Linguet’s Lettre du Mandarin, a Forgotten Apology for the Jesuits: The Mandarin Wei Zheng as a Model

Abstract

Abstract The Jesuit order was vehemently spreading the gospel since it was founded, and China was a major target. After 1601, many Jesuits had arrived in China and their learned reports to their headquarters accumulated rapidly. The Jesuits adapted to the Chinese scholar-officials called Mandarins and their Confucian theories, leading to a conflict with the French church, the Pope, and the Chinese Emperor. Throughout Europe, the Jesuits further played a prominent role in society: as educators, teachers, and advisors of royalty. Seventeenth-century France, troubled by a fundamental socio-cultural reorientation, class struggles and wars, blamed them for holding such esteemed positions and this resentment grew shortly before the French Revolution. The writer Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet takes an apologetic position in their lawsuit for the Parlement de Paris of 1762 in the Lettre du Mandarin. Bibliographic and biographic details are provided. The “opening part” shows the morally high position of Mandarins such as Wei Zheng, an image produced on the basis of Jesuit correspondence, and it denotes the European trend of “Chinoiserie.” This part is here presented in an English translation and richly commented on. The ideas of “Chinoiserie” are here illustrated with works from the literature. The Jesuits and their humane advocate Linguet lost the unique case, but it is concluded that the image of the Mandarin as a rational and moral man is portrayed as a model for a new French society.