Replotting the Ethnographic Romance: Revolutionary Frenchmen in the Pacific, 1768–1804

Abstract

S c h o l a r S h av e o f t e n n o t e d t h a t f r e n c h engagement in the Pacific cast itself in the form of romance. The south Pacific was a distant space for the free play of French imaginations, whether social, scientific, or political. From the moment of first French contact, louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s arrival in Tahiti in 1768, that imaginative space was suffused with eroticism. The cast of characters for stories of Frenchmen in the south Pacific inevitably included beautiful and naked island women, freely offering themselves to conquering Frenchmen. According to Matt Matsuda, “the French romance of nineteenth-century imperialism”—what he refers to as France’s Pacific “empire of love”—developed from “the literary and philosophical templates” of early contact: “What was ‘French’ about the ‘Empire’ developed as a curious concatenation of story and unrealized ambition of possession.”