La Tribu indienne, ou, Edouard et Stellina (review)

Lucien Bonaparte is best known today as Napoleon’s brother and onetime statesman under the Consulate, but, as Cecilia Feilla reminds us with this re-edition of La Tribu indienne (1799), French politicos have long dabbled in literary pursuits. An alumnus of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Georges Pompidou (president from 1969–74) published a well-respected Anthologie de la poésie française (1961); Valérie Giscard d’Estaing (president 1974–81) has published two novels—Le Passage (1994) and La Princesse et le président (2009). Giscard was even elected to the Académie Française in 2003, but his ascension was not without controversy; critics pointed out that Giscard had written only a single novel of dubious quality, and, judging from reviews of his second effort, popular opinion is unlikely to change on that front. The unhappy fact is that Giscard’s literary works have not done much to burnish the aura of the statesman, and La Tribu indienne is unlikely to elicit any posthumous homage for Lucien Bonaparte’s work as Ministre de l’Intérieur either. The value lies elsewhere.

Feilla does a good job situating La Tribu indienne in a rich literary context—the sentimental exoticism of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787) and Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801)—and she gestures towards a potential political interpretation. But today’s readers will likely resonate most with the novel’s critique of greed and the portrait of an odious trader as romantic anti-hero. Describing the education that the Portsmouth-born Édouard Milford received at the hands of his father, the narrator announces: “Ce n’était ni un homme aimable, ni un honnête homme, ni un citoyen, mais un marchand qu’il avait prétendu former, et il avait lieu de s’applaudir de son ouvrage” (27). This list renders obsolete the qualities prized by former generations: the sociability (amabilité) and respect for proper conduct (honnêteté) of the Old Regime court, and the revolutionary virtue of citoyenneté. Édouard hails from England: a rival whose mercantile economy and industrial might were in the 1790s rapidly out-producing the more artisanal French modes of production.

After a series of unfortunate events wherein Édouard’s shipmates leave him on the shores of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and he loses the precious cargo he was transporting to colonial outposts farther East, he is caught between two factions: the Portuguese colonists and the bellicose Indians who control the area where he washed up. Although stranded in tropical forest for much of the novel, Édouard remains true to the value system inculcated by his father. Reflecting on his options after meeting friendly Stellina, Édouard cheerfully thinks: “Pourquoi partir? La fille d’un prince indien m’a sauvé du trépas: malgré ses dieux, elle m’a donné l’hospitalité. Peut-être je la reverrai. Si je devenais son ami, que de trésors je pourrais acquérir! L’or et les diamants qu’ici l’on méprise me seraient par elle prodigués ... Sans regretter mon comptoir de Batavia, je retournerais à Plymouth” (45). His actions are certainly self-serving, but what else could one expect from the son of his father?

One might be best advised to interpret Édouard’s conduct as exemplifying the Marxist concept of economic forces dominating the intellect. As Marx wrote in 1859, “The mode of production in material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” cited in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992], 626). Unlike Stellina, who gradually abandons her faith, her tribe, and the trust of her aged father, Édouard keeps his value system intact. He is early on described as...