Ursula Haskins Gonthier (University of Birmingham)
Bougainville before Tahiti: negotiating savagery in colonial Canada

This paper will examine the representation of the native Canadian tribes in Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s journals of his time in Canada as a commander in the French colonial forces during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). One of the most remarkable configurations of the Enlightenment ‘noble savage’ can be found in Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, a work inspired by Bougainville’s later account of his encounter with the native inhabitants of Tahiti in the course of his circumnavigatory voyage (1766-69). Yet despite the fact that Bougainville’s interest in and vision of the indigenous populations of the South Pacific islands were shaped by his interaction with the native peoples of the New World, his Canadian journals have largely escaped critical notice. However, Michèle Duchet has claimed that Bougainville’s descriptions of these tribes informed Diderot and Raynal’s depiction of the Canadian peoples as ‘noble savages’ in the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes. This necessitates a close examination of the stance taken by Bougainville in his journals, with a view to understanding how and why the views of a colonial commander were integrated into a text with an anti-colonial orientation.

Bougainville’s descriptions of the native Canadians are not without ambiguity. In his journals the author portrays himself as a ‘philosophe’ whose interest in the native Canadians is solely inspired by an objective desire to study these ‘voisins de la première nature’ for anthropological purposes. Yet as a military commander in the colonial wars with England Bougainville was obliged to negotiate alliances with native tribes in order to support the French war effort. He was also involved in campaigns against those tribes who had decided to ally themselves with the English. This paper will explore the complex nexus of philosophical examination and colonial exploitation at the heart of Bougainville’s journals, which is exposed by the nature of his relations with the native Canadians.

There is a further dimension of the journals which this paper will also address, namely Bougainville’s representation of France’s colonial rivals: the English. Edmond Dziembowski’s study of the rise of French nationalism at the time of the Seven Years’ War has shown that the outbreak of hostilities coincided with the launch of a concerted Anglophobic propaganda campaign by the French state. This propaganda resurrected hostile images of the English as a savage, barbaric people that had been common currency in France in the aftermath of the turbulent events of the seventeenth century. The definition of savagery in Bougainville’s journals is thus complicated by this contemporary portrayal of France’s enemies as savages. This raises the question as to whether Bougainville’s depiction of the Canadians as ‘noble’ savages marks a division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of savagery, as represented by France’s allies and enemies. The 1763 Treaty of Paris obliged France to cede its Canadian territories to the English. Did France’s disengagement from Canada facilitate the incorporation of Bougainville’s vision of the Canadian peoples into the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes? It certainly simplified Bougainville’s own position; henceforth French authors could unequivocally extol the virtues of peoples which only the English, the ‘savages’ of the Old World, were guilty of exploiting. 

 

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