Paganism in Restoration France: Eckstein’s Traditionalist Orientalism

Early nineteenth-century Orientalism was bound up with the rival responses of conservatives and liberals to the question of whether or not post-Revolutionary society rests on religious foundations. Ferdinand d’Eckstein’s (1790–1861) writings in the Catholique (1826–1829) comprise the most extensive exemplar of Catholic Traditionalist Orientalism. This article, after outlining Eckstein’s intellectual formation, elucidates his version of Orientalism, characterized by Traditionalist understandings of revelation and paganism; discusses its status as a critique of contemporary mythography and as an alleged “Indo-Christianity”; and assesses Eckstein’s place in the intellectual and socio-political life of early-nineteenth-century France by linking his Orientalism to Catholic science and liberal-Catholicism.