SubStance

SubStance 31.1 (2002) 27-35

The French Sociological Revolution from Montaigne to Mauss

Michèle Richman

There exists a longstanding tradition of French critical thought that has been bypassed in the recent importation of French theory, but which remains viable. ¹ I refer to the sociological revolution sparked by Montaigne's 1580 essay on cannibalism, where he denounced certain European practices and behavior as undeniably more barbarian than any recounted by travelers who had observed New World "savages." In this way, the New World served as foil to the old, prompting a scrutiny of social and cultural assumptions as well as practices. A central reason for promoting what Claude Lévi-Strauss has referred to as "anthropological thinking" is that it addresses the nature of cross-cultural contact by providing an alternative to the more familiar French versus America dichotomizations. The utopian textual space resulting from the comparative perspective allows for innovative critical thinking that is irreducible to the influence of any one group or society.

From the Renaissance to Rousseau, the sociological revolution became a distinctive feature of French intellectual life. The notable precedent to Montaigne was the Protestant Jean de Léry's 1578 account of his sojourn among the Brazilian Tupis. Unlike most contemporary compendia of exotic practices, Léry's descriptions fed his denunciations of French society, including its brutally exploitative and racist representatives from whose aborted colonizing venture he had sought refuge among the Indians. ² Although Spain's colonial horrors provoked the indignation of Las Casas, the specificity of the French critical discourse was not replicated within other countries or cultures. Its exceptional development can be attributed to the monarchy's initial reticence to subsidize official expeditions. One could also point to Catholic repression of the reform movement that led to civil religious wars. Not surprisingly, the strongest impetus to venture new settlements arose among the persecuted Huguenots, whose humanistic tolerance toward Amerindians was prepared by ideology as well as by their own experience. ³

Léry's memoir of life among the Tupis enjoyed popular success, especially among his Protestant peers. But its consecration within the history [End Page 27] of ideas must be credited to Montaigne, who provided the template for subsequent works in this vein by deriving a moral lesson from the encounter with others, especially in regard to unequal distribution of wealth and political power. Furthermore, Montaigne established a format for skirting censorship by posing questions to a native speaker responsible for delivering subversive critiques. This explains the closing jibe of the essay, aimed at civilized readers wont to reject lessons imparted by so-called "naked philosophers." ⁴

Montaigne's ironic allusion to the possible disqualification of his ideas because their source lacked breeches points to another dimension of French social thought and practices--the ideal of civility forged in the middle of the sixteenth century. The vernacular term civilité appears in France at the same time that it begins to proliferate throughout an increasingly secularized Europe. In response to the demand for new rules of conduct, Erasmus provided a 1530 treatise on education responsible for formalizing the code of manners that would exert a lasting imprint upon French social behavior. His own advocacy of social change notwithstanding, Erasmus's subtle repudiation of the aristocratic model of behavior disappears altogether from the treatises of his successors in the seventeenth century, when the consolidation of absolutism enlisted the cult of manners in its campaign to stymie social mobility. This distinctively French turn of events--wherein politeness is equated with strict obeisance to rank and respect for the centralized government--discouraged the development of a distinct set of bourgeois values to challenge the rigid social order.

Thus, despite the intellectual influence exerted by the critical dimension of anthropological thinking that Lévi-Strauss discerns from the sixteenth century onward, the point of view it enunciated remained a minority discourse until its triumph in 1789. ⁵ The hybrid nature of a social critique encompassing a moral imperative as well as ethnographic data rendered it marginal, in contrast to the educational monopoly enjoyed by neo...