
226 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
⁷¹ AN, M 856, dossier 1, items 1–32 and 69: 33 letters from Couplet to Picques,
dated between 9 May 1686 and 19 Dec. 1687 (many of them undated).
⁷² On Picques, see F. Richard, ‘Un érudit à la recherche de textes religieux venus
d’Orient, le docteur Louis Picques (1637–1699)’, in E. Bury and B. Meunier, eds, Les
Pères de l’Eglise au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1993), 253–77. The Ménage quip is recorded by
le P. Léonard, cited in B. Neveu, Erudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris,
1994), 40.
⁷³ On Menzel (or Mentzel, 1622–1701) see Mungello, Curious Land, 236–44. He
published Sylloge minutiarum lexici latino-sinico-characteristici (Berlin, 1685) and Kurtze
chinesische Chronologia oder Zeit-Register aller chinesischen Käyser (Berlin, 1696). I have
not seen the letters from Couplet to Menzel in Glasgow University Library, ms Hunter
299 (U.6.17).
⁷⁴ The ‘pinceaux chinois pour M. Menzel’ is mentioned in AN, M 856, dossier 1,
item 4, letter dated 30 June 1687; Couplet had run out of his own brushes by this time
and had got one from another Jesuit (item 9).
Printing Confucius in Paris 227
some copies, as he promised, and God alone knows when that will
be’ (‘quant a la grammaire vous l’aurè apres que Msr Theuenot qui
en est le mestre et prend tous les exemplaires pour soÿ me fera la
faueur de m’en donner quelques exemplaires comme il m’at promis
et quand serà cela Dieu seul le peut scauoir’).⁸⁰ A few weeks later he
added, ‘as for the Arabic book, I can’t find a way to get it from the
very irritating Mr Thevenot. I think Monsr will get a more skilful and
satisfying response on this . . . from Mr Renaudot, whom I intend to
visit’ (‘touchant le liure arabe, je ne trouue pas le moyen de l’auoir de
ce tres facheux Sr Theuenot. je crois que Monsr aura plus d’adresse et
de satisfaction sur cela [. . .] de Monsr Raynodot qui je pretend d’aller
voir’).⁸¹
As well as spending time with Renaudot, we find that Couplet
met François Bernier, who was as excited as any by the arrival of the
Confucian classics. Bernier had written to the Jesuit to express his
admiration for the book, and the two met for a meal at the Bibliothèque
du roi.⁸² Bernier was so impressed with Confucius that he decided to
start a translation from the Jesuits’ Latin into French, so that he could
present the text to the salon of Mme de La Sablière. Unfortunately,
he died before he could complete these translations, and only the
introductory notes he made were published.⁸³ Other Paris savants were
equally drawn to this new addition to the philosophical library: within
a year, Louis Cousin and Simon Foucher had both produced books
of moral maxims culled from Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. This was
only the beginning of the book’s reception among the philosophers
of Europe.⁸⁴
There remains one other angle from which to approach the production
of Couplet’s book in Paris: its printing history. Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus was printed by Daniel Horthemels, a Flemish convert to
⁸⁵ After his death in 1691, Horthemels’s firm did not survive long, going bankrupt
in 1692: Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 726; Chartier and Martin, Histoire de l’édition
française, vol. 2, 340; P. Renouard, Répertoire des imprimeurs parisiens: libraires et fondeurs
de caractères en exercice à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Nogent-le-Roi, 1995); J.-D. Mellot and
E. Queval, Répertoire d’imprimeurs/libraires (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): état en 1995 (4000
notices) (Paris, 1997). Horthemels’s best-known production is Adrien Baillet’s Vie de
Monsieur Des-Cartes, 2 vols (Paris, 1691).
⁸⁶ Noel Golvers has speculated that the reason Couplet chose to publish his book
with Horthemels, and not any other Paris printer, was the convenient proximity between
Horthemels’s shop and the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand (Golvers, ‘The development
of the CSP’, 1160). However, the rue Saint-Jacques had innumerable printers’ and
engravers’ workshops, so Horthemels’s location can therefore not be a reason for the
choice.
⁸⁷ BN ms Archives de l’Ancien Régime 1, ff. 22v.
⁸⁸ Choisy, Journal du Voyage de Siam, 57: ‘M. Thévenot a donné de belles cartes
marines aux jésuites: il les a fait copier sur celles qui sont dans la Bibliothèque du Roi.’
⁸⁹ [M. Thévenot, and C. Hardy, eds,] Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque de
defunt Monseigneur le Chancelier Seguier (Paris, 1686). Two editions appeared that year,
one chez F. Le Cointe, one chez Horthemels.
⁹⁰ G. Tachard, Voyage de Siam des Pères Jésuites, envoyez par le Roy aux Indes et à la
Chine, avec leurs observations astronomiques, et leurs remarques de physique, de géographie,
d’hydrographie, et d’histoire (Paris, 1686); Second voyage du Pere Tachard et des jesuites
envoyez par le Roy au royaume de Siam, contenant diverses remarques d’histoire, de physique,
de géographie, & d’astronomie (Paris, 1689); A. de Chaumont, Relation de l’ambassade
de . . . à la cour du roi de Siam: avec ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable durant son voyage
(Paris, 1686).
230 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
Philosophus.⁹¹ What has rarely been remarked is that this was identical
with the privilège printed in the second part of Thévenot’s Relations de
divers voyages curieux, first published in 1664.⁹² The details are the same:
in both cases there is an extract of the lettres patentes dated 18 February
1663, signed by ‘Justel’, granted to Girard Garnier (Thévenot’s uncle),
for a Recueil de diverses Relations de Voyages curieux, qui n’ont point esté
publiées. The details are important: the collection is to appear in one
or several volumes, and the ten years’ duration of the privilège is to
begin from the date when each volume came off the press (‘à compter
du jour que chaque volume sera acheué d’imprimer pour la premiere
fois’). The only difference between the two is that in Couplet’s book
there is a line added, explaining that ‘the said Mr Garnier ceded his
privilege rights for Confucius alone to Daniel Horthemels, marchand-
libraire in Paris, to enjoy those rights according to the agreement made
between them’ (‘Ledit sieur Garnier a cedé son droit de Privilege pour le
Confucius seulement, à Daniel Horthemels Marchand Libraire à Paris,
pour en jouïr suivant l’accord fait entre eux’), and the date given for the
completion of the first impression (‘achevé d’imprimer pour la premiere
fois’) is 28 May 1687.
What this means is that Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was printed
on the twenty-four-year-old privilège given for Thévenot’s collection
of voyages. As was noted in Chapter 2, Thévenot was using, under
the name of his uncle Girard Garnier, a ‘package’ privilège, a practice
that was relatively common for open-ended series like the Relations.⁹³
Thévenot had already used an older privilege before, when he published
the 1681 octavo volume which effectively formed a fifth part of the
⁹¹ The ‘Extrait du privilège’ is the last page. It does not apply merely to the Tabula
chronologica section of the book, as Golvers implies (‘The development of the CSP’,
1163).
⁹² Thévenot, Relations, part 2 (Paris, 1664), sig. θ iijr . The date given for the
registration of the privilège with the Communauté des Imprimeurs et Libraires is 23
Apr. 1663. The fact that the CSP appeared on Thévenot’s privilège is noted by J. Lenox,
‘Description of the collection of the Voyages of Thévenot’, Contributions to a Catalogue
of the Lenox Library, 3 (New York, 1879), 19.
⁹³ See above, Chapter 2, note 84. Normally, a ‘package privilège’ would have required
the entire contents of the collection to be listed in the original lettres patentes. The
Confucius Sinarum Philosophus pushes this practice to the limit of legality, since we know
that Thévenot could not have proposed to translate these texts as early as 1663, when
the privilège was granted.
Printing Confucius in Paris 231
Relations.⁹⁴ It seems clear that he was doing the same thing again with
Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.
Why did the Jesuits’ translation of Confucius appear under the
privilège for Thévenot’s travel collection? Unfortunately, owing to the
lack of further evidence, we can only answer this question with tentative
suggestions. The most obvious reason might be the fact that Intorcetta’s
translation of the Doctrine of the Mean had already been published by
Thévenot. The question remains, though, why Couplet did not simply
apply for a privilège of his own for the book. The use of Thévenot’s
licence does not necessarily prove that Couplet had any trouble with
the censors (on the contrary, Couplet’s manuscript was approved by
a royal censor):⁹⁵ what it does suggest, however, is that this was the
path of least resistance. We know that Couplet was eager to get back to
Lisbon (to reach China) and therefore wanted to work quickly. To get
through the legal formalities in this way, by passing off the Confucius
Sinarum Philosophus as a part of Thévenot’s series, was probably the
easier, cheaper, and faster route.
C O N C LU S I O N
Archbishop got him removed from the post around the year 1691–2,
with some violence or threat’ (‘Mais comme il [Thévenot] estoit fort
négligent et qu’il ne songeoit qu’à son estude, et pas mesme à ses
affaires, le mesme archevesque l’en fit sortir vers l’an 1691–2 environ,
avec quelque violence et menace’).⁹⁶ After his fall from grace, Thévenot
retired to Issy, where he died the following year.
What this chapter has sought to do is to bring out the connections
between a story of the Jesuits’ production of knowledge about China—a
story now well researched by historians of sinology—and the Paris
intellectual scene that we have been criss-crossing in the previous
chapters of this book. Details that seem insignificant when placed
within the context of one narrative can become more important within
another. The fact that Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was edited at the
Bibliothèque du roi, printed in the rue Saint-Jacques, and dedicated
to Louis XIV was important to contemporary readers (as illustrated
by the examples of Leibniz’s friend Molanus and of James II). If we
want to understand the local context for the production of the Jesuits’
Confucius, we should be interested in the conjunction of interests and
circumstances that led to Philippe Couplet’s returning to Paris to have
it printed there. Thévenot’s role as a mediator, as the head of the
Bibliothèque du roi, then becomes important. As with so many other
aspects of Thévenot’s career, his role in the introduction of Confucius
to Europe has escaped the view of historians, because the kind of activity
he engaged in is rarely given centre stage. It remains the case, however,
that the first time any translation of a Confucian text was printed in
Europe it was as part of Thévenot’s collection of Relations de divers
voyages curieux (in 1672); and the first large corpus of Confucian texts
to appear in Europe—the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus —was also,
from a strictly legal viewpoint, a part of Thévenot’s series (because it
was printed under the same privilège). Although he may sometimes have
been less of a help than a hindrance to Couplet, Thévenot was clearly
involved to a considerable degree, not only in his capacity as manager
of the royal library, but also (it seems) providing the connection with
⁹⁶ Léonard cited in Neveu, Erudition et religion, 55. Christophe Brosseau told Leibniz
that ‘Mr Thevenot dont la disgrace est venüe par les intrigues du Sr Clement son
sousbibliotéchaire qui a tellement gaigné l’esprit de Monsr de Rheims qu’il l’a obligé de
congédier le dit Sr Thevenot, et de donner sa place à luy Clement’ (25 Apr. 1692; A,
1/8, 224). In spring 1692 other Paris scholars told Leibniz about Thévenot’s dismissal:
Germain Brice (A, 1/7, 658); Nicolas Toinard (A, 1/7, 592); and Daniel Larroque (A,
1/7, 650).
Printing Confucius in Paris 233
² On the role of ‘strange facts’ in the epistemology of the scientific revolution, see
L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998),
215–53.
236 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
desireroit fort de pouvoir obtenir l’extrait de ce Manuscrit, par la faveur de
M. Thevenot, qui n’est pas moins illustre par ses manieres obligeantes, que par
l’etendue immense de son erudition.³
[I have been asked a question which no-one could better solve than
M. Thévenot . . . Here it is: Fr Kircher, in his China illustrata, published an
ancient Chinese monument found in China, written in the language and
characters of the country. Some sceptics have cast doubt on it, but Fr Couplet
refers to the judgement of M. Thévenot, who found some mention of it in
some Arabic manuscript. On this, M. Andreas Mullerus, the man in Europe
who knows the Chinese language best, would very much like to be able to
get an extract from this manuscript, by the favour of M. Thévenot, who is
no less illustrious for his obliging manners than for the immense range of his
erudition.]
Andreas Müller was a Berlin-based scholar engaged in the ongoing
controversy over the history of Christianity in China.⁴ The discovery
in 1625 of the ‘Nestorian stone’ in western China—a monument
bearing an inscription which seemed to prove that there had been
Christians in China long before the Franciscan missions of the Middle
Ages—caused great excitement in Europe, and gave the Jesuits the hope
that the antiquity of Christianity in China might make their apostolic
work easier. The exposition and interpretation of this monument was
intensely controversial, because enemies of the Jesuits, inside and outside
the Catholic Church, suspected that the stone may have been a forgery.
To address this debate was one of the central purposes of Kircher’s
book China monumentis . . . illustrata (1667).⁵ Scholars like Leibniz
⁶ On antiquarianism and its relation to church history (and theology) in this period, see
above, Introduction; Kircher’s book on China is discussed in this context in A. Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997), 150–4.
⁷ Papebroch to Leibniz, 26 Jan. 1687 (A, 1/4, 613): ‘Dominus Thevenot Biblio-
thecarius Regius Parisijs mihi scripit [scripsit?] se invenisse Arabico in MS. documenta
fidei apud Sinas post annum M. prædicatæ: eaque daturum prælo. De Antiquiori etiam
prædicatione multa habet Kircherus in sua China illustrata, quam vobis notam arbitror
ubi etiam invenientur varia Latino-sinica qualia optas. Libri autem Kircheriani possunt
Amstelodamo haberi.’
⁸ Leibniz to Papebroch, Feb. 1687 (A, 1/4, 622): ‘Cum Celeberrimo Thevenotio
magnæ doctrinæ et humanitatis viro aliqvod mihi qvoqve olim intercessit per literas
commercium, diu est qvod nobis Abulfedæ Geographi Arabis præstantissimi spem fecit.
Egoque olim ad Carcavium Bibliothecarium Regium misi Schickardianum Abulfedæ
exemplar, qvod spero nunc ad Thevenotium pervenisse.’
⁹ Papebroch to Leibniz, 1 Apr. 1687 (A, 1/4, 630–1, here 631): ‘Clariss. Thevenotius
multa promittit: sed qui virum se nosse putant, parum expectant à semper cunctabundo
238 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
alioqui apto multa præstare.’ Further discussion of Chinese matters followed (A, 1/4,
645–7, and 653–6).
¹⁰ P. Couplet, Histoire d’une Dame chrétienne de la Chine, trans. P.-J. d’Orléans (Paris,
1688), 94.
¹¹ A, 1/8, 182–3 (Pellisson to Leibniz, 15 Nov. 1692).
Epilogue 239
¹⁴ Leibniz to Magliabecchi, 29 Dec. 1693 (A, 1/9, 711); 22 Apr. 1694 (A, 1/10, 360);
23 Dec. 1695 (A, 1/12, 239); late 1697 (A, 1/14, 523, 799) and 1698 (A, 1/15, 203).
¹⁵ Magliabecchi to Leibniz, Feb. 1698: ‘Quella traduzzione del Sig. D’Erbelot, sarà
serrata in qualche Stipo di S. A. S, ed esso medesimo facilmente non si ricorderà dove
sia’, A, 1/15, 304.
¹⁶ Leibniz, Novissima Sinica (Hanover, 1698); Leibniz, Discours sur la théologie
naturelle des Chinois, ed. and trans. C. Frémont (Paris, 1987), 57–72, here 71; and ‘La
préface des Novissima Sinica’, tr. P. Bornet, Monumenta Serica, 15 (1956), 328–43,
here 342; English translations include The Preface to Leibniz’ Novissima Sinica, tr. and
ed. D. F. Lach (Honolulu, 1957), and Writings on China, tr. and ed. D. J. Cook and
H. Rosemont, Jr (Chicago and La Salle, 1994). The literature on Leibniz’s interest in
China is large, but on this text, see P. Riley, ‘Leibniz’s political and moral philosophy in
the Novissima Sinica, 1699–1999’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 217–39.
¹⁷ Leibniz to Sparwenfeld, 8 Feb. 1697, A, 1/13, 541.
¹⁸ Sparwenfeld to Leibniz, 13 Mar. 1697: A, 1/13, 637–43, here 640 (‘il est aussi de
mes amis, il le cherchera infalliblement, pourveu qu’il ne soit pas perdu’).
¹⁹ Leibniz to Ancillon, 5 Dec. 1707, cited in Preface to C. Ancillon, Mémoires
concernant les vies et les ouvrages de plusieurs modernes célèbres dans la république des lettres
Epilogue 241
however, the idea that an Arabic travel text, discovered in a Paris library,
would cast light on the history of Christianity in China was not so
much Thévenot’s, as that of the abbé Eusèbe Renaudot. Renaudot had
mentioned this idea in 1685 in his letters to the abbé Bernou, who had
been able to get Philippe Couplet to comment on a segment of the
text. For reasons which remain obscure, it took Renaudot over thirty
years to finish editing these Arabic travels to China. It was only in
1718, three years after Leibniz was dead, that Renaudot published his
translation (which was from a manuscript in the Colbertine library),
along with a lengthy introduction and notes, to which he joined five
appendices which made up the largest part of the book. Throughout
the scholarly apparatus, Renaudot made critical swipes at almost all his
predecessors.²⁰ In the essay ‘sur les Sciences des Chinois’, he demolished
the sinophilia of Isaac Vossius, which he saw as encouraging libertines to
question the authority of Holy Writ.²¹ In the ‘Eclaircissement touchant
la Predication de la Religion Chrestienne à la Chine’, he recounted the
history of the controversy over the Nestorian stone, from its discovery,
through the writings of Kircher, the challenges by Georg Horn, to the
defence by Andreas Müller. Renaudot, who had made himself an expert
in the history of the Nestorian Church, allowed that the stone itself was
genuine, but he ridiculed Kircher for misunderstanding the inscription’s
Syriac. As for the Arabic manuscript of the Bibliothèque du roi—which
was a different text—he was sure that Thévenot had been mistaken:
‘what he [Couplet] says next about the Arabic manuscript which is not,
and has never been, in the Bibliothèque du roi, he reported on the
(Amsterdam, 1709), xxix–xxx: ‘Pour ce qui est de Mr. d’Herbelot, feu Mr. Thevenot,
le Bibliothecaire du Roi, m’apprit que cet habile Orientaliste étant à Florence, y avoit
traduit pour le Grand Duc, je ne sai si de l’Arabe ou du Persan, la Relation d’un ancien
voyage dans la grande Tartarie, qui paroissoit prouver qu’il y avoit eû autrefois des
Chrétiens à la Chine. J’en ai écrit à Monsieur Magliabecchi, mais il ne m’a point pû
donner satisfaction là dessus. Cependant l’original même de cette Relation meriteroit
d’être consideré.’
²⁰ E. Renaudot, Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine, de deux Voyageurs
Mahometans, qui y allerent dans le neuviéme siecle; traduites d’arabe avec Des Remarques
sur les principaux endroits de ces Relations (Paris, 1718); the main text (1–124) contained
the translations from Sulaiman al-Tajir (Sulaiman the Merchant) and Hasan ibn Yazid
Abu Zaid al-Sirafi; Renaudot included a long preface (iii–xxxix), a commentary on the
texts (125–75), and the five appendices (175–397).
²¹ The ‘Eclaircissements sur les sciences des Chinois’ (340–97) was separately pub-
lished in English translation as A Dissertation on the Chinese Learning (London, 1733).
Renaudot was targeting Vossius’s remarks in Variarum Observationum Liber (London,
1685), 69–85 (‘De artibus et scientiis Sinarum’).
242 Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France
testimony of the late M. Thévenot, who thought he had found it, but
was mistaken’ (‘ce qu’il [Couplet] a dit ensuite du Manuscrit Arabe qui
n’est point, & n’a jamais esté dans la Bibliotheque du Roy, il l’a dit sur
le tesmoignage de feu M. Thevenot, qui crut l’avoir deviné & qui se
trompa’).²²
In this, Renaudot echoes sentiments voiced by Sparwenfeld earlier, in
his response to Leibniz. Sparwenfeld mentioned that he had encountered
Couplet and his companion Shen Fuzong in Madrid, and that they had
promised him a treatise on Chinese affairs. The scholarly world was still
waiting, he said, for the Chinese dictionary that Couplet had brought to
Europe, which should have been printed in Chinese characters. Perhaps
unaware that he was attacking one of Leibniz’s friends, he traced the
problems back to Thévenot:
il faloit que tout y fut, tout autrement que le bon Thevenot fit imprimer
Confycius si nonchalament. Je me veu du mal d’avoir eu trop de bonne foy et
conivence avec ce viellard, qui d’ailleurs n’estoit pas mal noté, mais ceux qui le
connoissent mieux n’en sont pas mieux satisfaits que moy. Il rammassoit tout ce
qu’il pouvoit, et le remetoit puis dans un coin du tiroire ou armoire à moissir,
envieux que le monde sceut quelque chose dont il n’eut pu donner des raisons.
Herbelot avoit la meme maladie d’envier et je vois qu’il est difficile de taxer une
nat[ion] entiere de tell et tel vice, in omnibus labimur omnes, mais pourtant un
peu moins ceux quos ex meliore lato fiunt situs. Nil est asperius humili cum surgit
in altum. Der apfell falt nicht weit vom baum.²³
[everything was supposed to be there, and quite differently from the nonchalant
way that good old Thévenot had Confucius printed. I’ve caused myself trouble
by having too much good faith and connivance with that old man, who was by
the way well-regarded, but those who know him best were no better satisfied
with him than me. He hoarded everything he could, and filed it in the corner
of a drawer or an armoire to go mouldy, envious that the world might know
something that he could not explain. Herbelot had the same jealous madness,
and I know it is difficult to charge an entire nation with this or that vice,
in omnibus labimur omnes, but still a little less those quos ex meliore lato fiunt
situs. Nil est asperius humili cum surgit in altum. The apple doesn’t fall far from
the tree.]
M A N U S C R I P T S O U RC E S
Cambridge: University Library
ms Add. 7513: ‘Prospectus of a Work entitled A Selection of curious and inter-
esting Passages from the Bibliothèque Orientale of D’Herbelot. Translated
from the French by E. H. Howes.’
London: British Library
ms Add. 6210, f. 144: ‘Letter of Dr Letherland, relative to a passage in
Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale’, 1758.
Oxford: Bodleian Library
ms Smith 5, p. 151: Job Ludolf to Edward Bernard (no date); p. 153 (Ludolf to
Bernard, 15 Dec. [1677?]); pp. 155, 157: Ludolf to M. Thévenot, 20 Mar.
1678 and 31 Dec. 1683.
ms Smith 8, pp. 3–4: M. Thévenot to Bernard, Paris [18 Feb.?] 1673; pp. 5–6:
undated fragment of letter from Thévenot to Bernard.
ms Smith 11, pp. 15–16: Thomas Hyde to M. Thévenot, 24 June 1673.
ms Smith 46: letters of Henri Justel to Thomas Smith; pp. 207–30: nine letters
from Galland to Smith.
ms Smith 72, ff. 37–40: Galland to Edward Bernard, Istanbul 15 Apr. 1683.
ms Smith 130, pp. 10–11: Thomas Smith to M. Thévenot, 8 Dec. 1690.
Paris:
Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères
Mémoires et Documents, France 891, ff. 396–9: Morin’s denunciation of
Bernier.
Archives de l’Académie des sciences
Registres des procès-verbaux.
Dossiers personnels: ‘Thévenot, M.’
Archives nationales
M 856, dossier 1, pièces 1–32 and 69: letters from Philippe Couplet to Louis
Picques.
MM 267: le P. Léonard’s file on the Collège royal up to 1672.
AJ17 , carton 2, unnumbered bundle ‘Caractères orientaux’.
Affaires étrangères BIII 265: documents concerning the jeunes de langues.
Colonies C2 62, ff. 14–22. Bernier, ‘Mémoire sur l’Etablissement du Commerce
dans les Indes’.
246 Bibliography
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal
ms 2331: Bernier, ‘Confucius ou la science des princes’.
ms 2689: another copy of Bernier on Confucius.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des manuscrits
Fonds français:
fr. 6137–9: Galland letters.
fr. 7200: ‘Mémoire’ of Pierre-Victor Michel, Louis XIV’s envoy to the Shah of
Persia, 1706–9.
fr. 10729: letters from M. Thévenot to Mazarin on conclave of Rome (1654–5).
fr. 12405: ‘Bibliothèque Orientale ou Dictionnaire Historique, [inserted: Chro-
nologique,] Géographique, des peuples de la haute Asie, des Chinois,
des Indiens, des Tartares et des Japonais. Pour servir de Supplement à
la Bibliothèque Orientale de d’Herbelot’, 64 pp., covering A-G. [attrib.
Leroux-Deshauterayes]. Cf. fr. 25689.
fr. 12764, ff. 66–9: d’Herbelot letters to F. Charpentier, 1666–7.
fr. 15274: notes on ‘Professeurs Royaux’ by Martin Billet de Fanière.
fr. 15506, ff. 151–7: Bernier, Eclaircissement sur le livre de M. de la Ville
(privately printed pamphlet).
fr. 19658, ff. 37–8: M. Thévenot to Mabillon, 10 Apr. 1686.
fr. 22582, ff. 181–91: le P. Léonard’s notes on d’Herbelot.
fr. 22583, ff. 34–5: le P. Léonard’s notes on Thévenot.
fr. 24998: Journal of Jean Deslyons, doyen of the Paris faculty of theology.
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fr. 29303 [Cabinet des Titres: Pièces originales, vol. 2819], dossier 62724:
‘Thévenot à Paris’.
Nouvelles acquisitions françaises:
n. a. fr. 563, ff. 72–144: letters from abbé Eusèbe Renaudot to Nicolas Toinard
(1678–1700).
n. a. fr. 1216, f. 238r: list of items stolen by Jean Aymon from the Bibliothèque
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n. a. fr. 1887–9: letters of Jean Chapelain, copies (the ‘Sainte-Beuve ms’).
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n. a. fr. 5856, ff. 102–3: Gassendi’s notes on the solar eclipse of 12 Aug.
1654.
n. a. fr. 6262, f. 31: letter from François Charpentier to d’Herbelot [1667?].
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n. a. fr. 7497: letters from Claude Bernou to Eusèbe Renaudot.
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n. a. fr. 8973, f. 142–62: Fourmont, ‘Index de noms propres (A-C) de la
Bibliothèque Orientale’.
Other fonds:
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ms latin 6277 (1–2): manuscript of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.
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Index
Abū ‘l-Fidā’ (Abulfeda) 108; geography, 44, 109, 116–7, 120–2, 186, 202;
interest in 107–10; authority and alphabetic order 194;
of 110–1; Thévenot bibliographies 200–1
project 107–28, 216, 221–2, Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer de
233, 237, 243; extract in Paulmy, marquis d’ 169
Thévenot’s Relations 102–3 Aristotle 96, 100n, 140, 148
Abyssinia, see Ethiopia Arnauld, Antoine, Perpetuité de la
Académie française 19, 53, 60 Foi, 33–4
Académie des inscriptions 36, 75–6, Arpajon, Louis d’ 145, 160n
98n, 171; see also ‘petite académie’ arts (mechanical) 35, 82–3, 91–7,
Académie Royale des Sciences 158–9, 216
(Paris) 18, 20, 39, 52–3, 57–61, artisans 35, 82, 94, 96
83, 88–9, 215, 217–8, 225 Arvieux, Laurent d’ 12n, 113
Accademia del Cimento 67, 71, 75, 98 ‘Asiatic mode of production’ 133–4;
Accademia della Crusca 69–71, 176 see also Oriental despotism
accommodation (missions) 207, 211 Assembly of the Clergy (France) 117
air pump 82, 91 astrology 60–1, 140–2, 166; in
Aisha, wife of Muhammad 191 Mughal empire 150–4
alchemy 61, 142 Atkinson, Geoffroy 9n, 10
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 234 atomism 135
Aleppo (Halab) 2n, 27–8, 156, Aulus Gellius 14
196 Aumont, Louis-Marie de Rochebaron,
Alexander VII, pope 44, 73–4, 86 duc d’ 183
‘Alf layla wa-layla, see Thousand and Aureng-Zebe (Dryden) 164
One Nights Aurangzeb 131, 136, 151
Algiers 28, 30 automata 35
Aliamri, Sergio (Sarkis al-Gamri) 23 Auvergne, Pierre d’, royal professor of
Allacci, Leone 44, 73–4 Arabic, 78
Alliot, Pierre 91n Auzout, Adrien 91n, 96
alphabetic order 169–70, 174–5, Aymon, Jean 212
178–9, 190–6, 201
Amsterdam 117–8, 127, 213
anatomy 53, 151–2, 218 Bacon, Francis 58, 87, 91, 93; New
Angers, academy of 145n, 162 Atlantis, 58; history of trades 93
Anquetil-Duperron, Baghdad 2n, 28, 156
Abraham-Hyacinthe 133 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain 166
Antwerp 213, 226 ‘baldachin’, 2n
Apollonius of Perga 35, 71, 74, 110 Baluze, Etienne 22
Arabian Nights, see Thousand and One Barberini, Francesco 44, 72
Nights Barberini, Maffeo, see Urban VIII
Arabic, teaching of 23, 31; Collège Barbin, Claude 162–3, 198–201
royal chair 2, 23, 25–6, 78, Barrow, Isaac 110
114–5; interpreters 23–5; and Basra 156
Greek texts 35, 110; printing 23, al-Battān¯ı 111
292 Index
Baudelot de Dairval, Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, bishop of
Charles-César 98n, 193n Condom, later bishop of
Baudier, Michel 146 Meaux 6, 17, 22, 33n, 55n, 59,
Bayle, Pierre 4, 10, 27n, 189; and 77, 79, 93n, 217n, 220, 235; ‘petit
Bernier 142–4; on concile’ of, 77, 220
d’Herbelot, 191–2; Boulliau, Ismael 146
Dictionnaire 170, 197, 199 Bourdelot, Pierre Michon, abbé 90n
Bayly, C. A. 12n, 151, 167 Bourzeis, Amable de, abbé 19, 22,
Beckford, William 83; Vathek and 52–61, 62, 64, 68, 76, 78, 118
d’Herbelot 170–2 Boyle, Robert 14, 15, 82, 104–5, 220,
Beijing 214–5, 219, 224, 243 234
Bengal 161 Boym, Michael 219
Bernard, Edward 104–5, 109–10, Braem, Corfitz 91
117, 124–5, 180n, 189, 205n, brahmins 136, 152, 155
206n, 217n, 220 Bréquigny, Louis de 171
Bernier, François 131–167 passim; 14, Brèves, François Savary de 23, 116–7,
85, 95, 116n, 168, 221; and 122
Gassendi 135, 145; on Brosseau, Christophe 218n, 220n,
Confucius 208n, 228, 243; and 232n
Thévenot 155–6; ‘letter to Brosses, Charles de 83
Colbert’ 133–4; ‘letter to Brown, Harcourt 57n
Chapelain’, 136–9 buddhism 154
Bernini, Gianlorenzo 72–3 Budé, Guillaume 17
Bernou, Claude, 220–3, 241 Bulteau, Charles 224n
Besnier, Pierre 200 Burke, Peter 148
Beuningen, Coenraad van 91n, 111, Byron, George Gordon, Lord 170
113 Byzantine du Louvre 15, 124
bible 31–3, 55–6, 61, 77; see also
polyglot bibles
biblical history 6–7, 59, 146, 208 ‘cabinets’ 45, 83, 88, 90, 98–9
Bibliothèque du roi 21–2, 30, 36, 53, ‘Cabinet du Roi’ series 21
77, 99, 113n; d’Herbelot Cairo 29, 146n
and 177, 179, 184–5, 203, 233; Calcutta 165–6
Thévenot at 215–8, 226; Couplet Capuchins 24
and 226–32 Carcavi, Pierre de 22, 115–16, 118,
Bignon, Jean-Paul, abbé 36, 75, 79, 93 120–1, 123–5, 217, 237
Bigot, Emeric 103n Cardano, Girolamo 154, 167
Blaeu, printing house 213 Caron, François, 103; and Bernier 161
Block, Magnus Gabriel 240 Cassagnes, Jacques, abbé 19
Bochart, Samuel 32, 45, 56 Cassini, Giovanni Domenico
Boileau Despréaux, Nicolas 143, (Cassini-I) 14–15, 72–3
162–3 Castell, Edmund 25, 29
Bollandists 33, 213, 226, 237; see also Catholic reform 17, 33, 147–9
Papebroch Caton de Court, Charles 77n
Bonaparte, Napoleon, expedition to Chapelain, Jean 15; letters 37–8; and
Egypt 8–9 d’Herbelot 49–51, 63–8; and
Borch, Ole (Borrichius) 90n, 91 Bernier 131, 136–9, 155–65;
Borel, Pierre 91n and Thévenot 85, 88n, 91, 100;
Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso 71, 74n, 98, and Abulfeda 109–23; and
110 Colbert 19; on patronage 73–4;
Borges, Jorge Luis 204 La Pucelle 156
Bosquet, François, bishop of Chapelle, Claude Emmanuel Luillier,
Montpellier 29 known as 135n, 141, 145
Index 293
‘Chapelle, M. de la’, see La Chapelle Cordemoy, Géraud de 91n
Chardin, Jean 85, 132, 156, 165 correspondence 14–5, 37–8, 98–9,
Charpentier, François 19, 41, 51, 103–4, 113, 164, 233, 235
62–4 corsairs 30
Charron, Pierre 146 Cosmas Indicopleustes 102–3
Chaumont, Alexandre 215, 229 Cotelier, Jean-Baptiste 56, 62, 78
Chigi, Fabio, see Alexander VII Couplet, Philippe 206, 210–16,
China 11, 39, 101, 154, 156, 205–33 220–32, 235–39, 241–2
passim; Muslim sources on 185, Cousin, Louis 42, 65, 186; and
195, 235–43; attitudes to 207–8; CSP, 208n, 231n; on
annals 208–9, 213n, 221–2; see Confucius, 228
also Sigan-Fu stone; Sinology; crusades 27
Sinophilia Cureau de La Chambre, Marin 156,
Chinese rites controversy 171, 207, 160
212 curiosity 35–6, 40, 82–3, 91–2, 107,
chinoiserie 11, 214 129–30, 233, 244
Choisy, François-Timoléon, abbé
de 218, 229n Danishmend Khan, and
Cholets, college (Paris) 166 Bernier, 151–3, 243
Christina, Queen of Sweden 45, 206 Dangeau, Louis de Courcillon,
civility 43, 69, 75, 87, 159, 233 abbé 200–2
Clarke, Samuel, orientalist 109, 116, Danzig see Gdansk
124–5 Dati, Carlo 14, 53
Clément, Nicolas, librarian 77n, 231 Dauphin (son of Louis XIV), education
Clerselier, Claude 91n of, 17, 77
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 16, 18–30, 33, Delhi 137–8, 149–151
35–8, 40–3, 46, 48–9, 51–61, Della Valle, Pietro 31, 102
64, 74–7, 80, 88, 91, 102, 104, Descartes, René 144, 151–2
115, 118–124, 128, 131, 133–4, Deslyons, Jean 57
161–2, 178–81, 186, 202, despotism see Oriental despotism
217–8, 220, 241 deutas 154
Colbertine library 179n, 241 D’Herbelot, see Herbelot
Collège de France, see Collège royal Diderot, Denis 9, 172, 191, 194n
Collège royal (royal professors) 2, 17, Diophantus of Alexandria 35
20, 23–8, 39, 43n, 46n, 76, 78, diplomats 23, 24, 26, 28, 34, 51,
112, 114–5, 140 85–6, 113, 125, 145, 179, 214–5,
Colomiès, Paul 32 218, 220n, 229
colonialism 8–9, 12–3, 101–2, 161, Dodds, Muriel 10
221 dragomans 24
commerce 94, 100, 102, 161 Druzes 34
Commire, Jean 176 Dryden, John, tragedy Aureng-Zebe
Compagnie des Indes orientales 102, (1676) 164
215; Bernier and 161 Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, sieur 15,
Condé, family 22 56, 78, 185
Confucius 210 Du Clos, Samuel 217
Confucius Sinarum Philosophus Du Four de Longuerue, see Longuerue
(1687) 40, 154, 203, 205–33 Du Hamel, Jean-Baptiste, 105n;
passim history of the Académie des
Conrart, Valentin 65n, 98, 103n, sciences, 54, 57, 89
122n, 217n, 219n Du Perron, Jacques Davy, cardinal 23
Constantinople see Istanbul Dupuy brothers 109, 145
Copernicanism 140 Dutch see United Provinces
294 Index
eastern rite Christians 32, 34; see also Foucault, Michel 174
Maronites Foucault, Nicolas-Joseph, intendant of
Ecchellensis, Abraham (Ibrahim Normandy, and Galland 183
al-Haqilani) 23–4, 71, 85–6, Foucher, Simon 228
103, 110 Fouquet, Nicolas 18, 45–6, 71–2, 75,
‘échelles du Levant’ 24 114, library 20n
eclipses 97, 137–9 Fourmont, Etienne 36, 171
Ecole spéciale des langues orientales Foy-Vaillant, Jean 30, 35, 182
vivantes (Paris), 25 François I (king of France) 17, 26, 117n
Edict of Nantes, revocation of Frankfurt book fair 124
(1685) 211 Frénicle de Bessy, Bernard 91
education of the prince 17 Fréret, Nicolas 36
Egypt 7–9, 13, 29–30, 72, 146; Furetière, Antoine 187, 189–90, 199
pyramids 102; Nile 161
éloges 36–7 Gaffarel, Jacques 146
encyclopedism 41, 82, 93, 108, 175, galanterie 159n, 162–4 see also civility
178, 190 Galland, Antoine 4, 34, 76; translates
Enfants de langue, see Jeunes de langue Thousand and One Nights, 1–2, 4,
Enlightenment 5–6, 10, 83, 142–3, 29, 162n; collecting
172 missions, 35–6; Collège royal
Enlightenment, early 10 chair, 2; journal, 1–3;
Engels, Friedrich 133, 164 scholarship, 182–3; and
Epicureanism 88, 145n, 156 Thévenot, 84, 99–100, 125–6;
Erasmus, Desiderius 17 on Bernier 143n; and
Erpenius (van Erpe), Thomas 109 d’Herbelot, 78, 169; edits
Escorial library 36 Bibliothèque orientale, 169,
Espagnet, Etienne d’ 91n 198–9; preface to 176, 178–9,
Estiennot, Claude 224n 185, 192–3; and Kashf al-zunun
Estrées, Jean d’ 28 (Katib Chelebi), 179–81, 188,
Estrées, César d’, cardinal 218, 220, 202–3; Paroles remarquables, 171,
222 186
Ethiopia 29–30, 146–7 Gallicanism 33, 55, 57–8, 61
Ethiopic 29, 31, 226 Gallois, abbé Jean 84, 217
eucharist 33–4, 144n, 212 Garnier, Girard 89, 98, 104, 120, 122,
experiential knowledge 83, 96 230
experiment 18, 53, 91, 94, 96–9, 119 Garnier, Marie 85n
Garnier, Melchisédech 85n
fakirs 154, 167 Gassendi, Pierre 15, works 124, 156;
Faret, Nicolas 87 and Thévenot, 88–9; and
Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Bernier, 135, 137–56, 164–5
Mothe 17, 162n Gaulmin, Gilbert 21–2, 112–3, 146
Ferrand, Louis 26–7, 123 Gdansk 145
Fermat, Samuel 91n Genoa 85–6
Fléchier, Esprit 77n Gesner, Conrad 190
Fleury, Claude 77n, 130, 217 Gibbon, Edward 9, 10n, 169–70, 172,
Florence 14, 240–1; d’Herbelot in 42, 175, 183, 192, 196
47–51, 62–75 passim; Thévenot Girardin, Pierre de, ambassador to
and 98, 103, 122; Couplet in 225 Istanbul 125
Fludd, Robert 154 Goa 151, 215, 219
Fogel, Martin 91n Golius, Jacob 25, 103, 110–11,
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier 113–14, 116, 123
de 52–5, 89, 126n Gothic 200
Index 295
Graaf, Reinier de 91 Hezarfenn (Huseyn b. Ğa‘fer) 180–1,
Graindorge, André 90 203, 243
‘grande académie’ 20, 41, 52–4, 58–9, Hinduism 135–6, 150–5, 165–7
61, 64, 76 Holbach, Baron d’ 83
‘gratifications aux gens de lettres’ 19, Holland see United Provinces
27n, 73–4, 77, 113, 115, 121, Holstenius, Lucas 44
225 Holy Land see Palestine
Gravel, abbé, French Resident at honnêteté 50, 51, 87–8, 159 see also
Mainz, 124 civility
Greaves, John 72, 102, 106, 109–12, Horace 142–3
127 Horn, Georg 241
Gregory XIII, pope 24, 44 Horthemels, Daniel, 228–30, 233
Grimaldi, cardinal 45, 72 Hotman (de Fontaney), Vincent, 91n,
Gronovius, Johann Friedrich 85n, 121 121
Grueber, Johann 219–20 Howes, E. H. 171
Guastaferri, Fabrizio 14 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 17, 19n, 45,
Guignes, Joseph de 36, 116, 169 55–56, 59, 62, 77n, 90, 101n,
Guilleragues, Gabriel-Joseph de 112n, 182, 189n, 226
Lavergne 179n Huguenots see protestant
Guise, Henri, duc de 86 Hugo, Victor 3
gunpowder 101 Huygens, Christiaan 72–3, 96, 105;
and Thévenot 87, 90–1, 103
Hyde, Thomas 104–5, 109, 112, 127,
Habert de Montmor, see Montmor 205–8, 220
Hajji Khalifa, see Katib Chelebi
Hakluyt, Richard 81–2, 100–2
Halley, Edmund 110 Ibn Khallikan 201–2
Hanna 1–3, 243 de Imitatione Christi 15
Hardy, Claude 112, 217, 229n Imprimerie royale 15, 116, 120,
Hardouin, Jean 227 123–4, 128, 186, 202
Hartlib, Samuel 15 indexes 190, 196–7, 203–4
Harvey, William 152 India 9, 11–13, 85, 103n, 131–167
Hazard, Paul 10 passim, 171
Hebrew 7, 31–2; study of 26, 56; Innocent X, pope 86
Collège royal chair 26; protestant interpreters 36, 39 see also dragomans,
Academies 32; books 30, 98, jeunes de langues, secrétaire-
113n interprète
Herbelot (de Molainville), Barthélemy Intorcetta, Prospero 102–3, 105n,
d’, 41–80 passim, 14, 239–40, 213, 219, 231, 233
242; early career 43–6; in Isfahan 28
Florence, 42, 47–51, 62–75; and Isle, Arnould de l’ 26
Maurists, 77–8; and Bourzeis Issy, Thévenot’s house at 50, 88–91,
group 55, 64; working 98, 105, 116, 163, 217, 232
methods 184–7, 194–6; Istanbul 28, 30, 34, 179–81, 203–4,
Bibliothèque orientale, 168–204 243; latitude of 111; books
passim; Said on 173–5, 185, 196; in 181
debt to Katib Chelebi 178–9,
181; printing of 197–203 James II, king of England (and VII of
Herbelot (de Molainville), Edme Scotland) 205–8, 211, 232
d’, 47n, 65n, 176–7 jansenism 57, 208, 217n, 220; see also
Hero of Alexandria 35 Port-Royal; Arnauld
Heinsius, Nicolas 38, 73 Jansson van Waesberge, Jean 213
Hesenthaler, Magnus 123–5 Japan 103
296 Index
al-Jazar¯ı, Isma‘il ibn al-Razāz 35 La Palisse, French physician in
Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 57, 141, 144, India, 161
172n, 205–6, 227; astronomy La Roque, Jean de 113n
215; colleges 24, 26; China Larroque, Daniel, 198–9; letters
mission 11, 95, 207–9, 214, 221, cited 84, 93, 126, 232, 239
236–7; and Confucius, 205–11; Larroque, J.-P. Tamizey de, see
see also Bollandists; Byzantine du Tamizey
Louvre; Couplet; mathématiciens La Sablière, Marguerite de 228
du roi La Salle, Robert Cavelier de 220–1
Jesus, Muslim views of 194 La Tuillière (director of the Académie
Jeunes de langues 24–5 des arts in Rome) 223n
Johns, Adrian 39, 107, 127n, 202 Launay, François de 55–6, 62
Jones, Sir William 9 Launay, Gilles de 56n
juggernaut 136 Launoy, Jean de 56, 148
Justel, Henri, 92–3; on death of Le Capelain, Claude 55–6, 62
Colbert, 18; on the Bourzeis Le Clerc, Sébastien 21
group, 56–7, 62, 78; attends Leers, Reinier 189, 199, 208
Thévenot’s group, 91n; as royal Leghorn see Livorno
censor, 104, 230; letters cited 18, Leiden 109, 111, 114, 117, 123–4
55, 62, 113, 224 Le Jay, Guy-Michel 23, 116
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 4, 15, 99,
Kant, Immanuel 142 123–6, 212n; and Ferrand 27,
Kashmir 14, Jews in 161 123; and Hesenthaler 124; and
Kātib Chelebi (Katip Çelebi) 40, Thévenot 91–3, 99, 128–9,
178–81, 184, 186, 189–90, 217–8; and d’Herbelot 200–2;
194–5, 202–4, 243 letters cited 65–6, 125, 220,
Kenny, Neil 82n, 129n, 190 232n; and Arabic account of
Kircher, Athanasius 14, 33, 45, 146, China 235–43
213, 235–7, 241 Le Moyne Desessarts, N.-T. 170
Kneller, Godfrey 206 Léonard de Sainte Catherine, le P. 26n,
43n, 79, 226n, 231, 232n
Leroux-Deshautesrayes, M.-A. A. 171
Labrousse, Elisabeth 141n, 142n, 143 Le Tellier, Camille, see Louvois, abbé
La Bruyère, Jean de 67n, 130, 143n, Le Tellier, Charles-Maurice 217, 231,
220n 232n
Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Le Tellier, François-Michel, see Louvois,
Europe, 11 marquis de
La Chaize, François d’Aix de (confessor Letherland, Joseph 171
to Louis XIV from 1675), 193, letters see correspondence
211, 215n, 224, 225n, 227 ‘letters’, lettres, litterae, learning 15–6
La Chambre, Marin Cureau de, see ‘Levant’ 7
Cureau libertins érudits, 59, 77, 143, 168; and
La Chapelle (-Milon), Henri de Bessé Thévenot 88; and Bernier
de 217n, 225n 143–147
La Croix, ‘le sieur de’, secretary to libraries 21–2, 34–6, 183, 187–8
Nointel 28n see also Bibliothèque du roi;
La Croix, interpeter, see Pétis de La Colbertine library; collecting
Croix, François, père Lionne, Hugues de 86
La Fontaine, Jean de 12, and Lisbon 215, 231
Bernier, 162 ‘Liselotte’, see Orléans,
La Mothe Le Vayer, François de 131, Elisabeth-Charlotte
145–7, 156, 160, 163 Lister, Martin 89n, 98n, 99,
Lanson, Gustave 10 122
Index 297
Livorno (Tuscany) 47, 51, 65–6, 68, marvels 68, 94, 141
72 Marx, Karl 132–3, 164
Livy, Titus, 183 lost books 35 mathematics 35, 53, 67, 109–10;
Locke, John 10, 81–3, 92, 138, 144, Indian 166n
234 mathématiciens du roi 171, 214–5, 237
London 29, 127, 206 Maunier, maronite, 1–2
Longuerue, Louis Du Four de, Maurists 33, 40, 78–80, 182; see also
abbé 173n, 190n Mabillon
Longueville, duc de 140n Mazarin, Jules, cardinal 18, 86–7,
longitude and latitude 108–12, 121, 140–1, 161; library 227
126 Mecca 195
Louis IX see Saint Louis Medici, Cosimo III, Grand Duke of
Louis XIV, 57; patronage 16–22, 27, Tuscany 47, 65–7, 69–70, 79,
72–6; and d’Herbelot 76; 122
dedications 101, 121, 176, 203, Medici, Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of
206; meets Shen Fuzong 206, Tuscany, patron of d’Herbelot 41,
214; and Jesuits 211–2; religious 47–8, 61, 65–7, 72, 74, 79, 178,
policy 212 181
Louvois, François-Michel Le Tellier, Medici, Ferdinando I, cardinal, later
marquis de 122, 126, 217, 218n, Grand Duke of Tuscany 44, 72
223n, 225n Medici, Leopoldo,
Louvois, abbé (Camille Le Tellier) 217 cardinal-prince 65–69, 71, 75,
Lucas, Paul 193n 98, 110
Lucretius 155 medicine 94, 96, 101, 145, 148, 159;
Ludolf, Job (Hiob) 29–30, 45, 105, Arabic texts 26; Chinese
190, 224, 226 texts 223
Luillier, François 145–6 Ménage, Gilles 19n, 70n, 79n, 226;
Lyons 43, 141, 156 Menagiana 79n, 89n, 189n
Ménestrier, Claude-François 227
Meninski, Francis 25
Mabillon, Jean, 15, 77–8, 218, 224; Menzel (Mentzel), Christian 224,
see also Maurists 226–7
‘Madame’, see Orléans Mercator, Gerard 178
Madrid 242 Méré, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier
Magalotti, Lorenzo 65n, 68–71, 87, de 88
90, 98, 103–4, 122, 217, 219 Mersenne, Marin 15, 85–6, 109, 148
Magliabecchi, Antonio 42n, 65–8, Merveilles, François Boysson, seigneur
239–41 de 160–1, 163
Mainz 27, 123–4 Meysonnier, Lazare, of Lyons 141
Malebranche, Nicolas 4 Middle East see Levant; Palestine;
Malpighi, Marcello 218 Egypt; Ottoman empire
Manchu 227 Mille et une nuits, see Thousand and One
Maronite Christians 23, 114; college in Nights
Rome 24, 44, 85; scholars in Mille et un jours 29
Paris 23–4; see also individual Mirkhond, Persian historian 181
names missions 148–9, 211, 236; see also
Marseilles, 45, 113, 156; chamber of Jesuits
commerce 24 Missions Etrangères de Paris, Société
Marshall, Thomas 116, 124–5 des 215
Martel, Thomas de 91n Mississippi 221
Martini, Martino 157, 163, 219 Mitton, Damien 88
Marucelli, Giovanni-Filippo, Mocha 147n
abbé 49–51, 63–5 Moette, Thomas 106
298 Index
Molainville, see Herbelot Nolin, Jean-Baptiste (engraver) 210n
Molanus, Gerhard Wolter 212n, 232 Notre-Dame de Paris 1–3
Molière 12, 113n, 143n, 162 numismatics 22, 30n, 182–3, 193
Molinos, Miguel de 154
Monceaux, André de 36n, 164 observation 96–7, 111, 159,
monsoon 161 Ogier, François 59–60
Montaigne, Michel de 139, 146, Oldenburg, Henry 14–5, 113, 124–5;
149–50, 155 translates Bernier 164–5
Montausier, duc de 17 Olearius, Adam 157–8, 163
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de ‘Orient’, definition 7
Secondat, baron 4, 6, 9, 39, Orientalism, defined 8
132–4, 139, 166, 183n, 235 Orientalism (book), see Said
Montfaucon, Bernard de 172, 224n, Oriental despotism 133–4
226 Orléans, Elisabeth-Charlotte d’,
Montmor, Henri-Louis Habert Princess Palatine, known as
de 88–91, 142, 145, 156, 160 ‘Madame’, 193
Montpellier 145 Orléans, Etienne Hubert d’ 26
Moreri, Louis 42, 58–9, 84, 170, 190 otium 147
Morin, Jean-Baptiste 140–2, 145, 148, Ottoman empire 3–6, 8, 12, 13n,
154 23–4, 28, 34–5, 181;
Morland, Sir Samuel see speaking science 178; see also Istanbul
trumpet Oxford 109–10, 124–5, James II
Morocco 26, 28; library 35 visit 205–8; Magdalen
Mortemart, Louis-Victor de College 205
Rochechouart, duc de 28 Oxford, University Press 110, 127
Müller, Andreas 235–6, 238, 241 Oyseau, voyage of 215, 218, 229
Murr, Sylvia 145
Palestine 117, 146n
Naples 86 Panciatichi, Lorenzo, abbé 98n, 103,
natural history 83, 92–3, 97 219
Naudé, Gabriel 139n, 145, 183, Papebroch, Daniel, 213, 226–7, 237
187–8 ‘Paris Polyglot’ 23–5, 31–2, 77,
navigation 94 116–7; see also Le Jay
Neuré, Mathurin (Laurent Paris, Faculty of Theology, 57, 60–1,
Mesme), 148, 160 68, 143
Nestorian monument, see Sigan-Fu Pascal, Blaise 16–7, 22, 85n, 87–8,
stone 129, 145, 209
Netherlands, Spanish 56, 214 Patin, Guy 145
Netherlands see United Provinces Pavillon, Marthe 87
networks of communication 12, 20–1, Pavillon, Nicolas, bishop of Alet 87
103–5, 107, 113, 161, 167, 175, Pecquet, Jean 152
177–8, 181, 233, 243; see also Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 31n,
correspondence 99n, 109, 146
Newton, Isaac, 208 Peking see Beijing
Nicole, Pierre 16–7, 33–4; see also Pell, John 110
Arnauld Pellison-Fontanier, Paul 77n, 92n,
Nieuhof, Johann 219 235–9
Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, cardinal, Perpétuité de la Foi, see Arnauld
archbishop of Paris 1–2 Perrault, Charles, 53, 59–61, 162n;
Nointel, Charles-François Olier life of d’Herbelot, 42–49, 65, 68,
(marquis de) 28, 34, 98, 179n, 173
180n Perriquet, Marie 85n, 129
Index 299
Persia 8, 11, 28, 85, 157–9, 177 race 135n
Persian (Farsi), study of, 24–5, 28, Racine, Jean 12, 162
70–1, 112, 184; books 46n, 85n, Raguet, Gilles-Bernard 58
98, 113n, 180–1; Bernier Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 100, 108,
and 144, 151–2, 158 110, 126
Pétis de La Croix, family 27–8 Rapin, René 87–8
Pétis de La Croix, Alexandre Ravius, Christian 45, 110
L. M. 29n, 183n Redi, Francesco 14, 67–8
Pétis de La Croix, François, père 27, Regnauld, Jesuit mathematician 14
49–50, 55–6, 62–4, 183n, 222 Régnier-Desmarais,
Pétis de La Croix, (Jean-) François, François-Séraphin 176
fils 27–9, 34, 46, 78, 85, 115n, Reims, Archbishop of, see Le Tellier,
130n, 179n, 183, 222 Charles-Maurice
Petit, Pierre 91n, 141 Reiske, Johann Jakob 171
‘petite académie’ 19, 36, 51, 55, 58–9, Renaudot, Théophraste 220
76 Renaudot, Eusèbe, physician 220
Picard, Jean, abbé 14 Renaudot, Eusèbe, abbé 34n, 59, 220,
Picques, Louis 190n, 226–7 226–8, 238–9, 241–2; in
Pintard, René 145 Bossuet’s ‘petit concile’ 77n; and
Pitt, Moses 127, 165 Maurists 78; and Bibliothèque du
Pliny, the elder 92–3 roi 217; suspected of
Pococke, Edward 26–7, 56, 109, 117, jansenism 217; editor of
124–5 Gazette 221; library of 79; letters
polyglot bibles 23–5, 29, 31–3, 77, to Bernou 220–3; on
116–7; see also Walton; Le Jay; Sinophilia 221; on
Vitré d’Herbelot 197; on
Pondichéry 171 Thévenot 98–9, 220–3; on
Pontchartrain, Louis Phélypeaux de 34, Abulfeda 108n, 126–7; on Arabic
78 type 117n; Anciennes
popular culture, 142, 147–9 relations 241–2
porcelaine 221 Republic of Letters 4–6, 10, 16, 18,
Port-Royal 208; see also jansenists; 73, 105, 107, 125, 207, 211, 243;
Arnauld, Nicole correspondence and 38
Postel, Guillaume 108 Retz, Jean-François-Paul de Gondi,
Pray, György 209 cardinal de 86n, 140n
printing 39, 93n, 101, 127, 197–9, Ricci, Matteo 211n
210, 228–9; see also Arabic Ricci, Michelangelo 85, 98
Propaganda fide, congregation de 44, rites controversy see Chinese rites
166, 214, 224 Roannez, Artus Gouffier, duc de 22
protestants 25, 29, 32–4, 77, 117, Roberval, Gilles Personne de 137–8,
141, 143, 207–8, 211–2 141, 149
protestant academies (France) 26, Roe, Thomas 102
31–2 Rohault, Jacques 91n
psalms 61 Rome 23–4, 29, 43–5, 56–7,
Ptolemy 114 71–2, 85–6, 166, 214, 220–1,
Purchas, Samuel 81, 101–2 224–5
Rotterdam 199, 208n
questionnaires 94, 131, 218 royal professors see Collège royal
Quietism, Bernier on 154, d’Herbelot Royal Society of London 14, 127,
on 196; see also Molinos 164–5, 213
300 Index
Said, Edward W. 8, 12; Orientalism, 8; Siam 211, 214–5, 218, 229, 234
and Michel Foucault 174; on Sigan-Fu stone 236
d’Herbelot 173–5, 178, 185, silk 101
196, 204 Sionite, Gabriel [Jibra’il as-Sahyuni] 23
Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel Simon, Richard 32, 34
de Saint-Denis, seigneur de 143, Sinai, mount, library of 30
162 Sinology 209n
Saint-German-des-Prés, abbey 78, 172; Sinophilia 221–2, 241
see also Maurists al-Sirafi, Hasan ibn Yazid Abu
Saint-Germain-en-Laye 77 al-Zaid 241n
Saint Louis (Louis IX) 27 Smith, Thomas 206n, 224
Saint Paul 129 Smyrna 24
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 38 sociability see civility
Salmasius, see Saumaise Southey, Robert 170
salons 87–8, 90, 144, 159, 163–4, Sparwenfeld, Johan Gabriel 200–3,
228; see also galanterie 226, 240, 242
Salviati, Leonardo 70–1 speaking trumpet 14, 90n
Samarkand 112, 239 Spinoza, Baruch 10, 31, 144n
Samaritan Pentateuch 23, 31, 146n, Spon, Jacob 180, 184
Sanskrit 9, 152, 166 Steno, Nicholas (Neils Stensen) 68,
‘sapere aude’ 142–3 90n, 112, 122, 129
Sarasin, Jean-François 140n sufism 154
Sarasvati, Kavindracarya, Sanskrit Surat (India) 147n, 156, 161
poet 152 Sylvestre de Sacy, Antoine-Isaac 174
sati 153, 155 Syriac 23; Collège royal chair 78; see
Saumaise, Claude 109, 146 also polyglot bibles
Savary de Brèves, see Brèves Soltan Hosein (shah of Persia) 28
scepticism 88, 139, 143, 146–7, 149, Swammerdam, Jan 67, 90–1, 100,
155, 234 102, 122
Schelstrate, Emmanuel, Vatican
librarian, 224n Tachard, Guy 211, 214, 229
Schickard, Wilhelm 109, 123–4, al-Tajir, Sulaiman 241
237n Tamizey de Larroque,
Schomberg, Friedrich-Hermann 55 Jean-Philippe 37–8, 49n, 50n,
Schultens, Hendrick Albert 171 53n
Schulz, J. C. F. 170 Tardy, Claude 91n
science 14–15, 52–3, 111, 142, 148, Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 85, 132, 134,
178 146, 156, 162, 165n
scientific revolution 5, 234 technology see arts
scrofula 205 Tertullian 209n
seconds pendulum 14 Thailand see Siam
secrétaire-interprète (post of), 23, Thévenot, [Nicolas-]
27–8, 46–7, 56, 128, 162, Melchisédech 81–130 passim;
Séguier, Pierre, chancelier de France, family 84–5, 87n; in Rome 44,
protector of Académie 85–7; Genoa, 85; and Montmor
française 20, 54, 160n; group, 88–91; collection 98–9;
library 217, 229 ‘assembly’, 89–99, 155–6; and
Sergio, see Aliamri Bernier, 160–1; and Colbert, 88,
Shah Jehan, Mughal Emperor 151 118–20; and Académie des
Shahada of Notre Dame 1–2 sciences, 88–9, 217–8; and
Shen Fuzong, Michael 206, 214, 216, Abulfeda 107–28; knowledge of
225, 242 Arabic 112; head of bibliothèque
Shiraz 28 du roi 210, 215–27, 229–33,
Index 301
236–9; Relations de divers voyages Vansleb, Jean Michel, see Wansleben
curieux, 99–107 Varès, abbé 217
Thévenot, Jean [de] 85–6, 134; and Vatican library 44, 103–4, 227
d’Herbelot 44, 49, 51; will Vattier, Pierre 46, 112, 114–5
of 43n, 46 Vecchietti, Giambattista and
Thévenot, family 85n Gerolamo 48
Thoinard or Thoynard, see Toinard Vedas 136
Thou, Jacques-Auguste de 23 Vernon, Francis 14–5, 26–7, 65n
Thousand and One Nights Galland’s Versailles 21, 88, 214–5, 227
translation 1, 2, 4, 29, 162n, 169 Vico, Giambattista 6
Toinard, Nicolas 77, 81–2, 221, 232n Victor Amadeus II of Savoy 206
Toulon 26, 145n Vienna 123
travel writing 82–3, 132; Vincennes 23
methods 157–9 Visdelou, Claude de 171, 185, 214,
Trigault, Nicolas 146 236
Tunis 28, 200–1 Vitré, Antoine 23, 116–7, 119–20,
Turandot 29 122
Turkish (language) 23–5, 28, 46, Viviani, Vincenzo 67, 74, 85, 98n,
113n, 178, 180, 184–5, 188–9 110
Turkey see Ottoman empire Voltaire 6, 9, 83, 166, 169–70, 172,
Turretini, J. A. 173n 183, 194, 208
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 83 Vossius, Isaac 45, 91n, 103, 109n, 111,
Tuscany, grand duchy of, see Medici; 123, 219, 221–2, 241
Florence; Livorno ‘vulgar errors’ 94, 142, 147–8, 167; see
also popular culture
Ulugh Beg 111–2, 114, 127
United Provinces (Netherlands) 73n, Wallis, John 124–5, 127
82, 101–3, 111, 116–8, 120–4, Walton, Brian 29
127, 132, 145, 157, 189, 216, Wake, William 226
219; see also Amsterdam, Leiden, Wansleben, Johann Michael 29–30,
Rotterdam 178, 226
universal history 6–7, 58, 108, 178 War of Devolution (1667–8) 56
universal library 6, 188, 190 Wolfenbüttel 235
Urban VIII, pope (Maffeo Wood, Anthony à 205–6
Barberini) 102 ‘world-soul’ 154
‘Uthman ibn Affan, caliph 191–2
utility 51, 82–3, 94, 100, 159
Yoga 136, 154, 165, 167
Vaillant, see Foy-Vaillant
Van Beuningen, see Beuningen Zoroastrianism, books on 36