Recalling L’Ingenu, Alzire, and the Others: On The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender

Let me start with two examples which I hope will help you understand what I am about in this book.

The story Ingenu is a strange one. In a way which might surprise some readers, the hero is a Huron who
comes to France. There, he is converted to Catholicism, half against his will, by the pious locals of Lower
Brittany. As untainted by educated prejudices as he is possessed of a clear mind, the American devours the
Bible, quickly learning the Good Book by heart.

Looking around, he then sets about pointing out just how far modern Catholicism has "evolved" away from
its evangelical, that is gospel, sources. This example gives you a sense of the satire:

before baptism it was necessary that he should go to confession, and this was the greatest difficulty
to surmount. The Huron had still in his pocket the book his uncle gave him. He did not there find
that a single apostle had ever been confessed, and this made him very restive. The prior silenced
him, by showing him, in the epistle of St. James the Minor, these words: "Confess your sins to one
another." The Huron was mute and confessed his sins to a Recollet. When he had done, he dragged
the Recollet from the confessional chair, and seizing him with a vigorous arm, placed himself in his
seat, making the Recollet kneel before him: "Come, my friend, it is said, ‘we must confess our sins
to one another.’ I have related to you my sins, and you shall not stir till you recount yours."

When English raiders harass the coastline without declaring war, the Huron at first refuses to believe that
human beings could act so immorally. So, he goes to speak to them and hear their side of the story. It is
only when they mock him as a naïve (ingenu) that he fights so bravely against these imposters that he
becomes the saviour of his province, having already won the affections of the beautiful Mademoiselle Saint
Yves, through his other qualities.

Then, as often happens, the snitches come. The hero wants to go to Versailles, so the King can release his
beloved, who gets consigned to a convent to prevent her marriage to the Huron. On the way, he meets some
Protestant Huguenots. Their stories of expropriation and torture following Louis XIV’s 1685 revocation of
the tolerant Treaty of Nantes move him. He promises to sue for them, also, when he arrives at
Court. However:

there was at table a disguised Jesuit, who acted as a spy to the Reverend Father de la Chaise. He gave
him an account of everything that passed, and Father de la Chaise reported it to M. de Louvois. The
spy wrote. The Huron and the letter arrived almost at the same time at Versailles.

When our virtuous hero arrives to speak to the Reverend Jesuit, as well as this snitching document, "M. de
Louvois had, at his side, a letter from the inquisitive bailiff [an old rival in the province of our hero], which
depicted the Huron as a wicked, lewd fellow, inclined to burn convents, and carry off the nuns."

So, our hero is thrown into the Bastille without ceremony or trial. He is lodged therein with an old Jansenist,
another victim of Jesuitical cunning. This man, “old Gordon,” takes the Huron under his wing. He is quickly
given a roundhouse higher education in maths, French belles lettres, physics and metaphysics—in all of
which the Huron shines. But it is the native American man’s undying love for Miss St Yves that works to
convert the strict Jansenist from his Calvinistic principles to a religion starting from compassion, which the
narrator will in the last chapter call simply “wisdom”.

Meanwhile, only Mademoiselle St Yves’ worldly sacrifice, carried out in the private chambers of another
Holy Jesuit, secures the release of our hero from the Bastille. Alas, this crime also leaves her so destroyed
by guilt, and the horror of it, that she soon takes ill, despite being reunited with her beloved, whose eyes
she can no longer meet for shame.

As Miss St Yves expires, half-delirious, on the death bed, a scurrilous letter from a courtly Jesuit arrives.
With airy corporate brutality, it announces that the Huron’s jailing without trial for a year was an
administrative mistake: quel dommage, as they say. The letter also promises the Huron, in recompense,
that the King might look in his direction if he comes to Court, and that the ladies there will surely admire
him.

Our hero rips the letter up without a word. “There is my answer”, he tells the courier from Versailles. As
the hero summarises the wisdom the Old World has delivered him, in a later dramatic reproduction of
L’Ingenu:

In my barbarian days, I spoke the truth:

Wrong'd not my neighbor: paid back benefits,
With benefit and gratitude to boot;
Dealt justly: held a friend to be a gift,
Precious as stars dropt down from heaven: bowed
Before the works of God: beheld in them
His presence, palpable, as at an altar:
And worshipp’d heaven at the mountain's foot. But this
Was Barbarism, I am wiser now;
More civilized. I know the way to lie,
To cheat, deceive, and be a zealous Christian!

The second example story takes its setting in Peru, under the tyrannical Spanish conquest. In the opening
section, a repentant Spanish ruler Alvarez (see below) tries to convince his hot-headed son, Guzman, not to
continue ruling by the sword “this fertile source of riches and of crimes” which is the colony:

whilst we, my son,

Unmindful of that faith which we profess,
The laws we teach, and all the tender ties
Of soft humanity, insatiate ourselves still
For blood and gold, [and] instead of winning o’er
 These savages by gentle means, destroy them.
All is confusion, death, and horror round us,
And nothing have we of heaven but its thunder;
Our name indeed bears terror with it; Spain
Is feared, but hated too: we are the scourge
Of this new world, vain, covetous, unjust;
In short, I blush to own it, we alone
Are the barbarians here: the simple savage,
Though fierce by nature, is in courage equal,
In goodness our superior.

Alzire, daughter of the King, Montezuma, has been corralled by her father into marrying Guzman. Her
Peruvian suitor, Zamor, has disappeared after fighting the Spanish invaders, so in despair she accepts. But
Zamor, as eloquent as he is courageous, lives and continues to struggle for freedom:

To leave our bleeding country thus enslaved

By European robbers, those assassins
Whose thirst for blood and gold, these proud usurpers,
Who would extort by every cruel art
Of punishment those riches which we hold
More cheap, more worthless than themselves – to leave
My beloved Alzire, Zamor’s dearer half,
To their licentious fury, O my friends,
It is worse than death: I tremble at the thought.

The tragedy, whose title is Alzire, unfolds because the eponymous heroine feels honor-bound to go through
with her word and marry the Spaniard Guzman, even after Zamor returns, against all odds, to reclaim her.
“Dissimulation and deception … are European arts, which I abhor”, she explains:

… virtue will forgive me when I add,

That still I love you, Zamor; but my oath,
My marriage vow, rash fatal marriage! says
I never must be yours—nor can I now
Be Guzman’s—false to both, you both have cause
To hate me: which of you will kindly end
My wretched being?

Things soon enough come to blows, as they must. Zamor mortally wounds Guzman, not before being
horribly wounded himself. The second half of the play seems to be leading inevitably towards the classical
tragic denouement: a bloodied stage, littered with corpses. Everything now points to the Governor Alvarez,
Guzman’s father, executing both our hero and our heroine, Zamor and Alzire.
Instead, Alvarez offers Zamor clemency. As fate would have it, the aging Spaniard realizes that Zamor was
the Peruvian warrior who had nobly spared his own life in combat. He tearfully proclaims the young man:

The wished-for object of my gratitude;

He whom these eyes, grown dim with age, have sought
So long in vain; my son, my benefactor …

Alvarez’s price is only that Zamor should convert to the religion of the invaders, as Alzire has done. Then
the lovers can wed and live happily. Nevertheless, one more time, Alzire intervenes:

Hear me then:
You know that, to obey a father’s will,
I gave another what to you alone I had devoted;
I embraced his faith,
And worshipped Montezuma’s [the Christian] God; perhaps
It was the error of my easy youth,
And you will blame me for it; but I thought
The law of Christians was the law of truth,
And therefore, only did I make it mine.
But to renounce those gods our heart adores;
That is no venial error, but a crime
Of deepest dye; it is to give up both
The God we worship, and the God we leave;
It is to be false to heaven, to the world,
And to ourselves: no, Zamor, if you die,
Die worthy of Alzire; hear the voice
Of conscience; act as she alone directs you.

In fact, in this tragedy’s final twist, it is the Spaniard Guzman, not the Peruvian Zamor, who is converted.
Not to Christianity, but away from his bloodthirsty imperialism to a position which recognizes the dignity
of the peoples he has been oppressing:

My soul is on the wing,

… O my father,
The mask is off, death has at last unveiled
The hideous scene, and showed me to myself;
New light breaks in on my astonished soul:
O, I have been a proud, ungrateful being,
And trampled on my fellow-creatures: heaven
Avenges earth: my life can never atone
For half the blood I’ve shed: prosperity
 Had blinded Guzman, death’s benignant hand
Restores my sight; I thank the instrument
Employed by heaven to make me what I am.
A penitent: I yet am master here;
And yet can pardon: Zamor, I forgive thee,
Live and be free; but O, remember how
A Christian acted, how a Christian died.

***

So much then of the two examples.

Here, we have two literary works in which indigenous Americans and Peruvians—the victims of European
imperialism, and its grim economics—are presented as heroes, and a heroine. They are given voices,
afforded agency, transparently presented as models for conduct. And they use these things to eloquently
decry, and tragically oppose, the hypocrisy, greed, arrogance, prejudices, bastardry, and atrocities
committed by clever Europeans around the globe, including upon each other, in the three centuries that
followed the 1452 Dum Diversas bull, granted by a Roman Pope to a Portuguese King, affording the latter’s
marauding agents the right to reduce "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery,
a “right” reaffirmed by the Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455, and soon contested by other European powers—
not in the name of the indigenous peoples at stake, needless to say, but given their own desires to share in
the spoils.

Here we have two literary works, in which the vices of the Europeans are counterposed to the virtues of
the indigenous peoples, and any claim to European superiority is clearly decried: the Peruvians (and
Alvarez) will call the Spanish the true “barbarians” in Alzire. These are literary works in which the “New
World”’s “savages” (as the Europeans of those times described things) are presented as having a truer sense
for what Voltaire called “natural religion” than most Christians from the Old World, as well as being
possessed of superior honor, honesty, intelligence (in the case of the ingenu), and warlike courage.

But here’s the thing. The first work dates from 1767, the second from 1732. And they are written by a
European, involved in the enlightenment. Indeed, they are penned by Voltaire himself. But Voltaire is
widely known as the “patriarch” of the entire French enlightenment (c. 1720-1789). And this entire period
of intellectual history was long named “the age of Voltaire”.

One doesn’t want to go too far. At the end of Alzire, Zamor is converted to Christianity, albeit not by force
and the superior killing technologies of the invaders, but by the spectacle of Guzman’s repentance for his
inhumanities. It is a European education, too, that the heroic Huron receives in L’Ingenu, whilst rotting
away with old Gordon in the Bastille. These are 18th century European works, written by a European man—
albeit a European whom we should hesitate to call a good Christian, as against a deist or a proponent of
what is sometimes called a religion of toleration:
 What is toleration? It is the accessory of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us
mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature. (Voltaire, “Toleration”,
Philosophical Dictionary, 1764)

In any case, when I was asked to say a few words on my book The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement,
Race, and Sexuality, I felt like I needed to begin with some concrete examples. These examples already
make a case: that many of the views circulating these days about “the enlightenment” may not be the best
informed, and may pass over a good deal of the historical, textual materials, to say the least. The
enlightenment (or enlightenments, depending on which sources you read) may be long over. But “the
enlightenment” continues to be a political subject or at least a political signifier, as the structuralists used
to say. Claimed presently by “classical liberals” on the Right who seem not to have read many texts by
Voltaire, Montesquieu, or Diderot and the lesser lumières, it becomes a cypher for the “greatness” of
“Western civilization”, imperiled by social justice warriors, etc. Meanwhile, within academia but outside of
of 18th century studies where the texts are still studied, “the enlightenment” has often been accused by
many scholars—who also often show no evidence of have reading the texts of Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Diderot et al—of being a univocal apologia for Western cultural imperialism, racism, sexism, and the
transatlantic slave trade.

My contention in the book, at one level of generality, is that the textual and historical record supports
neither polemical representation.

The result of all of this, in any case, is that today “the enlightenment” has few friends within academia.
Many more scholars suppose themselves its foes. As for the friends it has, outside of academia? They seem
of a kind that would have probably made Voltaire ask: with friends like these, who needs enemies? Diderot,
in his last work (1782), wrote that “[a] day will come when the libels published against the most illustrious
people of this century will be raised up from out of the dust … from out of the same spirit that dictated
them”. The famous atheist was here arguably waxing prophetical.

I will not rehearse here the excellent work that has been done, notably by Dennis Rasmussen and Genevieve
Lloyd, to show how odd the claims are that the lumières to a man were unregenerate system-building
rationalists, naively utopian, closed to sexual, racial, and cultural differences, and uncritical supporters of
colonialism and the slave trade, once we read the primary texts. The latter make the lumières seem for all
the world more like skeptical, critical thinkers in whose works for the first time a concerted effort was
made by European intellectual elites—at least outside of the monasteries and universities—to come to
terms with the cultural consequences, not simply of the scientific revolution’s overthrow of Biblical
understandings of nature (chapter 2), but the discovery of the new worlds (chapter 3), and entire cultures
previously undreamed of by Europeans, despite their alleged cosmic and salvific centrality as the bearers
of the One True religion (chapter 4).

Again, I cannot to say too much here, due to the space. I know that people will have read Voltaire’s 1759
classic Candide, whose subtitle is Of Optimism (chapter 4). They will know that this text, probably the most
famous of all the French enlightenment, stages a litany of natural and human disasters, on the way to
showing how inhumane the idea is that “we live in the best of all possible worlds”, as the philosopher
Leibniz thought could be demonstrated, according to “pure reason”.

My book wants to make a case that more people today should consider reading the other enlightenment
philosophical novellas which I examine in chapters 3-6: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, whose principal
protagonists are Islamic men, and whose heroine is an Islamic woman (chapter 3); Voltaire’s Micromegas,
in which a visitor from the planet Sirius is used as a literary device to show how ridiculous Europeans’
pretentions to cosmic centrality are (chapter 4); Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind”, whose heroes, both blind,
seem there to show us that physical eyesight is a secondary thing, compared to the kinds of hateful
blindness peoples conceive against those they ideas and people they perceive to be other (chapter 5); and
finally Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, in which the most serious doubts about the wisdom
of European sexual mores are voiced by a Tahitian, Orou (chapter 6), and in whose opening scenes we read
a near-Mosaic speech delivered to the departing French visitors to Tahiti, from out of the mouth of a tribal
Elder:

‘Weep, unhappy Tahitians! Weep! Not, though, at the leaving of these cruel, ambitious men, but at
their coming. For one day you will see them for who they are. One day they will return, brandishing
in one hand that stick of wood which you see attached to this man’s belt and, in the other, the blade
which hangs from that man’s side. They will come to put you in chains and to cut your throats; they
will subject you to their every excess and vice. And one day you will serve under them, and you
will be as base, corrupted, and as wretched as they’ … Then, turning to Bougainville [the French
captain], he continued: ‘And you, leader of these brigands who obey your every command, quickly
remove your vessel from our shores. We are innocent and contented; our happiness you can but
disturb ... Here, all things are everyone’s, yet you have preached some or other distinction between
‘yours’ and ‘mine’ … We are free, yet in our earth you have buried the title deeds to our future
enslavement. You are neither God nor demon; who, then, are you to make us your slaves? Orou!
Since you understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have
written on that strip of metal: ‘This land is ours’. Yours, you say? How so? Because you have set
foot here? If one day a Tahitian were to arrive on your shores and carve into one of your stones or
the bark of one of your trees: ‘This land [of France] belongs to the people of Tahiti’, what would
you say then? So, you are the stronger! What of it? … You are no slave and would sooner die than
become one; yet you wish to enslave us. You think then that Tahitians are incapable of dying in
defense of their freedom? … the Tahitian is your brother. You are both children of nature. What
right do you have over him that he does not have over you? When you came, did we set upon you?
Did we pillage your vessel? Did we make you our captive and leave you to the arrows of our
enemies? Did we yoke you to our ploughs and put you to work in the fields like animals? No, we
treated you in our own image. Leave us alone with our ways; they are wiser and more honest than
yours. We have no desire to trade what you call our ignorance for your useless enlightenment.

***
Again, it isn’t possible to say too much in this presentation. The Supplément is a text written by an 18th
century European. Diderot, who can rarely help himself, is taking some shots at his frenemy, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau here. His elder’s discourse also strangely echoes ancient Epicurean ideals.

But neither, once readers encounter the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage or other enlightenment
texts—they might start at Jaucourt’s Encyclopedia entry on “the slave trade”—should they be surprised that
this enlightenment author, Diderot, should be responsible for ghostwriting many more, even more
inflammatory anti-colonialist declamations in the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies (2nd ed., 1780).
This book, described by scholar Anthony Pagden as a “mini-Encyclopedia of all the evils European
colonization had visited upon the world”, culminates in a call for a “Black Spartacus” to rise up and expel
“the Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch” with “arms and flames”.

Neither does a reading of Diderot’s interpolations into this History leave many reasons to wonder why
Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolt against the British and Spanish occupiers, kept a quarto
of Raynal’s L’Histoire in his study.

***

My book, evidently, is an attempt to read the primary texts that were central to the French enlightenment
in such a way that we might pass beyond polemical generalities about “Western civilization”, and maybe
“the enlightenment” itself. At one level, The Other Enlightenment aims to rescue important historical
materials from such empty generalities. By sowing fruitless confusions, these oddly remind the author of
Alzire’s claim that to “convert” to a religion one doesn’t believe in “is to give up both, [t]he God we worship,
and the God we leave”.

But I need to close here. As I have indicated, The Other Enlightenment is built around a series of readings
of key texts by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, figures whom no one can reasonably say weren’t central
to any “enlightenment” that is more than a word, or a scarecrow. The book’s contentions, which the said
textual readings aim to defend, are these:

1. The central critical and philosophical exercise or practice of key thinkers of the French
enlightenment was “self-estranging” or “self-othering”, which was carried out in a variety of
literary, poetic, dramatic, satirical, and philosophical mediums.

2. This philosophical practice, which structures many of the French lumières’s novellas and
philosophical fictions after Montesquieu’s 1721 Persian Letters, has different modalities:

a. exploring the intellectual, cultural, moral, aesthetic or political practices of other cultures,
and presenting these to members of our in-group;

b. imagining how “we” and our customs appear through the eyes of another; whether
Persians visiting Paris (Montesquieu), Quakers, Native Americans, Brahmins, or Chinese
sages (Voltaire), the blind, dreaming, or Tahitians (Diderot);
 c. presenting the (for us) evident flaws and problems facing other individuals or groups (for
example, religious intolerance) in such a way as it is clear that we share these others’ faults.

3. These modalities of enlightenment self-estrangement have critical functions, central to answering

the questioning “what is enlightenment?” when it comes to the great, widely neglected French
philosophes of the 18th century:

a. above all, to challenge our epistemic egoism, the deeply set individual and corporate
tendencies we face, anatomized in Western thought by Francis Bacon, John Locke, and
Pierre Bayle, to “relate everything to ourselves”, understanding and potentially judging
everything new and different against our own taken-for-granted norms and assumptions;

b. to realize that there are other ways of thinking, being, living and acting than our own,
recent, or present ways, and that therefore “our” ways are not inevitable, unquestionably
best, and unchangeable;

c. to realize that our own ways of thinking, being, living and acting will appear different and
strange to others, who will be able to readily identify what in our practices are contingent,
unnecessary, or even irrational, by comparison with their norms;

d. to recognize that, there where we might be inclined initially to see the other as only exotic
or “inferior,” they have virtues and capabilities which may in different ways be “superior”
to our own, and from which we could learn;

e. to recognize our own faults, wrongs, and limitations, by seeing the faults, problems and
limitations facing others, and recognizing ourselves in them;

f. to as such open the possibility of an expanded, cross-cultural or cosmopolitan dialogue

between different individuals and groups, predicated on a sense of curiosity, openness
and humility, rather than egoism, arrogance and fear.

4. That the preconditions for the development and literary-philosophical staging of enlightenment
self-estrangement lie in the limited skepticism characterizing Francis Bacon’s identification of the
“idols of the mind”, John Locke’s explorations of the limits of human understanding and the sources
of ignorance and error, and the historically informed philosophical criticism of Pierre Bayle.

5. That in a complex historical process which remain to be fully studied, since 1960 these critical
dimensions of the enlightenment have been widely misrepresented, and the classic enlightenment
texts neglected, by what is broadly called “postmodernism”, “post-structuralism”, or “French
theory”, whose advocates actually celebrate some practices of self-othering, and its ethics, but
present this as “anti-enlightenment”.

6. That the enlightenment practice of self-othering critique, opening onto what Genevieve Lloyd calls
“a cosmopolitan ideal nourished by what can be seen as an expansive form of skepticism,”
represents a cultural legacy which is increasingly needed, as virulently anti-liberal political
 movements on the Far Right increasingly menace the Capitols of pluralistic forms of polity looking
back to enlightenment ideals.

There are many struggles that will need to fought if we don’t wish to lose many things which have been
achieved for religious, racial, sexual, and other minorities—our fellow people and peoples—in societies like
Australia since 1789, or 1918, when women began to win the franchise, or indeed 1967 here, year of the
referendum to grant indigenous people constitutional recognition. I presume that most people here today
will think that these achievements represent progress, albeit not a “Progress” guaranteed by German
metaphysics, and only upheld by people of good will. One part of this much larger struggle, recondite but
not idle, will be to make sure we get our intellectual and cultural history right. Otherwise, we might find
ourselves looking many gift horses from our past in the mouth (including Voltaire, whose pursed mouth
was usually wryly smiling). The price will be to cede many sources of progressive revolt, wit, satire, insight,
compassion, lucidity, and critique to the forces of reaction who—today as when Diderot was hurled into
jail in 1749—hate the French enlightenment for its defenses of toleration, critique, scientific culture, and
the practice of artful self-othering which I stress in this book.