Abstract
François Moure au : Introduction. Voyages of exploration are slightly out of place in the civilisation of the French Enlightenment, in which travelling (on the Grand Tour or scientific journey) was seen as a way of finding oneself and verifying what was known. The voyage of exploration, on the contrary, is a search for the unknown, the epistemological revolution first undertaken by the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries. The present collection of essays concerns different categories of such journeys by professionals or experts, ranging from the diplomat or wanderer, the official or scientist, to the freebooter or adventurer. But these apparently utilitarian journeys which prefigure the imperialism of the following century, produce odd side-effects involving the scientific or sociological imagination, with the "imaginary savage" and the recurring myth of encyclopaedic knowledge. As the Enlightened expert advances towards the horizon of total knowledge, it recedes and the newly-explored earth acquires new mysteries.
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