by Encyclopedia.com
Accessed: 2/24/23
Fourmont's Dirty Little Secret
When Joseph DE GUIGNES (1721-1800) at the young age of fifteen was placed with Etienne FOURMONT (1683-1745), Fourmont enjoyed a great reputation as one of Europe's foremost specialists of classical as well as oriental languages. As an associate of Abbe Bignon (the man so eager to stock the Royal Library with Oriental texts), Fourmont had met a Chinese scholar called Arcadius HOANG (1679-1716) and had for a short while studied Chinese with him (Elisseeff 1985:133ff.; Abel-Remusat 1829:1.260). In 1715 the thirty-two-year-old Fourmont was elected to the chair of Arabic at the College Royal. Hoang's death in 1716 did not diminish Fourmont's desire to learn Chinese, and in 1719 he followed Nicolas FRERET (1688-1749) in introducing Europe to the 214 Chinese radicals. This is one of the systems used by the Chinese to classify Chinese characters and to make finding them, be it in a dictionary or a printer's shop, easier and quicker.
Thanks to royal funding for his projected grammar and dictionaries, Fourmont had produced more than 100,000 Chinese character types. But in Fourmont's eyes the 214 radicals were far more than just a classification method. Naming them "clefs" (keys), he was convinced that they were meaningful building blocks that the ancient Chinese had used in constructing characters. For example, Fourmont thought that the first radical (-) is "the key of unity, or priority, and perfection" and that the second radical (׀) signifies "growth" (Klaproth 1828:234). Starting with the 214 basic "keys," so Fourmont imagined, the ancient Chinese had combined them to form the tens of thousands of characters of the Chinese writing system. However, as Klaproth and others later pointed out, the Chinese writing system was not "formed from its origin after a general system"; rather, it had evolved gradually from "the necessity of inventing a sign to express some thing or some idea." The idea of classifying characters according to certain elements arose only much later and resulted in several systems with widely different numbers of radicals ranging from a few dozen to over 700 (Klaproth 1828:233-36).
Like many students of Chinese or Japanese, Fourmont had probably memorized characters by associating their elements with specific meanings. A German junior world champion in the memory sport, Christiane Stenger, employs a similar technique for remembering mathematical equations. Each element is assigned a concrete meaning; for example, the minus sign signifies "go backward" or "vomit," the letter A stands for "apple," the letter B for "bear," the letter C for "cirrus fruit," and the mathematical root symbol for a root. Thus, "B minus C" is memorized by imagining a bear vomiting a citrus fruit, and "minus B plus the root of A square" may be pictured as a receding bear who stumbles over a root in which a square apple is embedded.
Stenger's technique, of course, has no connection whatsoever to understanding mathematical formulae, but Fourmont's "keys" can indeed be of help in understanding the meaning of some characters. While such infusion of meaning certainly helped Fourmont and his students Michel-Ange-Andre le Roux DESHAUTERAYES (1724-95) and de Guignes in their study of complicated Chinese characters, it also involved a serious misunderstanding. Stenger understood that bears and fruit were her imaginative creation in order to memorize mathematical formulae and would certainly not have graduated from high school if she had thought that her mathematics teacher wanted to tell her stories about apples and bears.
But mutatis mutandis, this was exactly Fourmont's mistake. Instead of simply accepting the 214 radicals as an artificial system for classifying Chinese characters and as a mnemonic aide, he was convinced that the radicals are a collection of primeval ideas that the Chinese used as a toolset to assemble ideograms representing objects and complex ideas. Fourmont thought that the ancient Chinese had embedded a little story in each character. As he and his disciples happily juggled with "keys," spun stories, and memorized their daily dose of Chinese characters, they did not have any inkling that this fundamentally mistaken view of the genesis of Chinese characters would one day form the root for a mistake of such proportions that it would put de Guignes's entire reputation in jeopardy.
Apart from a series of dictionaries that never came to fruition, Fourmont was also working on a Chinese grammar. He announced its completion in 1728, eight years before the arrival of de Guignes. The first part of this Grammatica sinica with Fourmont's presentation of the 214 "keys" and elements of pronunciation appeared in 1737. The second part, prepared for publication while de Guignes sat at his teacher's feet, contained the grammar proper as well as Fourmont's catalog of Chinese works in the Bibliotheque Royale and was published in 1742. When Fourmont presented the result to the king of France, he had de Guignes accompany him, and the king was so impressed by the twenty-one-year-old linguistic prodigy that he endowed him on the spot with a pension (Michaud 1857:18.126).
But de Guignes's teacher Fourmont had a dirty little secret. He had focused on learning and accumulating data about single Chinese characters, but his knowledge of the Chinese classical and vernacular language was simply not adequate for writing a grammar. By consequence, the man who had let the world know that a genius residing in Europe could master Chinese just as well as the China missionaries decided to plagiarize -- what else? -- the work of a missionary. No one found out about this until Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat in 1825 carefully compared the manuscript of the Arte de La lengua mandarina by the Spanish Franciscan Francisco Varo with Fourmont's Latin translation and found to his astonishment that Fourmont's ground-breaking Grammatica sinica was a translation of Varo's work (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.298). In an "act of puerile vanity," Abel-Remusat sadly concluded, Fourmont had appropriated Varo's entire text "almost without any change" while claiming that he had never seen it (1826:2.109).2
While de Guignes helped prepare this grammar for publication, Fourmont continued his research on chronology and the history of ancient peoples. During the seventeenth century, ancient Chinese historical sources had become an increasingly virulent threat to biblical chronology and, by extension, to biblical authority. As Fourmont's rival Freret was busy butchering Isaac Newton's lovingly calculated chronology, de Guignes's teacher turned his full attention to the Chinese annals. These annals were in general regarded either as untrustworthy and thus inconsequential or as trustworthy and a threat to biblical authority. However, in a paper read on May 18, 1734, at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions, Fourmont declared with conviction that he could square the circle: the Chinese annals were trustworthy just because they confirmed the Bible.
Dismissing Freret's and Newton's nonbiblical Middle Eastern sources as "scattered scraps," he praised the Chinese annals to the sky as the only ancient record worth studying apart from the Bible (Fourmont 1740:507-8).
But Fourmont's lack of critical acumen is as evident in this paper as in his Critical reflections on the histories of ancient peoples of 1735 and the Meditationes sinicae of 1737. In the "avertissement" to the first volume of the Critical reflections, Fourmont mentions the question of an India traveler, Chevalier Didier, who had conversed with Brahmins and missionaries and came in frustration to Paris to seek Fourmont's opinion about an important question of origins: had Indian idolatry influenced Egyptian idolatry or vice versa? Fourmont delivered his answer after nearly a thousand tedious pages full of chronological juggling:With regard to customs in general, since India is entirely Egyptian and Osiris led several descendants of Abraham there, we have the first cause of that resemblance of mores in those two nations; but with regard to the religion of the Indians, they only received it subsequently through commerce and through the colonies coming from Egypt. (Fourmont 1735:2-499)
For Fourmont the Old Testament was the sole reliable testimony of antediluvian times, and he argued that the reliability of other accounts decreases with increasing distance from the landing spot of Noah's ark. Only the Chinese, whose "language is the oldest of the universe," remain a riddle, as their antiquity "somehow rivals that of Genesis and has caused the most famous chronologists to change their system" (1735:1.lii). But would not China's "hieroglyphic" writing system also indicate Egyptian origins? Though Fourmont suspected an Egyptian origin of Chinese writing, he could not quite figure out the exact mechanism and transmission. He suspected that "Hermes, who passed for the inventor of letters" had not invented hieroglyphs but rather "on one hand more perfect hieroglyphic letters, which were brought to the Chinese who in turn repeatedly perfected theirs; and on the other hand alphabetic letters" (Fourmont 1735:2.500). These "more perfect hieroglyphs" that "seemingly existed with the Egyptian priests" are "quite similar to the Chinese characters of today" (p. 500).
Fourmont was studying whether there was any support for Kircher's hypothesis that the letters transmitted from Egypt to the Chinese were related to Coptic monosyllables (p. 503); but though he apparently did not find conclusive answers to such questions, the problem itself and Fourmont's basic direction (transmission from Egypt to China, some kind of more perfect hieroglyphs) must have been so firmly planted in his student de Guignes's mind that it could grow into the root over which he later stumbled. Fourmont's often repeated view that Egypt's culture was not as old as that of countries closer to the landing spot of Noah's ark made it clear that those who regarded Egypt as the womb of all human culture were dead wrong and that China, in spite of its ancient culture, was a significant step removed from the true origins.
Though the Chinese had received their writing system and probably also the twin ideas that in his view "properly constitute Egyptianism" -- the idea of metempsychosis and the adoration of animals and plants (p. 492) -- Fourmont credited the Chinese with subsequent improvements also in this respect: "My studies have thus taught me that the Chinese were a wise people, the most ancient of all peoples, but the first also, though idolatrous, that rid itself of the mythological spirit" (Fourmont 1735:2.liv). This accounted for their excellent historiography and voluminous literature:I said that the Chinese Annals can be regarded as a respectable work. First of all, as everybody admits, for more than 3,500 years China has been populated, cultivated, and literate. Secondly, has it lacked authors as its people still read books, though few in number, written before Abraham? Thirdly, since few scholars know the Chinese books, let me here point out that the Chinese Annals are not bits and pieces of histories scattered here and there like the Latin and Greek histories which must be stitched together: they consist of at least 150 volumes that, without hiatus and the slightest interruption, present a sequence of 22 families which all reigned for 3, 4, 8, 10 centuries. (p. liv)
While Fourmont cobbled together hypotheses and conjectures, the Bible always formed the backdrop for his speculations about ancient history. A telling example is his critique of the Chinese historian OUYANG Xiu (1007-72), who argued that from the remote past, humans had always enjoyed roughly similar life spans. Lambasting this view as that of a "skeptic," Fourmont furnished the following argument as "proof" of the reliability of ancient Chinese histories:We who possess the sacred writ: must we not on the contrary admire the Chinese annals when they, just in the time period of Arphaxad, Saleh, Heber, Phaleg, Rea, Sarug, Nachor, Abraham, etc., present us with men who lived precisely the same number of years? Now if someone told us that Seth at the age of 550 years married one of his grand-grand-nieces in the fourteenth generation: who of us would express the slightest astonishment? ... It is thus clear that all such objections are frivolous, and furthermore, that attacks against the Chinese annals on account of a circumstance [i.e., excessive longevity] which distinguishes them from all other books will actually tie them even more to Scripture and will be a sure means to increase their authority. (Fourmont 1740:514)
No comment is needed here.
Immediately after Fourmont's death in 1745, the twenty-four-year-old Joseph de Guignes replaced his master as secretary interpreter of oriental languages at the Royal Library. It was the beginning of an illustrious career: royal censor and attache to the journal des Scavans in 1752, member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1753, chair of Syriac at the College Royal from 1757 to 1773, garde des antiques at the Louvre in 1769, editor of the Journal des Savants, and other honors (Michaud 1857:18.(27). De Guignes had, like his master Fourmont, a little problem. The pioneer Sinologists in Paris were simply unable to hold a candle to the China missionaries. Since 1727 Fourmont had been corresponding with the figurist China missionary Joseph Henry PREMARE (1666-1736), who, unlike Fourmont, was an accomplished Sinologist (see Chapter 5). Premare was very liberal with his advice and sent, apart from numerous letters, his Notitia Linguae sinicae to Fourmont in 1728. This was, in the words of Abel-Remusat,neither a simple grammar, as the author too modestly calls it, nor a rhetoric, as Fourmont intimated; it is an almost complete treatise of literature in which Father Premare not only included everything that he had collected about the usage of particles and grammatical rules of the Chinese but also a great number of observations about the style, particular expressions in ancient and common idiom, proverbs, most frequent patterns -- and everything supported by a mass of examples cited from texts, translated and commented when necessary. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.269)
Premare thus sent Fourmont his "most remarkable and important work," which was "without any doubt the best of all those that Europeans have hitherto composed on these matters" (p. 269).
But instead of publishing this vastly superior work and making the life of European students of Chinese considerably easier, Fourmont compared it unfavorably to his own (partly plagiarized) product and had Premare's masterpiece buried in the Royal Library, where it slept until Abel-Remusat rediscovered it in the nineteenth century (pp. 269-73). However, Fourmont's two disciples Deshauterayes and de Guignes could profit from such works since Fourmont for years kept the entire China-related collection of the Royal Library at his home where the two disciples had their rooms; thus Premare was naturally one of the Sinologists who influenced de Guignes.4 So was Antoine GAUBIL (1689-1759), whose reputation as a Sinologist was deservedly great.
But there is a third, extremely competent Jesuit Sinologist who remained in the shadows, though his knowledge of Chinese far surpassed that of de Guignes and all other Europe-based early Sinologists (and, one might add, even many modern ones). His works suffered a fate resembling that of the man who was in many ways his predecessor, Joao Rodrigues (see Chapter 1) in that they were used but rarely credited. The man in question was Claude de VISDELOU (1656-1737), who spent twenty-four years in China (1685-1709) and twenty-eight years in India (1709-37). One can say without exaggeration that the famous Professor de Guignes owed this little-known missionary a substantial part of his fame -- and this was his dirty little secret.
De Visdelou's Brahmins
The fact that the reader has already encountered one of de Visdelou's seminal ideas without realizing it is symptomatic. De Visdelou was the direct source of Le Gobien's "Brahmin followers of Fo" mixup that reached, as we have seen in the previous chapter, such a large European readership via Bayle's and Diderot's "Brachmanes" articles. After his arrival in China in 1685, the linguistically gifted Frenchman made such fast progress in learning Chinese that even China's crown prince was astonished. In a letter dated January 20, 1728, De Visdelou remembers a scene from the year 1790:When I was five years in China and had begun to devote myself to reading Chinese books for barely four years, emperor Kangxi ordered me and one of my companions to come from Canton to Beijing. We were directly led to the palace. The emperor was gravely ill, and we could not see him. The crown prince of the empire who conducted affairs in place of his father was told that a European had arrived who within four years had acquired knowledge of the canonical books and the classics. The prince soon appeared at the door asking where that foreigner was. Here he is, I answered, after I had prostrated in the manner of the land. The prince immediately ordered that a volume of the canonical book called Shujing be brought, i.e., the Canonical History. Opening it at random, he asked me to stand up and read it; I did so and explained it in the presence of several persons who accompanied the prince. Since the Chinese have a high opinion of themselves and their products, the prince was in admiration and said the following words: "Ta-ting, i.e., he understands very well." The crown prince did not leave it at this verbal testimony but also wanted to provide an authentic attestation, written in Chinese characters on a piece of satin one aune in length and half an aune in width. It said: "We recognize that this man from Europe is loftier in intelligence [lumiere] and in the knowledge of Chinese characters than the clouds floating above our heads, and that he is more profound in penetration and knowledge than the abyss on which we tread." (de Visdelou 1760:341-42)
Seven years after this incident, de Visdelou dictated a few pages about the religions of China to the visiting Mr. Basset in order to explain the background of a regional persecution of Christians. Basset's notes made their way to Paris and into the hands of Father Le Gobien who edited and used them as introduction to his book about the edict of tolerance issued by the Chinese emperor (1698), which was then used by Bayle and Diderot. Already the first few lines show the extent and character of Le Gobien's editorial interference. He was an inclusivist in the line of Matteo Ricci who shared the opinion of the vast majority of Jesuits that the ancient religion of China (and Confucianism as its successor) had venerated the true God. De Visdelou, by contrast, was one of the few dissenters in the line of Joao Rodrigues who thought that ancient Chinese religion and Confucianism were forms of atheism. Already the initial paragraphs of de Visdelou's report as taken down by Basset were heavily edited by Le Gobien and exhibit an immense difference of opinion. De Visdelou only discussed modern Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism and lost no word about an ancient Chinese monotheism. The latter was added by Le Gobien, who claimed that this ancient Confucianism was still extant with the Chinese emperor as head; see Table 5, where major differences are highlighted in gray.
[Table Omitted]
Leaving aside the missionary's discussion of Neoconfucianism (de Visdelou's first and Le Gobien's second religion), we will here focus on the passages that for the first time provided support from the Chinese side for Kircher's idea that the Brahmins were the missionaries who brought Xaca's religion from India to China. Though Basset, who wrote down the text dictated by de Visdelou, appears to have left out a few words, the overall meaning of de Visdelou's statement is clear: it is de Visdelou who calls this "sect" that "has many names in China" by the name of "brachmanes of China." In the parentheses he adduces two reasons to justify his choice: (1) its representatives call themselves polomen, which is the Chinese pronunciation of brahmin; and (2) this religion was brought from the Indies to China by the brachmanes. Today we know that boluomen seng (Brahmin monk) was mainly used for Buddhist monks who had come from India to China and that on some occasions it served as a generic honorific for monks (as the Italian "monsignore" would flatter Catholic priests of any country). De Visdelou's choice to call Chinese Buddhism "the sect of the brachmanes of China" was not based on Chinese custom but rather on the Western idea, popular since the publication of Kircher's China illustrata (1667), that the religion of Xaca/Fo (that is, Buddhism) had been brought to China by Brahmins. In fact, after the parentheses explaining his reasons for this choice, de Visdelou clearly states that this religion "has many names in China" and that its priests are commonly called hochan (Ch. heshang, reverend) and not polomen. In Le Gobien's published text, de Visdelou's "I call" becomes "can be called," and de Visdelou's choice turns into an official nomenclature since "they themselves call it by this name." Under Le Gobien's pen, de Visdelou's "sect of the brachmanes of China" loses both the "of China" and its "many names" and turns straight into Brahmanism by becoming "the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes" -- and there can be no doubt about this since "they themselves call it by that name." These changes might be regarded as minor, but they are not. As the explanations continue, de Visdelou keeps calling the priests of this religion by the name they use themselves, namely, hocham, whereas Le Gobien changed this into Bramenes.
This was not de Visdelou's (or Basset's?) only confusing sect name; he called his third religion (which we now call Daoism) the sect of the "bonzes," a term usually employed for Buddhist priests. Here, de Visdelou once more emphasizes that this is his choice rather than that of the Daoists, and in the first section of Table 6 he justifies this by pointing once more to the origin of the "sect" (which in this case is China).
De Visdelou's hochans are transformed by Le Gobien into Bramenes, and this choice of words contributed to the "mixup" that filled the critics of Bayle and Diderot with so much indignation. But Le Gobien's confusion is understandable. As the second section of Table 6 shows, de Visdelou seems to have held that the religion brought by brachmanes from India to China has priests called hochan, and that hochan from different countries venerate three identical treasures: Buddha, dharma, and "the rule of the brachmanes."
[Table Omitted]
Like Rodriguez and Kircher, de Visdelou thus seems to have thought that the religion of Fo had been brought to China by Indian Brahmins and that the old "rule of the brachmanes" was still operative in China. But he neither mentioned a "God Fo" nor "books" containing "particular rules." Instead of simplifying things as he intended, Le Gobien added another layer of confusion. Hardly anybody had access to de Visdelou's dictation text or knew that de Visdelou was the source of this information. Bayle, Diderot, de Guignes and others could thus only refer to Le Gobien's description with its clear-cut identification of Indian Brahmanism with Fo, his law, and his "books." The identification of the religion of India's ancient Brachmanes with the religion of Fo in China, where it was imported by Brahmins (polomen), was the first seminal idea of de Visdelou that shaped de Guignes's outlook.
Huns from Shinar
Claude de Visdelou got much unattributed exposure in Paris when Le Gobien's book on the Chinese emperor's edict (whose introduction, as we have seen, is a heavy-handed edition of de Visdelou's dictated words about Chinese religions) became the joint subject of a hearing at the Sorbonne on July 1, 1700. One of the five propositions that was condemned on October 18 of the same year was from Le Gobien's Histoire de l'edit de l'empereur de La Chine (1698) and the rest from Lecomte's Nouveaux memoires sur l'etat present de La Chine (whose 1698 edition also contained Le Gobien's book, as previously mentioned) and his Lettre au due du Maine sur les ceremonies de la Chine. The central point of contention of all five condemned propositions is exactly the "first religion" that Le Gobien had added to de Visdelou's report. De Visdelou, like Rodrigues before him, was familiar enough with Chinese literature and religion to realize that Ricci's and his successors' monotheistic idealization of ancient Chinese religion and of classical Confucianism was a pipe dream. He was also staunchly opposed to Bouvet's, Premare's, and Foucquet's attempts to somehow make the Yijing (Book of Changes), the Daodejing (Book of the Way and its Power), or other Chinese classics into a kind of Asian Old Testament where the Dao would appear as creator God and prophecies of lambs, sacrificed saviors, and virgin mothers abounded.
De Visdelou's opposition to such views and his willingness to furnish proofs from Chinese sources to those who fought such figurist and accommodationist fantasies eventually led to his consecration as a bishop, his ouster from China and the Jesuit order, and twenty-eight years of exile in southeast India. The French government did not allow him to return to France, and he was forced to spend the rest of his life (1709-37) in exile at the house of the French Franciscans in Pondicherry. There he used his large library of Chinese books to produce works, reports, and translations of rare quality. Unlike his colleagues in the China mission, he could devote almost all his time to study, and unlike the scholars in Paris scavenging his work, he had twenty-four years of China experience under his belt and was arguably the most competent Western Sinologist of his time. Like Fourmont (his junior by seventeen years) and later de Guignes, de Visdelou was able to use sources not only in the major European languages and Chinese but also in Arabic and Persian. He was thus perfectly positioned to correct and supplement the famous Bibliotheque Orientale of seventeenth-century Europe's foremost Orientalist, Barthelemy D'HERBELOT DE MOLAINVILLE (1625-95), one of de Guignes's eminent predecessors as holder of the chair of Syriac from 1692 to 1695. De Visdelou remarked that d'Herbelot's Turkic, Arabic, and Persian sources contained much information about Central and East Asia that was either incorrect or questionable, and he decided to "redress the Mahometan histories in what they falsely assert about China and Tartary" by furnishing alternative or supplementary information from Chinese sources.
The resulting work by de Visdelou, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, only saw publication in 1779. De Visdelou gave it a title that almost says it all:Abbreviated history of Tartary, containing the origin of the people who appeared with verve in this vast land more than two thousand years ago; their religion, their manners, customs, wars, and the revolutions of their empires together with the chronological and genealogical sequence of their emperors; all of this preceded and followed by critical observations on several entries of the Bibliotheque Orientale. (1779:46)
His manuscript came in four tomes that -- according to the geographer Jean- Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1776:33) -- were sent from Pondicherry to the Academician and economic historian Jean-Roland Mallet.
D'Anville, whose New Atlas of China appeared in the year of de Visdelou's death (1737), appreciated de Visdelou's manuscripts for their precious information about many places in Central and North Asia whose Chinese names de Visdelou had managed to identify and whose descriptions from Chinese sources he furnished and expertly translated.5 D'Anville must have been particularly interested in de Visdelou's additions to d'Herbelot, his summary and translations from Chinese dynastic histories about the nations north and west of China, and his Latin translation of the history of the Mongols (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.333). If both the academician Mallet (who died in 1736) and d'Anville (member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature) had their hands on these precious manuscripts, it is likely that fellow Academy member Fourmont -- at the time the only man in Paris reputed to be expert in both Arabic and Chinese -- and/or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes were also in the loop. Apart from his work on Tartary and the Mongols, de Visdelou had also sent an annotated translation of the Shujing (Classic of History; unpublished but used by Deshauterayes), an annotated translation of the eighth-century Nestorian stele of Xi' an (partly published by Voltaire's nephew Abbe Vincent Mignot in 1760), and a long letter about the Yijing or Book of Changes (used by Mignot in 1761-62 and published by de Guignes in 1770). De Visdelou's four-volume work on Tartary and the inserted manuscript with his annotated translation of the Nestorian stele somehow ended up in The Hague where Jean Neaulme, the well-known publisher of Voltaire and Rousseau, purchased them for 400 Dutch florins and communicated them to the bibliophile Prosper Marchand (c. 1675-1756) and others (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.iii).
Jean Neaulme resided in Paris between 1740 and 1750 (p. iv) and sought the advice of specialists regarding its publication. In the course of this examination, the inserted small manuscript containing Visdelou's expertly annotated translation of the Nestorian stele of Xian was also discovered. Neaulme asked several professors for advice (the names s'Gravensande and de Joncourt are mentioned, p. iii); and if anybody in Paris would be consulted for this prospective publication involving Chinese as well as Arabic and Persian, it would have been Fourmont or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes. Abel-Remusat6 and others had long suspected that de Guignes had used de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript; but only in the summer of 2008 did I find the conclusive proof of this among the papers of Fourmont at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The Fourmont dossier contains dozens of pages in de Guignes's hand, copied word for word from de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript. The notes contain references indicating that these copies from de Visdelou's manuscript were very voluminous.7
In 1751 de Guignes published a 24-page prospectus for a large work on the origin of the Huns and Turks (Memoire historique sur l'origine des Huns et des Turks, adresse a M. Tavenot) whose central argument and methodology eerily resemble those of de Visdelou's manuscript on the Tartars. In various places in his manuscript, de Visdelou had advanced the idea that the Xiongnu, a horse-mounted nomad people of the steppe that had for many centuries invaded and threatened the Chinese empire, might correspond to the people known to Europe as "the Huns."8 The first section of de Visdelou's Abbreviated History of Tartary in the same manuscript deals exactly with the empire of the Xiongnu and begins as follows:The Toum-hou, or Oriental Tartars, recognize as first father of their nation Yen-yue, son of the emperor of China named Kao-sin who began his reign 2,432 years before the Christian era .... The Hioum-nou or Occidental Tartars (which may be the Huns whom the Greeks called [x] and the Romans Hunni) drew their origin from Chun-vei, son of a Chinese emperor of the Hia dynasty, which ended in the year 1767 before the Christian era. (Herbelot et al. 1779:48)
De Visdelou then goes on to cite at length Chinese historians about the Xiongnu and concludes that this people (which the Chinese eventually labeled Hioum-nou [Xiongnu]) "may be those who appeared in Europe in the fourth century under the name of Huns" (p. 51).
De Guignes's Visdelou-inspired view that the Xiongnu are identical with the Huns formed the basis of his 4-volume magnum opus: Histoire generale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres tartares occidentaux, & c. avant Jesus-Christ jusqu a present. It was an immediate success and received praise from many eminent men including Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who called it a "great history" and praised de Guignes for having "laid open new and important scenes in the history of mankind" (Pocock 2005:110). Such interest was understandable since the hitherto isolated islands of Chinese dynastic histories and the history of the late Roman Empire received a connecting link that showed the origins of Europe in a new, far more global light.
But where did the Chinese and the Huns ultimately come from? De Guignes addresses this question at the beginning of his second volume. Like his teacher Fourmont, de Guignes's vision of origins was thoroughly biblical: "Only Moses has in few words reported the sequence of generations before the deluge, and it is a fact worthy of mention that the histories of all nations stop in unison around the times that approach this great catastrophe" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.2). As the fictions of antiquity-obsessed Egyptians and Chaldeans had supposedly all vanished under the gaze of critical scholars like Fourmont, it was now de Guignes's turn to confirm that the histories of the Chinese "do not at all contradict the account of Moses" but rather "indirectly confirm it" (p. 2).The Huns do not seem less ancient than these famous people. They are mentioned in the history from the first beginnings of Chinese monarchy; they thus are part of those colonies that abandoned the plains of Shinar shortly after the deluge. One might be tempted to believe that these two nations [the Huns and the Chinese] stem from the same people. (p. 2)
Though de Guignes was reluctant to discuss topics without any base in some historical record, he developed a scenario that traced the course of the Chinese people from Shinar in Mesopotamia to Persia and along the Silk Road to China. Another colony turned north from Shinar toward Armenia where it split into a western and eastern branch. The first went on to form the ancient Europeans, whereas the second formed the Tartar nations including those that the Chinese from the Han period onward called Hiong-nou or Huns (pp. 3-13). These Huns had reportedly established an empire as early as 1230 B.C.E. (p. 21), and de Guignes spent much of the rest of his four volumes tracing their fate.
In the nineteenth century, de Guignes's view of the identity of the Huns and their connections with the Mogols and Turks came under heavy fire and was no longer accepted. But de Visdelou's and de Guignes's conjecture of an initial identity has recently found unexpected support through the analysis of a few letters that Sir Aurel Stein dug out of the desert sand 55 miles west of Dunhuang. These "Sogdian Ancient letters" confirm "a long-suspected but never proven link between the Xiongnu of old Chinese sources and the Huns unleashed on Europe from 370," even though they "do not imply that the Huns of Europe or Central Asia after A. D. 350 are themselves descendants of the Xiongnu" (de la Vaissihe 2004:22). On the other hand, the Bible-inspired scenario linking the Chinese and the Huns to the plains of Shinar was abandoned by its author de Guignes barely two years after publication. In 1758, just before the fourth and last volume of his History of the Huns went to press, de Guignes had the printer set the following stunning announcement on the last page of his work:At the beginning of the second part of the first volume of this work, I made some reflections about the origin of the Chinese. I then believed that these peoples came directly from the plains of Shinar. New researches oblige me to change my view and to beg the reader not to pay any attention to what is said about this subject in the first two or three pages. The Chinese are only a rather modern colony of the Egyptians. I have proved this in a paper read at the Academy. The Chinese characters are nothing more than monograms formed by Egyptian and Phoenician letters, and the first emperors of China are the ancient Kings of Thebes. This I intend to show in a separate work. (de Guignes 1758:4.518)
How could an author who had just finished his 4-volume magnum opus, erected on the reliability of Chinese annals, rip out its foundation on the last page? It was by no means only a problem of "the first two or three pages," as de Guignes suggested. If the Chinese were a "rather modern colony of the Egyptians," then central pillars of de Guignes's argument like "the Huns were not less ancient than the Chinese who knew them even before the Hia Dynasty, which began its reign in 2207 before Jesus Christ" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.16) or "the establishment of the empire of the Huns must be dated to the year 1230 before Jesus Christ" (p. 21), crumbled to dust. What in the world had happened?
De Guignes's Egyptian Enlightenment
Two major events had triggered this spectacular change of opinion. The first is not obvious unless one carefully reads de Guignes's response to a review of his first volumes in the Memoires de Trevoux. De Guignes printed this letter to the editors just before the index at the end of the fourth volume of his History of the Huns, but it was written in 1757, that is, before de Guignes's "Egyptian enlightenment" of 1758. In this letter he criticizes "modern writers" who believe in the "authenticity of Chinese Annals and the Chinese Chronology" in order to attack that of the Bible (1758:4.347). De Guignes's main target is obvious since his name appears twice: Voltaire. Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs first appeared in the year 1756, the very year that also saw publication of the first volumes of de Guignes's Histoire des Huns. The view of origins in these two works is indeed diametrically opposed. For de Guignes, everything has its roots in the plain where Noah's ark landed, whereas Voltaire began his work by making fun of such "oriental fables" and "vain ideas" that are "an insult to reason" and "suffocate what little we know about antiquity under a mass of forced conjectures" (Voltaire 1756:4-7). Arguing that the Jesuits themselves had confirmed by calculation of solar eclipses that the Chinese Annals were both old and reliable, Voltaire had begun his universal history with a chapter on China that stated that twenty-five centuries before Christ the Chinese already had a well-established empire (p. 11). De Guignes sharply criticized such enthusiasm that makes the Chinese empire "begin well before the deluge and possibly even before the epoch of creation" (de Guignes 1758:4.348). Insisting that "nothing is as uncertain as this kind of chronology" (p. 349), de Guignes went on to dismiss the historical value of the very sources on which his early history of the Huns and of the Chinese was based. He now held that Chinese annals delivered neither detailed nor reliable information and were mostly late works that are "barely more ancient that Herodotus ... who flourished around 480 B.C.E." (p. 351):
The Chou-king, which is the most ancient, contains only some haphazard events without chronology. The Tsou-chou, whose authority is contested by the Chinese themselves and that was composed around 300 B.C.E. is, as it were, no mote than a chronological table. The Chuntchieou of Confucius is only a very dry short chronology; and the Chipen is very short. That's all there is of Chinese sources. (p. 351)
As we have seen in Chapter 1, Voltaire was at this point still unsure whether he should assign the role of cradle of human civilization to China or to India. But his sarcastic dismissal of biblical history and his initial chapters on China and India -- which relegated the Mediterranean cultural region and Israel to the also-rans -- ruffled many feathers. Furthermore, Voltaire's argument that the constant inundations of the Nile must have prevented early settlement in Egypt (Voltaire 1756:30) was a provocation to the majority of the encyclopedists and the egyptophile antiquarians of the time. As the author of an entire volume of chronological tables (vol. 1) and a history that took Chinese chronology and annals very seriously, de Guignes had good reason to fear being instrumentalized by Bible-averse critics like Voltaire. While his letter at the end of the fourth volume was a brave attempt at preventing such misuse, it also risked throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But there was another, far more decisive event that led to de Guignes's radical change of mind. After reading the abstract of an April 1758 report by Abbe Jean-Jacques Barthelemy on the Phoenician alphabet, de Guignes decided "to work on the manner in which alphabetical letters could have formed" (de Guignes 1760:36). Having before him a table with Phoenician letters, de Guignes happened to glance at a Chinese dictionary with old forms of characters. The similarity of ancient Chinese character elements and Phoenician letters struck him so forcefully that he was soon convinced that not only the Chinese characters "but also the laws, form of government, the sovereign, the ministers governing under him, and the entire Empire were Egyptian; and that the entire ancient history of China was nothing other than the history of Egypt inserted before that of China proper" (p. 37). Utterly convinced of having made an epoch-making discovery, de Guignes on November 14, 1758, read a report to the public assembly of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Literature in Paris. In the following year he published an abstract of this report together with some older opinions about Egypto-Chinese connections along with part of Abbe Barthelemy's paper on Phoenician letters in form of a booklet with the title "Report in which one proves that the Chinese are an Egyptian colony" (de Guignes 1760). De Guignes argued, to the astonishment of missionaries and academics alike that the Chinese had constructed their characters using a toolset of Phoenician letters. Unaware that these letters represent sounds, he explained, me Chinese interpreted them as elements of meaning or keys -- that is, character radicals in Fourmont-style -- and in this manner constructed myriads of characters with a hidden story they themselves could not grasp. It is here that, in Indiana Jones style, Professor de Guignes bursts upon the scene and discovers me hidden code.9 If the first Chinese radical (according to Fourmont) "signifies unity among the Chinese," aleph has the same meaning for the people of the Middle East; and "for both groups it also signifies preeminence and the action of steering" (de Guignes 1760:61). Soon enough, de Guignes drew up a kind of Ur-alphabet that was "perhaps very analogous to the primitive alphabet of all nations" (pp. 61-62). This would of course be the kind of writing system used in the plains of Shinar before peoples and languages multiplied. "New combinations gave me new letters, and I saw my alphabet develop imperceptibly to my eyes" (p. 63).
But if the Chinese had adopted alphabetic letters as hieroglyphic elements of meaning, men there had to be a proof of the pudding: it had to be possible to disassemble Chinese characters and get Egyptian or Phoenician words....
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
Sinologist and opponent of the chinese rites; b. Château de Bienassis, Pléneuf, France, Aug. 22, 1656; d. Pondicherry, French India, Nov. 11, 1737. He entered the Society of Jesus on Sept. 5, 1673, and was sent to China in 1685. Although he laid the foundations for the celebrated French Beijing mission, he is more renowned as a Sinologist than as an active missionary. When Charles de tournon, papal legate for Clement XI, arrived in Canton, April 8, 1705, Visdelou was the sole Jesuit adverse to the adoption of the Chinese rites. Tournon, who had banned the Malabar rites in India on June 23, 1704, was banished from Beijing by Emperor K'ang-hi for attempting a similar prohibition in China. The legate traveled to Nanjing and there issued a decree on Jan. 25, 1707, obliging all missionaries under pain of excommunication to abolish the rites. He also made Visdelou vicar apostolic of Guiyang with the title of bishop of Claudiopolis. Against the opposition of his Jesuit superiors, Visdelou was consecrated at Macao on Feb. 12, 1708, and in June of that year moved to Pondicherry. There he lived in retirement with the Capuchins until his death. During these 28 years he wrote on the rites, and composed a chronology of Chinese history, a life of Confucius, and the valuable Histoire de Tartarie.
Bibliography: c. sommervogel, Bibliotèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 v. (Brussels-Paris 1890–1932) 8:838–843.