Revising Rousseau: Young, Legrand d'Aussy, and the Challenge to Enlightenment Constructions of the Peasantry, 1787-1794

Revising Rousseau: Young, Legrand d'Aussy, and the Challenge to Enlightenment Constructions of the Peasantry, 1787-1794 AMY WYNGAARD Toujours des voyages de Suisse, d'Angleterre, d'Italie, de tous les états du monde enfin et jamais des voyages de France! Nous recherchons, nous lisons avec avidité tout ce qui concerne les pays étrangers; et le nôtre, qui, dans ses diverses provinces, offre des mœurs, des usages, des productions, des montagnes ... qu'il serait pour nous si utile et si intéressant de connaître, le nôtre, dont la description bien faite deviendrait un travail si sûr d'être accueilli par des Français, nous ne le connaissons pas!1 Thus laments Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Legrand d'Aussy in the introduction to his Voyage dans la haute et basse Auvergne, which he undertook in 1787 and 1788. Certainly, for most of the eighteenth century, French travelers of both the adventurer and armchair types had their eyes turned toward foreign lands and their exotic inhabitants: the Persia of Chardin and Montesquieu, the Tahiti of Bougainville and Diderot, the Peru of La Condamine and Graffigny, just to name a few. In the years preceding the Revolution, however, the voyage in France became popular among scientists and philosophers, professional and amateur, who, in the spirit of the Enlightenment quest for knowledge, set out to explore and document the different customs, climates, and soils of the nation.2 Following the models 237 238 / WYNGAARD of Rousseau and Buffon, voyagers such as the comte de Guibert, the abbé Papon, Jean Dusaulx, François Marlin, and Horace de Saussure, among dozens of others, documented the details of their travels for a French public increasingly interested in reading about the terrain and population of its own country.3 The voyage of Legrand d'Aussy is representative of this burgeoning interest in travel for scientific and philosophical inquiry in late eighteenthcentury France. A Jesuit traveling in Auvergne recounting his discoveries in letters to his friend the abbé de Fontanay, editor of the Journal général de France, Legrand d'Aussy was primarily interested in geology and mineralogy, although a later, three-volume edition of his Voyages, published in 1794, expanded upon the ethnographic aspects of his work in response to criticism directed at his 1788 edition charging that he was more interested in rocks than people.4 The voyage of Arthur Young, an Englishman who set out to study French agriculture in order to bring ideas and improvements back to England, was largely inspired by the interest in the reform of French farming techniques generated by the writings of the physiocrats and the agronomists in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although their primary objects of inquiry differed, both authors shared an interest in documenting the condition of the contemporary peasantry, providing lengthy and moving testimonies to the tragic state of farming, the heavy burden of taxes, and the overwhelming poverty and misery that plagued the inhabitants of the French countryside. As I will argue in this essay, the works of these two travelers are significant not only because of the historical and cultural information they contain, but also because they expose the critical pretensions of Enlightenment travel literature, fictional and documentary. Containing the most detailed descriptions of the state of the French peasantry ever before published in the eighteenth century, the Voyages of Young and Legrand d'Aussy reveal the extent to which eighteenth-century notions of national identity were based not simply on the constract of the foreign other, but more importantly on the exclusion of the native peasant from French society and consciousness. The writings of Young and Legrand d'Aussy define a key moment in French history, when the public was forced—by both the texts and the events they documented—to confront the realities of peasant existence with the fictional representations propagated by Enlightenment authors, artists, and thinkers. In the pages that follow, I will provide a comparative reading of their texts within the context of eighteenth-century cultural production, showing how the two authors both prepare and prefigure Revising Rousseau: Young, Legrand d'Aussy / 239 the social and political crises of self-definition faced by the...