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Jean-François de Saint-Lambert and His Moral conte “Ziméo” (1769) in the Context of Abolitionist and Imperial Activities

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Enlightened Colonialism

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

This chapter offers a reading of J.-F. de Saint-Lambert’s moral tale “Ziméo,” that is one of the rare Enlightenment texts representing slave revolution. Focusing on categories and conventions of representation, the chapter addresses two main points. First, it explores how slavery and slave revolution could be represented in the abolitionist and Enlightenment discourse. Second, linking esthetic debate with historical colonial context, it brings up questions of representation of colonial others and of colonial violence as well as questions of imperial agency. Bandau explores these questions by analyzing discursive positions and rhetorical strategies. She studies the different interplays between literature, philosophy, and politics in Saint-Lambert’s narrative and analyzes it in the context of his work for colonial reform projects. Lastly, she analyzes “Ziméo”’s circulation and reception in abolitionist and physiocratic milieus.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, (1971) 1995), 179.

  2. 2.

    See Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places. Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010); Jean Ehrard, Lumières et Esclavage: L’esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Versaille, 2008). In the wider context of Enlightenment and colonialism, see the radical but still seminal essay by Louis Sala-Molins, Dark side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); Daniel Carey and Lynn M. Festa, eds. The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), here esp. Garraway’s chapter on Lahontan and Diderot are important. Jean-François Hoffmann, Le Nègre romantique: Personnage littéraire et obsession (Paris: Payot, 1973) has provided a valuable overview of literary texts from where to start a postcolonial revision.

  3. 3.

    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 95–107.

  4. 4.

    Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 4.

  5. 5.

    On Saint-Lambert’s biography, see Roger Poirier, Jean-François de Saint-Lambert (1716–1803). Sa vie, son œuvre (Sarreguemines: Édition Pierron, 2001) as well as Youmna Charara, ed. Fictions coloniales du XVIIIe siècle: Ziméo, Lettres africaines, Adonis, ou le bon nègre, anecdote coloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 27–29 and Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Contes américains L’Abenaki, Ziméo, Les deux Amis, ed. Roger Little (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997); on his writings and literary qualities, see Saint-Lambert, Contes américains, v-viii. Whereas Grimm and Diderot in Correspondance littéraire wrote positively about the “contes orientaux” as well as L’Abenaki (cf. Saint-Lambert, Contes américains, xiv), his 20th-century editor Little himself confirms that the long poem “Les Saisons” merited most the praise (viii). Grimm and Diderot disliked “Ziméo” (Cf. Correspondance littéraire, 15.02. and 01.03.1769; cf. Saint-Lambert, Contes américains, xviii–xix) and the latter did also criticize “Les Saisons” (cf. Correspondance littéraire). Literary critics in the nineteenth and twentieth century perpetuated the critique and had their reservations (cf. Little). Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 137 qualifies Saint-Lambert as a “poète médiocre”.

  6. 6.

    See Saint-Lambert, Contes américains, vii for the articles written by Saint-Lambert.

  7. 7.

    Cf. Charara, Fictions Coloniales, 28–29; Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire, 177–193; Muriel Brot, “La collaboration de Saint-Lambert à l’Histoire des deux Indes: Une lettre inédite de Raynal,” in Raynal, de la polémique à l’histoire, eds. Gilles Bancarel and Gianluigi Goggi (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 99–107. Cf. Lüsebrink 2006 on the art of compilation in the Encyclopedia and especially in l’Histoire des deux Indes.

  8. 8.

    All these texts were published in 1801 as Oeuvres philosophiques (5 volumes).

  9. 9.

    Cf. Poirier, Saint-Lambert, 270, 271, 275.

  10. 10.

    Charara, Fictions coloniales, 33 assumes that Saint-Lambert chose Jamaica over Suriname not because of historical differences but because reference texts depicted Maroon resistance in Jamaica as more successful. On Tacky’s Rebellion, see the chapter by Trevor Burnard in this volume.

  11. 11.

    The most important texts are Antoine-François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre qui ont été publiées jusqu’à présent dans les différentes langues de toutes les nations connues (Paris: Didot, 1746), Olfert Dapper, Description de l’Afrique (Amsterdam, 1686), and Guillaume Bosman, Nouveau Voyage de Guinée (Utrecht, 1705). The travel narratives by Labat and Dutertre, especially Charles Leslie, Histoire de la Jamaïque (London: Chez Nourse, 1751) give information on the Antilles. See Charara, Fictions coloniales.

  12. 12.

    “A slave who conducted himself as a good man for ten years was sure of his freedom. These freed men remained with my friend; their example gave hope to others and inspired their behavior.” Saint-Lambert quoted in Charara, Fictions Colonials, 50.

  13. 13.

    Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire.

  14. 14.

    Saint-Lambert, Contes américains points to the fact that the godlike features of Ziméo and his like also refer to the genre of fairy tales where these characters have supernatural abilities.

  15. 15.

    Charara, Fictions Coloniales, 69.

  16. 16.

    See Saint-Lambert, “Introduction,” in Contes américains, 17–19.

  17. 17.

    The philosophical-political reflections draw on the notion of natural law (droit naturel) formulated by Locke, Montesquieu, and others that provides every human being with inalienable rights. On this basis the author demands justice for every human being. References in this context are Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, the essays of Burlamaqui on natural law (Principe du droit naturel, 1747, Principes du droit politique, 1751), theories of the state by Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), and Machiavelli (Il Principe, 1513; Discorsi, 1531).

  18. 18.

    Saint-Lambert quoted in Charara, Fictions Coloniales, 62, 76 (Fn 57).

  19. 19.

    “a size and face … of most beautiful proportions.” Ibid., 61.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 62.

  21. 21.

    “Polite people, learned people, beware, you will not have moral, good governments and manners until the principles of natural law are known to all men…it is only then that you will not be tyrants and executioners of the rest of the land … you will know that your money does not give you the right to enslave a single man.” Ibid., 62–63.

  22. 22.

    “Take them our discoveries and lights, in a few centuries perhaps they will adopt them, and the human race will be saved. Do we not send the apostles of reason and the arts? Will we always be led by a commercial and barbaric spirit, by a senseless greed that ruins two thirds of the globe to give the rest a few luxuries?” Let us bring them our discoveries and our knowledge (enlightenment), in a few centuries perhaps they will contribute to them and the human race will have profited from this. Will we never send apostles of reason and the arts? Will we always be guided by a mercantile and barbaric spirit, by a senseless greed that ruins two-thirds of the globe to give the rest some superfluities? Ibid., 62.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 61.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 58.

  25. 25.

    Denis Diderot, “Observations sur les Saisons, poème par M. de Saint Lambert,” in Correspondance littéraire (March 1, 1769), 190–191.

  26. 26.

    “Vous y apercevrez à chaque ligne le dessein de l’auteur de vous renvoyer de la terreur à la volupté, et de la volupté à la terreur; et vous n’êtes pas à la troisième page sans mépriser ce jeu puéril d’escarpolette.” [“At each line, you perceive in it the author’s intention to send you from terror to delight and from delight to terror; and you will not have arrived at the third page without despising this childish game of swinging.”] (Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, 15.2.1769, 170); Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, 1.3.1769, 190–191.

  27. 27.

    Saint-Lambert in Charara, Fictions Coloniales, 57.

  28. 28.

    Michel Delon, Robert Mauzi and Sylvain Menant, De l’Encyclopédie aux Méditations (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 242–243.

  29. 29.

    Cf. Jean Tarrade, “L’administration coloniale en France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: Projets de réforme,” Revue historique 229, no. 1 (1963): 103–122.

  30. 30.

    Duchet, Anthropologie, 178.

  31. 31.

    “From now on, one must in preparation of general liberty bring closer mulattos and whites, in order to one day bring closer blacks and mulattos.” Saint-Lambert quoted in Duchet, Anthropologie,181, also 186.

  32. 32.

    “I think that the more mulattos or free people of color come closer to the condition of the whites and are always separated from the blacks. And on all occasions they will make common cause with the whites, so that if it is necessary they would defend them with fervor against the blacks.” Ibid., 182.

  33. 33.

    See Jeremy Popkin’s chapter in this volume.

  34. 34.

    Cf. Daut, Tropics of Haiti, 4–5, 7, 11 as an introduction and actually the main thread of the whole study.

  35. 35.

    The “people of color’s” role as allies to the white planters was a frequent trope used in various contradicting ways by different factions in the fight for independence, autonomy, and emancipation in Saint-Domingue as this closeness always implied the threat of betrayal.

  36. 36.

    Saint-Lambert quoted in Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 186–187.

  37. 37.

    Condorcet referred to it in the most famous French abolitionist text, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres, et autres textes abolitionnistes, 1781.

  38. 38.

    Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 192–193.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 22.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 196.

  41. 41.

    Roger Little states that Saint-Lambert’s “Ziméo” (1769) preceded Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s noble and impressive figure of a rebel who re-installs the droit naturel on the American continent (1771). Both bear interesting resemblances. The famous similar paragraph from Histoire philosophique des deux Indes (probably written by Diderot) appeared only in 1780; it is thus posterior to Saint-Lambert’s and Mercier’s fictional texts that were certainly known to the author Diderot. See Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Contes américains: L’Abenaki, Ziméo, Les deux Amis, ed. Roger Little (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), XV.

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  1. Romance literatures and cultures, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany

    Anja Bandau

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  1. Philosophische Fakultät I, Martin Luther Universität , Halle, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany

    Damien Tricoire

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Bandau, A. (2017). Jean-François de Saint-Lambert and His Moral conte “Ziméo” (1769) in the Context of Abolitionist and Imperial Activities. In: Tricoire, D. (eds) Enlightened Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54280-5_10

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