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De Pauw and the Inferiority of the Men of America I. FAITH IN PROGRESS AND SOCIETY SOON after Buffon, these slanders on the whole of American nature reached a definitive climax with the appearance of the Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains ou M emoires interessants pour servir .a l'histoire de l'espece humaine by Mr. de P. (the abbe Cornelius de Pauw).t The work is dated Berlin, 1768, the date and location of encyclopedism at its most glorious and triumphant. The contents of the work live up to the promise of the title page. De Pauw reveals himself a typical encyclopedist; he not only makes frequent attacks on religion and the Jesuits,2 and exhibits a complete lack of modesty in his minutely detailed, almost Freudian, examination and description of sexual aberrations and peculiarities, but also provides a quite typical example of that combination of a firm and unquestioning faith in Progress with a complete lack of faith in the natural goodness of man. If he believed in the goodness of Nature he would be a Rousseauian and ala Marmontel would have little trouble in adapting Buffon's thesis to the Americans, finding the men like the animals to be imperfectly 1. Cited hereafter simply as Recherches. (De Pauw's subsequent works dealing with [a) the Egyptians and Chinese and [b) the Greeks will be cited as Recherches sur les Egyptiens and Recherches sur les G recs respectively; for further details, see the Bibliography of Works Cited and the index entries.) De Pauw's genealogy is discussed and his meager biography summarized by Gisbert Beyerhaus, "Abbe de Pauw und Friedrich der Grosse, eine Abrechnung mit Voltaire," Historische Zeitschrift. 134 (1926), pp. 465-93, and Church, op. cit., pp. 178-206. Denina gives Amsterdam as his birthplace (La Prusse lilleraire sous Frederic /I [Berlin, 1790-91), 111,143), but Delisles de Sales (Histoire philosophique du monde primitif [Paris, 1795), VI, 20-22) calls him"Alsatian," in fact a "Strasburger"; on 26 August 1792 he was awarded honorary French citizenship, as were Bentham, Klopstock, Schiller, and the Founding Fathers of the United States (A. Mathiez, La Revolution etles brangers [Paris, 1918), pp. 75-76); and in 1811 Napoleon had an obelisk erected to him at Xanten (Beyerhaus, op. cit., p. 469). 2. "The Jesuits, ever untrustworthy" (Recherches. I, 61); "their complete expulsion ... regarded, in Peru, as a stroke of providence" (Recherches. 11,356); cf. Defense (1771 ed.), p. 36. 52 De Pauw and the Inferiority of the Men ofAmerica 53 formed and relatively weak, yet lovable and "interesting" for this very weakness of theirs. But unlike Rousseau (whom he mentions only once in passing and then merely to criticize him),3 de Pauw believes that man reaches perfection only in society, and that a man living alone in the state of nature can only be a brute, incapable of progress. Talking of Alexander Selkirk, the inspirer of Robinson Crusoe and eighteenth-century prototype of man in a state of solitude, de Pauw asserts: Man is thus nothing by himself; he owes what he is to society; the greatest Metaphysician , the greatest philosopher, if he were abandoned for ten years on the Isle of Fernandez, would come back transformed into a brute, dumb and imbecile, and would know nothing in the whole of nature.4 II. THE AMERICANS AS DEGENERATE It is not difficult to anticipate de Pauw's attitude toward the American savages: they are animals, or little more than animals, "holding in abhorrence the laws of society and the hindrances of education," living each one for himself, without a helping thought for his neighbor, in a state of indolence, inertia, complete dejection. The savage does not know that he must sacrifice a part of his freedom in order to cultivate his spirit, and yet "without this cultivation he is nothing."5 It is obvious that de Pauw is much more radical than Buffon. It was only a couple of years earlier that Buffon had published the fourteenth volume of the Histoire naturelle with its provocative essay "On the Degeneration of the Animals," whose explosive potential was clearly not lost on him; referring to it in a letter to Brosses he wrote: "One can slip ideas into a quarto volume which would cause a public outcry if they appeared in a pamphlet."6 Buffon, however, had sought to exclude man from his theory and had made him at worst a cold and sluggish brute, newly appeared and inexperienced. But for...

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