"Les Sauvages Ameriquains": Persistence into the 18th Century of Traditional French Concepts and Constructs for Comprehending Amerindians

Abstract

This article argues that the various conceptual frameworks and intellectual constructs employed by Frenchmen to describe and understand the native inhabitants of the New World during the 16th and 17th centuries persisted into the Age of the Enlightenment. Numerous modern studies of the literature and history of French contact with Amerindians have attempted to find a dominant and unifying theme. It is contended in this paper that a wide range and variety of concepts were employed to explain new experiences, so that ambivalence and contradiction characterized the literature. The French were consistent, however, in believing they possessed a peculiar facility for getting along with native peoples, a genie colonial. The negative expression of that belief was the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty and enslavement. In the 18th century, Frenchmen still employed the traditional concepts of a more recently created New World, the monstruous Satanic world, the Golden Age, the Terrestrial Paradise, the Chain of Being, etc. But they had reinterpreted some of these themes in order to incorporate new knowledge of Amerindians. Indeed, a new debate was launched about the possible degeneracy of European stock in colonial environments. The more optimistic refutation of such anti-colonialist sentiments was rooted in traditional intellectual concepts. Although there was a growth of interest in New World men, there was not a commensurate deepening of understanding or appreciation. The 18th century is equated with the Enlightenment or Illuminismo during which the cosmopolitanism that followed the opening up of the New World and the East led to significant social, cultural and political changes. Among other things, it is generally believed to have given birth to anthropology as a scientific discipline. The siecle des lumieres, also called the siecle de la bienfaisance and siecle de l'humanite, has been seen in our historiography as an essentially European movement which affected all aspects of life and all classes of the population. The consideration of the persistence of traditional frameworks and ideas in this historical age, and also of the influence of the Native American experience, might seem contradictory, at first. Social scientists, however, are accustomed to tracing back the roots or origins of structural changes and the evolution of intellectual and moral ideas. Historical literature abounds with references to fruition of earlier manifestations, forerunners, prior indications, and seminal ideas. Nevertheless, historians in general view the flow of human events according to its natural developmental and chronological course-the unfolding of mankind's destiny concept. Thus, such concepts as development, progress, and stages of evolution-all terms frequently employed by the Enlightenment writers-become part of the