Replotting the Ethnographic Romance: Revolutionary Frenchmen in the Pacific, 1768–1804

Scholars have often noted that French engagement in the Pacific cast itself in the form of romance. The South Pacific was a distant space for the free play of French imaginations, whether social, scientific, or political.¹ From the moment of first French contact, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s arrival in Tahiti in 1768, that imaginative space was suffused with eroticism. The cast of characters for stories of Frenchmen in the South Pacific inevitably included beautiful and naked island women, freely offering themselves to conquering Frenchmen. According to Matt Matsuda, “the French romance of nineteenth-century imperialism”—what he refers to as France’s Pacific “empire of love”—developed from “the literary and philosophical templates” of early contact: “What was ‘French’ about the ‘Empire’ developed as a curious concatenation of story and unrealized ambition of possession.”²

The construction of French empire in the Pacific was not, however, a consistent and uninterrupted effort to realize fantasies of possession first elaborated in the mid-eighteenth century. Possession in its most obvious form—claiming territory—virtually disappeared from France’s approach to the Pacific around the turn of the nineteenth century, with the expeditions of the revolutionary period making no territorial claims at all.³ The metaphor of sexual possession similarly faded, and the Tahitian myth of European explorers in an erotic paradise suffered a temporary eclipse.⁴ Revolutionary France’s relationship with the South Pacific was thus crucially different from both its Enlightenment models and its nineteenth-century successors.

Pacific voyagers of the revolutionary era attempted to create a new ethnography that no longer situated Pacific “nature” at the moral and intellectual antipodes of French “civilization.” Enlightenment writers focused on difference; notably, they contrasted the roles and capacities of male and female in France and in the Pacific, often concluding that Pacific nature produced a more authentic rendering of human sexuality than French civilization. In contrast, revolutionary Frenchmen, as representatives of a regenerated nation, chose not to see themselves as corrupt foils to the virtuous primitive; the Revolution had ended French society’s alienation from the laws of nature, and the opposition between nature, on the one hand, and France, on the other, was no longer an appropriate framework for ethnographic investigation. Revolutionary naturalists therefore looked for similarity, and they believed that men in France and the Pacific shared common understandings of gender and sexuality. This search for common ground shifted ethnographic speculation away from the eighteenth-century fascination with the sexual availability of Pacific women toward an interest in patriarchal kinship. Ironically, however, the revaluation of the relative merits of nature and civilization broke down as naturalists conducted their Pacific fieldwork. “Nature” increasingly seemed an undesirable state for men to live in—a threat to rather than an opportunity for male sexuality—and ethnographers concentrated on documenting and measuring the superiority of civilization. Revolutionary era ethnography thus paved the way for the nineteenth century’s physical anthropology, built on biological foundations, that would buttress the development of empire and promote a reinvigorated Tahitian myth.

This article begins with a discussion of the Enlightenment’s myth of Tahiti, focusing particularly on Bougainville’s voyage and responses to it, notably those of Philippe de La Condamine and Denis Diderot. The erotic allure of the Enlightenment’s Tahiti lay in the radical simplicity of islanders’ organization of gender and sexuality. Sexual pleasure existed in Tahiti without the trappings of the European erotic; instead of sensual luxury products and the social games that accompanied them, Tahitians and their French visitors appeared to enjoy a world in which male and female were obvious and unmistakable categories and in which gender complementarity was a simple matter of sexual function. The Enlightenment romance with the Pacific suggested that the truth of sexuality was in fact quite simple and that its apparent complexities were the result of the artifices of civilization.

Revolutionary France’s two Pacific voyages inherited the Enlightenment’s Tahitian myth but combined it with a fervor to make “liberty” a characteristic that all could share. Ultimately, the assumptions of Enlightenment anthropology that...