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  • Mémoires touchant l'établissement d'une mission chrestienne dans le troisième monde: Autrement appelé, La Terre Australe, Meridionale, Antartique, & Inconnuë, and: Histoire d'Andre Thevet Angoumoisin, Cosmographe du Roy, de deuz voyages pay luy faits aux Indes Australes, et Occidentales
  • Andrea Frisch
Abbé Jean Paulmier . Mémoires touchant l'établissement d'une mission chrestienne dans le troisième monde: Autrement appelé, La Terre Australe, Meridionale, Antartique, & Inconnuë. Les Géographies du Monde 7. Ed. Margaret Sankey. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006. 400 pp. + 22 b/w pls. index. append. illus. map. bibl. CHF 95. ISBN: 2-7453– 1382-7.
André Thevet . Histoire d'Andre Thevet Angoumoisin, Cosmographe du Roy, de deuz voyages pay luy faits aux Indes Australes, et Occidentales. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 416. Eds. Jean-Claude Laborie and Frank Lestringant. Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2006. 496 pp. + 16 b/w pls. index. append. illus. gloss. bibl. CHF 150. ISBN: 2–600–01042–4.

The Abbé Jean Paulmier, whose Mémoires were composed around 1654 and first published in 1663 without his express authorization, then republished a year [End Page 946] later with a preface by the author, urged the French to explore and evangelize the vast "terres australes" hypothesized on maps and in geographical texts since antiquity. Although this edition of the Mémoires is the first since the seventeenth century, Paulmier's work had a far-reaching impact, according to Margaret Sankey, since it influenced Charles de Brosse, whose 1756 Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes in turn inspired both Bougainville's and James Cook's southern voyages. Whatever their role in the eventual European appropriation of Australia, the Mémoires offer a rich and revealing picture of the early stages of the French colonial enterprise, caught between an evangelizing mission that inevitably involved Rome, and commercial and political initiatives that manifested a more overtly nationalistic posture.

It is clear that the Abbé was primarily concerned with saving souls. Nonetheless, though he argued for the establishment of "missions sans colonies," he was forced to rely on the support of those whose interests were rather more profane. By tracking variants in her notes (especially in chapter 6), Sankey traces the increasing influence of those forces on the Mémoires from an early manuscript to the first unauthorized edition through to the second printing overseen by the Abbé and finally to correspondence regarding the project up until 1670, when Paulmier seems to have abandoned hope of realizing his grand vision.

Sankey's detailed and informative preface situates Paulmier's project in the context of European missionary and colonizing activity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and explains the state of geographical knowledge of the southern lands in this period (the volume includes a selection of twenty-two relevant maps). She also gives a helpful overview of the controversies surrounding Paulmier's supposed ancestor, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, who may or may not have been the first Frenchman in South America. (It is generally agreed that, if he did in fact exist, Binot's 1503 voyage did not take him to Australia as the Abbé stated, and that the Abbé's claim to be descended from a native of "ces Contrées Méridionales" [142] — a claim not made in the earliest manuscript of the Mémoires — has no factual basis.) In the Mémoires, the Abbé offers excerpts of a travel account purported to be Binot's as proof of France's early presence in the terres australes, and consequently of the special interest the French ought to take in evangelizing the region's peoples. He goes on to emphasize France's Catholic identity (Paulmier published three anti-Protestant pamphlets in 1644), and that the Spanish and Portuguese were too busy elsewhere, in order to justify his view that the French should take the lead in establishing a mission in this little-explored territory.

No such clear goal drives the writings of André Thevet, cosmographe du roy under Henri II and his sons. Jean-Claude Laborie and Frank Lestringant call Thevet's Histoire . . . de deux voyages, written up for the most part by a scribe between 1585 and 1588, "un texte monstre." The...

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