Preface
"Orientalism" has been a buzzword since Edward Said's eponymous book of 1978. Critics have pointed out that Said's "Orient" is focused on the Arab world and excludes most of what Westerners mean by the word. A more recent history of Orientalism, Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing, criticizes Said's narrow view of orientalists as "those who travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world" (2006:294) but goes on to use the same "somewhat arbitrary delimitation of the subject matter" (p. 6), which leaves out India, China, Japan, Tibet, Central Asia, North Asia, and Southeast Asia -- in other words, most of what we mean by Asia and more than half of humankind.
The term "Orientalism" also has many other connotations, for example, in the context of "oriental" fashions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or the imitation of oriental styles in garden architecture and painting. The Orientalism whose birth process is examined in this book is modern Orientalism, that is, the secular, institutionalized study of the Orient by specialists capable of understanding oriental languages and handling primary-source material. Its genesis -- and, more generally, the history of premodern Europe's encounter with Asia -- is still barely known. The present book does not claim to furnish a history of Orientalism as a whole. Its much more modest aim is to elucidate through relatively extensive case studies a crucial phase of the European encounter with Asia: the century of Enlightenment. The focus is on the European discovery of the regions east of Said's and Irwin's "Orient," in particular on Europe's discovery of non-Islamic Asian religions. The facets of Asian religions treated are, needless to say, determined by the interests of the protagonists of the included case studies. Unlike Immanuel Kant (App 2008a), they showed little interest in Tibetan religion; hence there is little discussion of it in this book.
Why the focus on religion? Because the role of colonialism (and generally of economic and political interests) in the birth of Orientalism dwindles to insignificance compared to the role of religion.
[A] false dichotomy) is a logical fallacy, which occurs when a limited number of options are incorrectly presented as being mutually exclusive to one another.
-- False Dilemmas and False Dichotomies: What They Are and How to Respond to Them, by Effectiviology
[T]he director of the Paris observatory in the 1670s Gian-Domenico Cassini (1624-1712) submitted a proposal to the minister Colbert to send Jesuits to China to make some astronomical observations, and to advance their knowledge of latitudes, longitudes and magnetic declinations....One of the missions that was sent to Thailand finally landed up in Pondicherry.
A leading French astronomer stationed in China was Pere Antoine Gaubil (1689-1759), whose astronomical researches had exercised influence on the French astronomer, theorist and mathematical physicist, Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827)....
Pere Gaubil was in constant touch with the French Jesuit astronomer and cartographer Pere Claude Stanisla Boudier (1687-1757) stationed at Chandernagor in India. Boudier's reputation as an astronomer earned him an invitation to Jai Singh' s court in 1734. During his journey to and sojourn at Jaipur, he, like his counterparts in China determined the longitude of 63 Indian cities, in addition to measuring the meridional altitudes of a few stars. [Ansari 1985: 372]. In addition, he observed the first satellite of Jupiter on April 2, 1734 at Fatehpur, and again at Jaipur on August 15 of the same year. He also observed the solar eclipse of May 3, 1734 at Delhi and had earlier reported the lunar eclipse of December 1, 1732....
Pere Pons arrived in India in 1726 and after spending a few years in Thanjavur was appointed superior of the French Mission in Bengal. Other than compiling a Sanskrit grammar, and a treatise on Sanskrit poetics that was sent to Europe, he visited Delhi and Jaipur with Pere Boudier, mentioned earlier, to make some astronomical observations ...
Perusing these records, we recognise firstly the importance and authority of Gaubil among the Jesuit astronomers in India, for he appeared to be providing them the numbers that they considered standard, and thus aided their calibration. It was Gaubil who forwarded their results to Cassini, and thus the latter was the final authority certifying the results of the expedition. Secondly, the study of the motion of the stars and the planets, enabled the savants, through the Jesuits to map the co-ordinates of the globe, symbolically weaving Paris, Rome, Delhi, Jaipur and Beijing into the new fabric of modern science of which the Jesuits were the prominent cultural vectors, and subsequently the agents of cultural imperialism.
-- French Jesuit Scientists in India: Historical Astronomy in the Discourse on India, 1670-1770, by Dhruv Raina
Modern Orientalism is the successor of earlier forms of Orientalism involving the study of Asian languages and texts. Christian Europe had been wrestling with Islam for many centuries; from the sixteenth century many of its universities prided themselves on having an "orientalist" professor who specialized in Hebrew and other Bible-related languages such as Aramaic, Syriac, and sometimes even Arabic or Persian. Such premodern academic Orientalism was generally a handmaiden of Bible studies and theology -- which explains its almost exclusive focus on regions, languages, and religions that play a role in the Old and New Testaments. Studies of Oriental texts and languages beyond the "biblical" region usually -- though not exclusively -- occurred in the context of Christian missions.
This essay is about the letters of Jesuit missionaries about their missions in South India, compiled into the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. The Lettres édifiantes represent the last attempt of men of the cloth to describe India, before the full-scale advent of Imperialism. More than offering a genuine description of south India per se, the Lettres were extensively quoted by other Europeans writing about India and therefore offered a uni-dimensional image of India to the west.
Examining the Lettres fulfils several important aims. Firstly, it fills a gap in the scholarship on pre-colonial India. Secondly, the work of missionaries becomes especially important for this intellectual history, because the aim of French missionaries in India by the late seventeenth-century was as much to record information as amateur scientists as it was to effect conversions to Christianity. The mission writings are representative of the earliest educated western descriptions of India. These early representations were considered so valuable that nineteenth-century works on India relied greatly on missionary accounts of the previous centuries. Citing Pierre Filliozat, William Halbfass in his essay on India and Europe noted:The birth of Indology as a real science is the result of a collaboration between Indian traditional scholars and French missionaries. The first work that can be recognized as an achievement is a grammar of Sanskrit written in Latin, in about 1733. It is probably the work of J.F Pons, a Jesuit, who resided in India, especially at Chandranagore, Karaikal and Pondicherry, in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
By the seventeenth century, new geographical and scientific discoveries and incipient long distance trade between Europe and the East led to increased vigour in seeking information about new lands. As R. K. Kochhar points out, traders only explored the coastline of India. Geographical exploration was left to the Jesuits, who had the training, time, and opportunity to criss-cross the country. They also had the necessary discipline to make careful observations, record them faithfully, and transmit them regularly. In 1687 Louis XIV sent a mission of fourteen Jesuits to Siam. Designated ‘Mathematicians of the King’ they were to collect whatever information they could about the country and its culture in order to understand the peoples of India, Siam, China, and Japan. Expelled from Siam in 1688, only three Jesuits made it to the coast of India alive, including Pères Bouchet and Richaud. The observations of these missionaries along with others who were travelling in India at the time were recorded in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. As Kate Teltscher points out, between the years 1700 and 1750, Europe viewed India primarily through the medium of the letters of the French Jesuits.
It is necessary to point out here that the Lettres exhibit several common characteristics. This indicates that an institutional ‘Jesuit view’ of India was already in place by this time. The first feature of ‘missionary views’ in the Lettres was their anti-Muslim stance....
Another unanimous point lay in proclaiming the antiquity of Indian religion, and the essential unity of a religious power despite polytheism. By the time the Jesuits were writing their letters, the origin of Indian religion was a matter of great interest. Many of the Jesuits who travelled to India were intellectuals and men of science. Several of them were members of the Academia des Sciences and the tone of the Lettres they sent back grew increasingly more scientific as the eighteenth century progressed. The Lettres reflect this trend towards recording information about a country and its people not only for the purpose of conversion but also to further knowledge. For instance, Father Bouchet provided extensive comparisons between Hinduism and Judaism in a long letter. ‘In this present Letter I shall set before you, and I compare some Conjectures, which, I believe, will be thought important. The Design of them is to prove, that the Indians borrowed their Religion from the Books of Moses and the Prophets.’ Bouchet then proceeded to compare and analyze incidents and figures in Hindu religion and mythology to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and incidents in the Old Testament: ‘Among these Customs, which the Indians must necessarily have borrowed from the Jews, and still practice in this Country, I include their frequent Bathings, their Purifications, their extreme Aversion to dead Bodies, the bare touching of which, they imagine to be Pollution. Add to these, the different Order and distinction of Castes; and the inviolable Law, by which all Persons are commanded not to marry out of their own Caste or Tribe.’ He concludes:...I will here end the long Letter which I have taken the Liberty to address to your Lordship. I therein have given you an Account of such Particulars as were told to me by the Indian Nations, who, in all Probability, were antiently [sic for ‘anciently’] Christians, but fell back, many Ages since, into the Errors of Idolatry…You may perceive, that, at the same Time we win over these abandon’d Nations to Christ, we endeavour to be of some Service to the Literati in Europe, by our Discoveries in Countries with which they are not enough acquainted.
The fact that missionaries chose to single out Muslim rulers for criticism highlights the antipathy they had for Islam, which, according to Masuzawa stemmed from a long-standing anti-Semitic feeling in Europe....
Additionally, by the time the Lettres were being written, European economic interest in India was well advanced, and trading depots, factories and a flourishing trade in cotton, tobacco, tea, spices and other luxury goods. This was at the time when European traders were scrambling to secure their footing in India by establishing their own colonies. The Lettres were translated into English solely because they provided valuable information—geographical, social, political and religious—which helped English merchants in their dealings with the locals in the south of India. For their part, Jesuit missionaries could not have been unaware or even uninfluenced by the emerging theory that the European, or Christian culture to be more precise was a superior civilization that owed other, lesser civilizations the opportunity to develop through the mission civilisatrice. What is interesting to note in this transition is that the voice of the native was never heard. The Jesuits presented their own understanding of these customs and dismissed native explanations for their performance as proof of their irrationality and backwardness. While Jesuit understanding of native customs could very likely be coloured by Enlightenment discourses about individual rights, their refusal to accept anything other than a European moral compass was a new development of the colonial era. While Indian religion may have held a kernel of truth in origin, the Jesuits described contemporary Hindus as ‘idolaters’ who displayed their ignorance and backwardness in their stubborn adherence to superstitions and ritualistic beliefs....
According to the historian of science R. K. Kochhar, although the spread of Christian faith was the most important plan of the Jesuits, their activities had a scientific dimension about them, being the first European men of learning in India. Kochhar notes that Bouchet was the first person who, having travelled extensively in the southern part of India, was able to produce a reliable map of the peninsula, which the celebrated geographer D’Anville later used as blueprint for his maps of south India. The Jesuit mission sent by Louis XIV made the first attempt to study Indian languages. These men applied themselves with vigour to the study of the local languages in the south, particularly Tamil and Telegu that were spoken by the majority in the areas they served. Bouchet was fluent in Tamil and was considered a scholar by his fellow missionaries. They also applied themselves to the study of Sanskrit believing that this would give them a greater understanding of the foundation of Indian religion and cultural traditions....
In studying these languages and writing detailed accounts of their impressions of Indians they encountered, as well as producing rudimentary grammars, dictionaries and linguistic guides for other missionaries to use, the Jesuits provided an invaluable service to later generations of Indologists who used these works as their base to learn about India. For example, a signal service to the study of local languages was performed by Ariel, missionary in Pondicherry, who had compiled a Tamil grammar and collected a wealth of Tamil manuscripts and sent them to Paris where Charles d’Ochoa organized them. Père Coeurdoux was another missionary in Pondicherry who was in touch with Voltaire, Anquetil-Duperron, and other academics, providing them information about Indian culture, history, science, etc. In fact it is no coincidence that until the notion of the academic as a rational man of science became dominant in the Enlightenment, many scholars of India were deeply religious and began their studies on India as part of an effort to understand a ‘heathen’ religion or to trace the roots of pagan religion....
An examination of the writings of French missionaries who visited India points to the efforts of these men to create an image of India for their western readers. Since they comprised the majority of Europeans who ventured into the country (as opposed to traders who limited themselves to the ports) their writings were virtually the only firsthand accounts of interior regions in India to be available in Europe. One must remember, however, that the Jesuits were not only steeped in their own religious fervour, but were also subject to the aggressive economic mission that Europe had launched in Asia, particularly in India and China. Jesuit missions to Asia were corollaries to the steady commercial traffic to the East by the late seventeenth-century and the Lettres reflect the need to document the different aspects of the country in order to provide information about the land and people. As outlined in the introduction to each volume of the Lettres, the Jesuits compiled information in order to better effect conversions in India, America and China. Yet the availability of their accounts to the literate public meant that secular writers (such as the philosophes, who cited the Lettres widely) as well as traders and colonialists used them as manuals of information. Many of the missionaries were directly connected to the colonial enterprise, since the French ships usually carried at least one missionary onboard when they voyaged to India. These men were to provide to the spiritual needs of the French, but once they had established their missions, they also actively converted the native population.
-- French Jesuits in India and the Lettres Edifiantes, by Jyoti Mohan
The very first Jesuit mission started in India with the arrival of Francis Xavier (1506–52) in 1542. This is one of the reasons why the first Jesuit historiographies (written exclusively by the Jesuits) were either written in or about India, a geographical term, today corresponding to South Asia, but which in the early modern period often encompassed the entire Asia or at least what the Portuguese, who were the patrons of the Jesuit missions, called Estado da Índia. As a new religious order specifically available for overseas missions by a special vow to the pope, the Jesuits were aware of the need to produce and show the results of their engagement and to publish them, as the use of the printing press was gaining ground, for their European sponsors and benefactors. Jesuit written reports and their correspondence provided materials for the first histories of the order. It is safe to say that the absence of the past stimulated the production of historiography. These histories were meant to be read widely and to edify European audience, and to entice new recruits and provide the template for the missionary action. They were both apologetic and factual, since each detail, whether about missionary successes, obstacles, or martyrdoms, was seen as a step forward to the ultimate triumph. This teleological coloring of the historiographical account was also closely interwoven with Catholic providentialism...
The earliest publications of missionary letters from India, such as the famous Copie d’une lettre missive envoyée des Indes (Paris, 1545) by Francis Xavier, can be taken as the first Jesuit historiographical effort at printing primary sources. Jesuit historiography, therefore, proleptically starts with the present, in which the historical actors were still alive and writing about themselves...The use of history was further divided, as was almost every Jesuit cultural practice, between internal and external. The history for the insiders, besides its apparent edifying and exhortative character, aimed primarily at the integration of an ever-growing and diversifying membership, and consequently at establishing an efficient conflict-solving strategies....
[ It] was during the generalship of Francisco de Borja (in office 1565–73) that Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–76), who organized the secretariat and centralized correspondence for the generals, wrote about the necessity to initiate a work on the history of the Society of Jesus: “Since some kind of history of the Society is desired from various parts, it would be appropriate if each college sent information (unless it is already sent) concerning its foundation as well as all remarkable events that happened until now, noting down times and places.”...
The New Historical Reports (Nova relatio historica or Newe Historische Relation) or New Indian Relations (Indische Newe Relation) signal a transitional genre between letter (a witness report) and history. The printing press was therefore accelerating the process of making recent present events into fixed past, controlled by the Jesuit imprimatur...
The manuscript that Joseph Wicki dated to around 1615 is interestingly not simply a history of the Society of Jesus but a combination of a geography and an ethnography of Kerala. It seems to have been written in the first place for the Portuguese colonial administration in order to provide strategic advice for a possible conquest of or at least an attack on one of the rich temples. It was also, of course, directed at the Jesuit missionaries, offering them information and instructions on how to respond to Indian idolatry and customs. These kinds of texts in which Jesuits used their history writing skills, although not necessarily for histories of the order, were many, and some were written in vernacular languages of the missions...
Jesuits were in the early modern period actors in and writers of their own and other peoples’ histories. They were both local and global heroes for their Catholic audience...
It is clear that in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, Jesuit historical writings and what can be called “historical sources” from India, take clearly national and defensive stands. With the arrival of the French Jesuits, sent by the French king and defying Portuguese padroado system, the letters written from the two missions in Tamil Nadu, an already famous Madurai mission under the padroado and the Mission du Carnate, a French mission on the east coast of India, were immediately published in a famous collection entitled Lettres édifiantes et curieuses ["LEC"]. While the publication of the Cartas in the early years of the Society of Jesuit had been haphazard, the French letters in this collection were from the start a self-conscious effort at promoting the new French missions. The letters were not simply reproduced, but retailored by the editors in Paris...
The publication of the LEC was a veritable machine de guerre of the French Jesuits against multiple enemies, both Catholic and Protestant. In addition to Portuguese ecclesiastical padroado, the French Jesuits were also involved in a bitter struggle with Capuchins and the Missions Etrangères de Paris (hereafter MEP) in Pondicherry, and with numerous theologians in Rome, with whom they exchanged “literary” punches concerning the Malabar rites controversy. As the Propaganda Fide strove to replace the padroado in the missionary field in Asia, in particular, the Jesuits found themselves in a difficult position. Inspired mostly by Jesuit strategies and “modernized” by the more extensive use of the printing press, they both cooperated and resisted Roman efforts to centralize missionary activities.
Another front opened by the LEC was to shut down reports by various and increasingly famous travelers in India, French libertines, and Protestants and coming from rival European nations such as Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany...
The Society of Jesus in France was bracing for a fight against very articulate enemies at home, some of whom came straight from the Jesuit colleges and who were eventually associated with the Enlightenment. Epistolary form [letters] in general became a preferred means of expression in the century, in which many certainties were shaken and self-apologetic histories were mistrusted. To win over French literary public, the missionaries in India produced erudite and descriptive texts and letters in which distant peoples and their histories were variously portrayed as congealed in ancient (European) time or as people who “forgot” (or were tricked into forgetting) their own Christian origins. Jesuit speculations about connections between Brahmans and Jews, and many other conjectures were incorporated into some of the most important Enlightenment projects such as Bernard and Picard’s, Cérémonies et coutumes...
[F]rom the early years of the eighteenth century, a rival Christian mission in India, that of the German Pietists from Halle in Tranquebar, a Danish enclave on the Coromandel Coast, started producing, partly in imitation of the Jesuits, their own missionary historiography...Veyssière de la Croze established a very long history of Christianity in India, preserved by the St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, while he portrayed the Jesuits and the Portuguese as those who came to pervert and corrupt the pristine message and this ancient community that had originally resembled a Protestant sect....
Along the large spectrum of the Jesuits’ published historical works, some ranged from melodramatic, romantic, and pious constructions and fictionalization rather than historical scholarship...
In addition to French Jesuit scholarship focusing mainly on South India, which was also their missionary base, in other parts of India Jesuit historians specialized in other missions and in other historical topics having to do with Indian history. Posted in Jesuit colleges turned universities, and later on in Jesuit research institutes established in Bombay, Calcutta, Goa, New Delhi, Pune, and many other places, the Jesuits ceased to be “missionaries” and some became professional historians. A Catalan, Enric Heras de Sicars (1888–1955), or under his better known anglicized name of Henry Heras, became a famous historian and archeologist, and professor of history at the St. Xavier's College in Bombay. The career of Henry Hosten (1873–1935), a Belgian Jesuit, stationed in Darjeeling, was equally rich, since he was another prolific historian and translator. His work still remains in good part unknown since his publications were scattered in different historical journals in British India, such as Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. He was probably better known as a research source to various famous non-Jesuit British historians such as Edward MacLagan who wrote The Jesuits and the Great Mogul.
-- The Historiography of the Jesuit Missions in India (1500–1800), by Ines G. Županov
The eighteenth century brought a momentous change that opened the door to a new kind of Orientalism, less shackled by theology, Bible studies, the frontiers of the Middle East, and Europe's time-honored Judeo-Christian worldview. This new or "modern" Orientalism was prepared by a growing interest in India as the cradle of civilization, an interest that was promoted by Voltaire (1694-1778) in his quest to denigrate the Bible and destabilize Christianity (see Chapter I).
"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it."...
"What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."...
"The most beautiful of all emblems is that of God, whom Timaeus of Locris describes under the image of 'A circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.'"
-- Voltaire's Deism, by World Union of Deists: "God Gave Us Reason, Not Religion"
After the appearance of a number of purportedly very ancient texts of Indian origin in the 1760s and 1770s (Chapters 6 and 7), the idea of Indian origins of civilization gained ground. The research by early British Sanskritists in Calcutta and their articles in the Asiatick Researches added oil to the fire, and in 1795 Europe's first secular institution for the study of Oriental languages was established: the Ecole Speciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris. Its first director, Louis-Mathieu Langles (1763-1824), was inspired both by Voltaire's idea of Indian origins and the new approach of the British gentlemen scholars, and he regarded the Bible as an imitation of the far older Veda (see Chapter 8). With the support of Constantin-Francois Volney (1757-1820), the noted Orientalist and author of the law expropriating the French Catholic Church, the Ecole Speciale officially sought to divorce the study of Asia, its languages, and its textual heritage from the realm of theology and biblical studies. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this school quickly became the Mecca of secular Orientalist philology, and further progress was made with such developments as the creation of the first European university chairs in Indology and Sinology (Paris, 1814). However, as the recent studies of Mangold (2004), Polaschegg (2005), and Rabault-Feuerhahn (2008) show for the case of Germany, the emancipation of Orientalism from theology and its establishment as a discipline in its own right required many decades. Indeed, the complicated relationship between "theology," "religious studies," and "Asian studies" in today's academic environment would indicate that this emancipation process is far from finished.
It is easily forgotten that even in the 1820s Europeans believed with few exceptions that the world is only a few thousand years old, that all the world's peoples can be traced back to Noah's Ark, and that Christianity is the fulfillment and goal of all religion. Even well-informed people like the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had no doubt about this, as his lectures on the philosophy of history and on oriental religions show (App 2008a). Fundamental views about where we come from, where we stand, and where we are headed played an extraordinary role in the discovery of other cultures and religions. The notion of a soul that, once created, goes on living forever, or of a future state in which acts committed during life will be rewarded or punished, were incomparably more important in the European discovery of Asian religions than were commercial greed and imperialist ambitions.
[R]eligion was an important political aspect of French society and continued to remain so throughout many different historical periods, under many different governments. Starting from the period of pre-revolutionary France, or the Ancien Regime, religion began to take an active role politically. Catholic liturgical rites and ceremonies were especially significant for the use of religion for political power. Under what can be termed as “royal religion, “Catholicism assimilated with the French Monarchy along with its ceremonial practices. As a result, Catholicism gave spiritual validity to the French monarch through the use of liturgical rites during a king’s coronation. At the same time, the Catholic Church was granted status by the French government. The connection between Church and State was a long lasting political relationship as a result of it lasting several hundred years....
Ancien Regime
Many factors played into the growing unpopularity of the Catholic Church during the Ancien Regime. Within the Ancien Regime, the Catholic Church was a dominant political figure and the Catholic clergy were granted exemptions from paying many taxes to the French monarchy due to Catholicism’s position as the official religion of France. The Church was allowed to “collect its own tax, the tithe,” from the French population. As a result, the Catholic Church began to gain special political and social status in France in exchange for its support of the monarchy. With the privileges granted to the Catholic Church economically, its political power grew because of the taxation money allowing the Catholic Church 10% of France’s territory. This ownership of large amounts of French property also led to “seigneurial duties,” of overlooking property and those who reside on it for the Monarchy. Because of this, The French nobility and clergy became intertwined in association. Both groups began to hold equal wealth and status, while the highest positions within the Catholic Church were reserved for members of the nobility. This power structure became unpopular with the Third Estate, part of the French political voting system, which made up of 97% of the French population. The Third Estate was constantly outvoted by the Catholic Church and the nobility, which made up a small part of the population, but held the most voting power. The French public grew tired of the power that the Catholic Church was holding and the political corruption it created. Though supported by the nobility and monarchy, the general distaste for the Catholic Church’s political power over voting rights, land, and taxation became its downfall, making distaste for the church one of the key components for the advent of the French Revolution.
-- God and Revolution: Religion and Power from Pre-Revolutionary France to the Napoleonic Empire, by Alexa Weight
The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris (French: Société des Missions étrangères de Paris, short M.E.P.) is a Roman Catholic missionary organization. It is not a religious institute, but an organization of secular priests and lay persons dedicated to missionary work in foreign lands.
The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris was established 1658–63. In 1659, the instructions for the establishment of the Paris Foreign Missions Society were given by Rome's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and marked the creation of a missionary institution that did not depend on the control of the traditional missionary and colonial powers of Spain or Portugal....
The traditional colonial powers of Spain and Portugal had initially received from the Pope an exclusive agreement to evangelize conquered lands, a system known as Padroado Real in Portuguese and Patronato real in Spanish. After some time however, Rome grew dissatisfied with the Padroado system, due to its limited means, strong involvement with politics, and dependence on the kings of Spain and Portugal for any decision....
As early as 1622 Pope Gregory XV, wishing to take back control of the missionary efforts, had established the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, commonly known as Propaganda) with the objective of bringing to the Catholic faith non-Catholic Christians (Protestants, Oriental Christians), but also inhabitants of the American continent and Asia. In order to do so, Rome resurrected the system of Apostolic vicars, who would report directly to Rome in their missionary efforts, and would be responsible to create a native clergy.
On the field, violent conflicts would erupt between the Padroado and the Propaganda during the 17th and 18th centuries (when the first missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society left for the Far East, the Portuguese had orders to capture them and send them to Lisbon). The creation of the Paris Foreign Missions Society was well-aligned with Rome's efforts to develop the role of the Propaganda.
The creation of the Paris Foreign Missions Society was initiated when the Jesuit Father Alexandre de Rhodes, back from Vietnam and asking for the dispatch of numerous missionaries to the Far East, obtained in 1650 an agreement by Pope Innocent X to send secular priests and bishops as missionaries. Alexandre de Rhodes received in Paris in 1653 a strong financial and organizational support from the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement for the establishment of the Paris Foreign Missions Society....The Company of the Blessed Sacrament (French: Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement), also sometimes referred to as the Company of the Most Blessed Sacrament, was a French Catholic secret society which included among its members many Catholic notables of the 17th century. It was responsible for much of the contribution of the Catholic Church in France to meeting the social needs of the day.
-- Company of the Blessed Sacrament, by Wikipedia
The Society itself ("Assemblée des Missions") was formally established by the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement in 1658. The object of the new society was and is still the evangelization of non-Christian countries, by founding churches and raising up a native clergy under the jurisdiction of the bishops. The creation of the Paris Foreign Missions Society coincided with the establishment of the French East India Company.
In order to dispatch the three missionaries to Asia, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement established a trading company (the "Compagnie de Chine", founded 1660)....The Compagnie de Chine was a French trading company established in 1660 by the Catholic society Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, in order to dispatch missionaries to Asia (initially Bishops François Pallu, Pierre Lambert de la Motte and Ignace Cotolendi of the newly founded Paris Foreign Missions Society). The company was modelled on the Dutch East India Company.
A ship was built in the Netherlands by the shipowner Fermanel, but the ship foundered soon after being launched. The only remaining solution for the missionaries was to travel on land, since Portugal would have refused to take non-Padroado missionaries by ship, and the Dutch and the English refused to take Catholic missionaries.
In 1664, the China Company would be fused by Jean-Baptiste Colbert with the Compagnie d'Orient and Compagnie de Madagascar into the Compagnie des Indes Orientales [French East India Company].
-- Compagnie de Chine, by WikipediaThe French East India Company (French: Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales) was a commercial Imperial enterprise, founded on 1 September 1664 to compete with the English (later British) and Dutch East India companies in the East Indies.
Planned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, it was chartered by King Louis XIV for the purpose of trading in the Eastern Hemisphere.
It resulted from the fusion of three earlier companies, the 1660 Compagnie de Chine, the Compagnie d'Orient, and Compagnie de Madagascar.
The first Director General for the Company was François de la Faye,...Jean-François Leriget de La Faye (1674, Vienne, Isère – 11 July 1731, Paris) was a French diplomat, wealthy landowner and art collector, poet, and member of the Académie française for a single year.
At one time a musketeer, through social connections La Faye became a member of the court of Louis XIV. His position was head of the royal cabinet, and private secretary and special adviser to the King on matters such as finding a wife for the young Louis XV. He also performed various diplomatic missions in London, Genoa and Utrecht, including involvement in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, and was also a director of the French East India Company.
Often classified first as a poet, La Faye's work was indeed approvingly quoted by his correspondent Voltaire...
La Faye was the owner of an extensive art collection, two hotels in Paris, and another in Versailles. When he acquired the ancient château de Condé in 1719, he commissioned the most fashionable artists of his time and the architect Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni for elaborate improvements....
[[[The Marquis was a member of the French Academy, a director of the French India Company, and accordingly, was a very rich man. In his mansion in Paris, he often received such famous people as Voltaire and Crébillon....
At a later date, the castle belonged to the Count de la Tour du Pin Lachaux, through his marriage with the niece of the Marquis de la Faye.
In 1814, the Countess de Sade, the daughter-in-law of the famous Marquis de Sade, inherited Condé from her cousin, La Tour du Pin. Since this time and up to 1983, the castle remained the property of the Sade family, who restored it with much care after the two World Wars.
-- Château de Condé, by Wikipedia]]]
[[[Perhaps the most important name connected with the EzV in this early period is that of Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805), who quotes a long passage from it in the "Discours Preliminaire" to his Zend-Avesta (1771:1, I. lxxxiii-lxxxvii). Anquetil adds the interesting remark, that "the manuscript brought back to France by Mr. de Modave [and delivered to Voltaire] originally comes from the papers of Mr. Barthelemy, second of the Council at Pondicherry, who probably had the original translated by the Company's interpreters under his orders."
Anquetil possessed his own copy of the EzV; it is No. 20 of the Fonds Anquetil, now No. 8876 of the "Nouvelles acquisitions francaises" at the National Library in Paris. This copy is evidently more complete than Voltaire's; the supplementary final section (fol. 55 recto) is introduced: "from the copy of Mr. Tessier de la Tour, nephew of Mr. Barthelemy, a member of the Council at Pondicherry." Folio 2 recto contains a note, in Anquetil's handwriting, in which he mentions the name of the person who introduced him to Tessier's copy: Antoine Court de Gebelin,10 and in which he also speculates on the origin of Maudave's manuscript. "On August 27, 1766, a Swiss (Mr. Court de Gebelin, of Geneva) came to see me. He told me about the Ezour-Vedam which had been brought back from Pondicherry by Mr. Tessier, the nephew of Mr. Barthelemy, second in rank in that town. It had been found in the papers of that councilman who, as reported by Mr. Tessier, had also other Indian books translated. It is probably from there that Mr. de Maudave had derived his. This Swiss has in the meanwhile confirmed that it is the same work and that Mr. Tessier's copy contains one more chapter at the end. Or else, Mr. de Maudave has obtained his from Mr. Porcher, the commander at Carical whose daughter he had married." I shall come back to the manuscripts of the EzV, their origin and mutual relationship, later in this volume.
Anquetil's interpretation of the EzV and its dialogue between Biache and Chumontou is shown most clearly in a handwritten marginal note in his manuscript (fol. 8 verso). On Chumontou's statement (Text p. 116) that the common interpretation of the terms choto, rozo, and tomo is wrong and ought to be replaced by his own, Anquetil comments: "This is how the Br[ahman] Chumontou proceeds. Later in this treatise he refutes the legends told by Biache, either because they are contrary to good sense, or because they are not found in the ancient books, and he provides a moralistic explanation for those that are based on facts which he agrees to. However, these legends are accepted throughout India (see Abrah. Roger), and Chumontou does no more than confront them with the doubts of a philosopher which cannot be held to represent the religion of India. To prove that they are, he ought to combat authority by authority."
-- Ezourvedam, edited by Ludo Rocher]]]
For the interior decoration he hired François Lemoyne and his disciple François Boucher; Antoine Watteau and his disciple Nicolas Lancret; as well as Jean-Baptiste Oudry.
-- Jean-François Leriget de La Faye, by Wikipedia
who was adjoined by two Directors belonging to the two most successful trading organizations at that time: François Caron, who had spent 30 years working for the Dutch East India Company, including more than 20 years in Japan,...François Caron (1600–1673) was a French Huguenot refugee to the Netherlands who served the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) for 30 years, rising from cabin boy to Director-General at Batavia (Jakarta), only one grade below Governor-General. He was later to become Director-General of the French East Indies Company (Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales) (1667–1673)...
Caron succeeded in founding French outposts at Surat (1668) and at Masulipatam (1669) in India; and Louis XIV acknowledged those successes by awarding him the Order of St. Michael. He was "Commissaire" at Surat between 1668 and 1672. The French East India Company formally set up a trading centre at Pondicherry in 1673. This outpost eventually became the chief French settlement in India.
-- François Caron, by Wikipedia
From 1741 the French under Joseph François Dupleix pursued an aggressive policy against both the Indians and the British until they ultimately were defeated by Robert Clive.
-- French East India Company, by Wikipedia
[T]he establishment of a trading company and the perceived threat of French missionary efforts to Asia was met with huge opposition by the Jesuits, the Portuguese, the Dutch and even the Propaganda, leading to the issuing of an interdiction of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement by Cardinal Mazarin in 1660. In spite of these events, the King, the Assembly of the French Clergy, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement and private donors accepted to finance the effort, and the three bishops managed to depart, although they now had to travel on land....
The mission had the objective of adapting to local customs, establishing a native clergy, and keeping close contacts with Rome....
Instructions were also given to the effect that respecting the habits of the countries to be evangelized was paramount, a guiding principle of the Missions ever since:..."Do not act with zeal, do not put forward any arguments to convince these peoples to change their rites, their customs or their usages, except if they are evidently contrary to the religion and morality. What would be more absurd than to bring France, Spain, Italy or any other European country to the Chinese? Do not bring to them our countries, but instead bring to them the faith, a faith that does not reject or hurt the rites, nor the usages of any people, provided that these are not distasteful, but that instead keeps and protects them." — Extract from the 1659 Instructions, given to Pallu and Lambert de la Motte by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
For the Paris Foreign Missions Society the starting point was Siam, with the establishment of a base in its capital Ayutthaya, because Siam was highly tolerant of other religions and was indeed the only country in Southeast Asia where the Catholic Fathers could establish themselves safely. With the agreement of the Siamese king Narai, the Seminary of Saint Joseph was established, which could educate Asian candidate priests from all over the country of the Southeast Asian peninsula, as well as a cathedral. The College remained in Siam for a century, until the conquest of Siam by Burma in 1766.
Besides these events of purely religious interest there were others in the political order: through their initiative a more active trade was established between Indo-China, the Indies, and France; embassies were sent from place to place; treaties were signed....
In 1825, emperor Minh Mạng, the son and successor of Gia Long, prohibited foreign missionaries in Vietnam, on the grounds that they perverted the people....
In 1843, the French Foreign Minister François Guizot sent a fleet to Vietnam under Admiral Jean-Baptiste Cécille and Captain Charner. The action also was related to the British successes in China in 1842, and France hoped to be able to establish trade with China from the south. The pretext was to support British efforts in China, and to fight the persecution of French missionaries in Vietnam.
In 1847, Cécille sent two warships (Gloire and Victorieuse) under Captain Lapierre to Da Nang (Tourane) in Vietnam to obtain the release of two imprisoned French missionaries, Bishop Dominique Lefèbvre (imprisoned for a second time as he had re-entered Vietnam illegally) and Duclos, and freedom of worship for Catholics in Vietnam. As negotiations drew on without results, on April 15, 1847 a fight named the Bombardment of Đà Nẵng erupted between the French fleet and Vietnamese ships, three of which were sunk as a result. The French fleet sailed away.
Other missionaries were martyred during the reign of Emperor Tự Đức, such as Augustin Schoeffer in 1851 and Jean Louis Bonnard in 1852, prompting the Paris Foreign Missions Society to ask the French government for a diplomatic intervention. In 1858, Charles Rigault de Genouilly attacked Vietnam under the orders of Napoleon III following the failed mission of diplomat Charles de Montigny. His stated mission was to stop the persecution of Catholic missionaries in the country and assure the unimpeded propagation of the faith. Rigault de Genouilly, with 14 French gunships, 3,000 men and 300 Filipino troops provided by the Spanish, attacked the port of Da Nang in 1858, causing significant damage, and occupying the city. After a few months, Rigault had to leave due to problems with supplies and illnesses among many of his troops. Sailing south, De Genouilly captured Saigon, a poorly defended city, on 18 February 1859. This was the beginning of the French conquest of Cochinchina....
In the mid-19th century the first western Catholic missionaries began to enter Korea. This was done by stealth, either via the Korean border with Manchuria or the Yellow Sea. These French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society arrived in Korea in the 1840s to proselytize to a growing Korean flock that had in fact independently introduced Catholicism into Korea but needed ordained ministers....
Bishop Siméon-François Berneux, appointed in 1856 as head of the infant Korean Catholic church, estimated in 1859 that the number of Korean faithful had reached nearly 17,000. At first the Korean court turned a blind eye to such incursions. This attitude changed abruptly, however, with the enthronement of King Gojong in 1864....
Berneux was summoned to the capital, but upon his arrival in February 1866, he was seized and executed. A roundup then began of the other French Catholic priests and native converts.
As a result of the Korean dragnet all but three of the French missionaries were captured and executed...Fortuitously in Tianjin at the time of Ridel's arrival was the commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, Rear Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze. Hearing of the massacre and the affront to French national honor, Roze determined to launch a punitive expedition, the French Campaign against Korea, 1866....
Father Auguste Chapdelaine, who was preaching illegally in China, was imprisoned, tortured and killed by Chinese authorities in 1856. This event, named the "Father Chapdelaine Incident" became the pretext for the French military intervention in the Second Opium War....
In Hong Kong there were also a house of spiritual retreat and a printing establishment (Nazareth) which published works of art of the Far East -– dictionaries, grammars, books of theology, piety, Christian doctrine, and pedagogy.
-- Paris Foreign Missions Society, by Wikipedia
The same is true for the conviction that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing, manages its smooth functioning, foresees everything, punishes man's evil deeds by natural disasters such as floods, and sent his son to atone for man's sins. Such notions form the ideological background of the European discovery of Asian religions, and the history of Orientalism is to a substantial degree also a history of the West's gradual detachment from this traditional ideology.