ABSTRACT
In the first half of the 19th Century, the discrepancy between the erudite milieu, limited in the number of scholars despite the legitimacy they had recently acquired, and the importance of Orientalist themes in the cultural field leads one to question the practices that existed at the time. Alongside academic works intended for specialists, a mass of publications coexisted to satisfy the exoteric demands of the general public whose curiosity for the Orient had been aroused notably by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. When the intellectual and moral values of the Ancien Régime were being restored, different prophets invested in the image of India as they used this civilisation as the archetype of a lost social world, moving backwards from the Enlightenment struggle.
