«Il n’y a point d’état plus immoral que celui de voyageur»: autour des contributions de Diderot à l’Histoire des deux Indes
«Of all trades, being a traveller is the most immoral»: about Diderot’s Contributions to the Histoire des deux Indes

Author(s): Jean-Michel Racault
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, French Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Diderot; Raynal; travel; traveller; anti-colonialism; rhetoric; irony
Summary/Abstract: Borrowed from one of Diderot’s anonymous contributions to Raynal’s famed anticolonialist encyclopedia of travels (1770-1780), the quotation opposes strongly to a long-standing humanist tradition of travelling as a precious medium of education, especially for young men, established at the sixteenth century from classical sources. New eighteenth-century representations of travel as useless or even morally dangerous (Muralt, Rousseau) result in Diderot’s moral condemnation of the European traveller, mainly on political grounds. However, his so-called “anticolonialism”, highly rhetorical and ambiguous, may be seen both as an expression of his own dialogic turn of mind and as a kind of mock echo to Raynal’s personal ambiguities.

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