Images of Exotic Objects in the Abbé Prévost's Histoire Générale des Voyages

The impact of the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages ¹ on French eighteenth-century readers is now well documented. ² Its capacity to disseminate knowledge, anchored in its encyclopedic features and historical perspective, makes this collection a forceful vector of the circulation of information and inscribes it in the global process of familiarizing the exotic. ³ The rich descriptions of people and objects transform the entire collection into a textual “cabinet de curiosités” that narrates travel histories. The primary aim of Prévost, a true man of letters of the Enlightenment, was not to attempt to decipher the secrets of the unknown, as the intellectually curious thinker would have ventured to do in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ⁴ Rather, it was the desire for money and social recognition that made him accept the Chancelier d’Aguesseau’s offer to translate the original English collection into French, even though the opportunity to please and instruct the general public must have played a role in his decision as well. While completing this task, Prévost nevertheless demonstrated professionalism to the point that he no longer merely translated but competently edited the collection and also produced new volumes. It was an attempt to provide readers with as much relevant knowledge as possible, knowledge that was presented in an organized and rational manner. Although to date some critical studies have focused on the representation of people and geographical features in the Histoire, ⁵ none has so far addressed the illustrations featuring objects that accompanied these volumes. The representation of material items in the Histoire brings into question their double status as things: it is precisely their graphic representation that is featured as part of an illustration—an object in itself—which is part of another object, the book. ⁶ As iconographic elements inscribed in this collection, these objects acquire a new form, use and function; consequently, they are subject to a different reading protocol. Of course, given the genre in which they are inserted—the illustrated travelogue—such objects do not narrate any story based on their perception of reality (as does the eponymous protagonist of Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s novel The Sofa, for example) but expose how they are enlivened, to rephrase Arjun Appadurai, through their circulation. ⁷ In order to understand how such images of exotic objects operate in this context, it is necessary to examine first the links among the object, its illustration, and the anthology in which it appears. It is only through an analysis of this network that the visual side of the “object matter” ⁸ forming the Histoire générale des voyages can be fully understood. At the outset, I will explain how the Histoire can be taken into account as a collection of collections, while focusing on the status of the image. In an attempt to explore the notion of the ethnographic object, I will then concentrate on the nature and function of the illustrated objects. In view of the Histoire as a chronicle of colonial expansion, I will finally discuss the representation of objects from Africa and America in reference to the visual dynamics of the collection as a whole, while hinting at the wider significance of these exotic items in European culture and thought.