Chapter 1

Cultural transfer in the French Enlightenment

Over the last decade, scholars of the Enlightenment have shown how cultural critics all over Europe – fashioning themselves as philosophes – took inspiration from non-Western cultures. Articulating their criticism of contemporary European society, they drew comparisons with seemingly better functioning societies in other parts of the world. How they selected and processed relevant information, however, has not been given due attention. How this information was subsequently used in Enlightenment thinking has hardly been analysed – as if philosophes only adopted ideas instead of examining and revising them in the process. To point out this last aspect of Enlightenment culture, this article discusses two important late eighteenth century texts. The first is the report of the French explorer Bougainville about his sojourn on Tahiti (1771). This author renders extraordinary sexual mores intelligible by referring to the Enlightenment concept of “natural man.” The second is the commentary of the French philosophe Diderot, who used the above report to develop an alternative to French sexual mores (several versions, 1771–1784). Together, these two texts offer examples of Enlightenment cultural transfer: the explorer describing Tahitian culture in a way which inspires the cultural critic to formulate new sexual mores and to discuss the feasibility of their implementation in contemporary Europe.