Geography, Etymology, and Taste: Charles de Brosses and the Restoration of History

Author(s): William Pietz

Source: L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 25, No. 3, The Discourse of Travel (Fall 1985), pp. 86-94
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Geography, Etymology, and Taste:
Charles de Brosses and the Restoration of History

William Pietz

WHEN crat
HE and
IS philosophe
REMEMBERED Charles deAT ALL,
Brosses the Burgundian
(1709-1777) is remem aristo
bered by different people for different things. The literati of the
nineteenth century knew de Brosses for his amusing Lettres historiques
et critiques sur l'Italie (an account of his travels in the south in 1739 and
1740, first published in 1799), and for a famous quarrel with Voltaire
over a peasant's bill for firewood from de Brosses' estate at Tournay that
Voltaire was renting (along with its noble title).1 Geographers recall de
Brosses for his collection of voyage accounts, Histoire des navigations
aux terres Australes (1756), in which he authoritatively divided the
regions of the South Pacific and coined the lasting placename "Polyne
sia."2 Anthropologists acknowledge de Brosses for his pioneering work
on primitive religion, Du Culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de
l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle deNigritie (1760),
in which he invented the term "fétichisme" and defined methodological
guidelines for the study of mythologies and distant cultures that antici
pated nineteenth-century social science.3 Archaeologists might know
of de Brosses' Lettres sur l'état actuel de la ville souterraine d'Herculée
(1750), which was the first widely-read account of the excavations at
Herculaneum, the prototypical archaeological site; they would proba
bly not know that de Brosses went on to apply the term "archaeology"
to characterize his new materialist approach to etymology. Linguists,

See the classic 1853 version of this affair by C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, "Voltaire et le Président
de Brosses" in Causeries de Lundi, 3rd éd., Vol. 7 (Paris: Gamier, n.d.), pp. 85-104.
For Lytton Strachey's English treatment, see "The President de Brosses" in Biographical
Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), pp. 112-121. The dispute may be followed
first hand in Voltaire et le Président de Brosses: correspondance inédite, ed. Th. Foisset
(Paris: Didier, 1858).
For a thorough examination of de Brosses' work on "Australia" see Alan Carey Taylor,
Le Président de Brosses et l'Australie (Paris: Boivin, 1938).
Ε. B. Tylor chose the final words of Du Culte des dieux fétiches as the epigraph for his
seminal 1870 anthropological study Primitive Culture.

g6 Fall 1985
 PlETZ

however, are familiar with de Brosses' Traité de la formation méchanique

des langues et des principes physiques d'étymologie (1765), for the late
eighteenth century an authoritative treatment of the leading theory of
etymology. It would not be every classicist who would know of de
Brosses' lifelong work on the text and biography of the Roman historian
Sallust.4 Political historians remember de Brosses as president of the
Burgundian parliament and author of remonstrances against Louis XV
which earned him three separate exiles to distant parts of France.5
Despite his many influential works and his friendship with most of
the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, intellectual historians
have had little interest in de Brosses, viewing him as a merely eccentric
and dispersed intelligence. This essay argues that there is a comon pro
ject among these diverse writings, the restoration of order to History,
and that in the course of his works de Brosses developed two opposed
methods for reclaiming historical truth lost beyond the horizon of the
written document. These methods corresponded to the two exotic souths
of de Brosses' world: Italy, the south of classical history and Roman
models for identification and imitation by Enlightenment nobles; and
the terres Australes unknown to the ancients, an alien world to be ob
served and colonized rather than imitated and internalized. One was a
method of aesthetic judgement leading to a standard of taste and liter
ary style; the other method was a materialist "archaeology" leading to
a mechanics and general taxonomy. This latter defined a field of
knowledge gained not through observant travels in society (voyages) but
through charted voyages in nature (navigations). It made possible a dif
ferent order of knowledge and historical truth which the Enlightenment
intellectual (since Bayle) could use to undermine the false knowledges
and superstitions promoted by conventional history, as in his book on
fetishism de Brosses reexamines ancient Egypt in the light of voyagers'
knowledge of black Africa ("Nigritie").
Travel and navigation, style and archaeology, are alternate routes
for de Brosses toward the restoration of historical order to a geographi
cally and linguistically deranged domestic space. The peculiar nature
of the problem appears in de Brosses' 1739 account of his passage
through the French town of Valence on the way to Italy:

4. De Brosses' Vie de Salluste was originally published the year of his death. It is reprinted
in M. Pessoneaux, Œuvres de Salluste (Paris: Charpentier, 1875), pp. i-lxviii.
5. See the only book-length biography of de Brosses: Th. Foisset, Le Président de Brosses:
Histoire des lettres et des parlements au XVIIP siècle (Paris: Olivier-Fulgence, 1842).

Vol. XXV, No. 3 87

 L'Esprit Créateur

Nous passâmes ensuite à l'embouchure de l'Isère, rivière infâme s'il en fût jamais;
c'est une décoction d'ardoise. De l'autre côté, au-dessus d'un rocher en pain de sucre,
on voit le vieux château ruiné de Crussol, d'où la maison dTJzès tire son nom. Les bonnes
gens nous dirent qu'un géant nommé Buard, haut de quinze coudées, en avoit fait jadis
son habitation. Dans le vrai, il faudroit cependant que Chintré se baissât pour y entrer.
Cet honnête géant, ayant détruit le genre humain, voulut bien le repeupler et bâtir une
ville. Pour ce faire, il engrossa toutes les filles du pays et jeta sa lance en disant: Va, lance.
Elle alla tomber de l'autre côté du Rhône, où est maintenant la ville de ce nom, et où
des belîtres de jacobins nous montrèrent ses os, qui sont bien à la vérité d'une grosse
bête; mais comme les grosses bêtes de toute espèce sont moins rares que les géants, vous
êtes dispensé de croire que ces os soient ceux du prétendu seigneur Buard. Maudit soit
celui qui fit bâtir cette vilaine ville, où l'on nous fit une chère détestable!6

This anecdote concerns the disruption of historical knowledge by a false

etymology of a geographic name. In classic Enlightenment fashion de
Brosses mocks popular superstition (the belief in giants of old by "les
bonnes gens") and its hypocritical exploitation by priests ("des belîtres
de jacobins"). The priests prevent popular enlightenment and accurate
historical knowledge by misrepresenting natural material objects (the
bones) as tangible proof of fantastic past social events. True social history
(the ruined castle of Crussol whence the noble house of Uzès took its
name —a family whose living representatives de Brosses knew) was for
gotten by the local society due to this simultaneous mutilation of lin
guistic and natural knowledge: the false etymology of the town's name
constitutes a false history hiding the true feudal origins of the town under
an aristocratic lord; and the use of animal bones for the impossible bones
of the giant Buard (the "prétendu seigneur") distorts natural history as
well. Both outraged de Brosses, himself the living head of an ancient
noble family in a time when feudal relations and the ancien régime were
beginning to lose their meaning and the lifelong friend, since their
childhood days at the Collège des Jésuites in Dijon, of the founder of
natural history, Buffon. The mythic tale of the giant Buard, produced
by superstitious ignorance and preserved by clerical self-interest, repre
sented the ground of this triple displacement of history, language, and
nature. It was as an explanation of the "mechanism" responsible for such
superstitious myths, and for irrational historical formations in general,
that de Brosses later elaborated his theory of fetishism.

6. Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières écrites d'Italie en 1739 et 1740, 4th ed. (Paris: Perrin,
1885), pp. 7-8. Hereafter cited in the text as Lettres.

88 Fall 1985
 PlETZ

De Brosses could count on the readers of his Valence story to know

that he himself was closer in stature to Chintre than Buard. Diderot,
telling an obscene anecdote about Buffon and de Brosses in his Salon
of1767, refers to the latter as "guère plus grand qu'un Lilliputian."7 In
his 1765 Salon Diderot remarks that:

... le président de Brosses, que je respecte en habit ordinaire, me fait mourir de rire
en habit de palais ... une petite tête gaie, ironique et satirique, perdue dans l'immensité
d'une fôret de cheveux qui l'offusquent; et cette fôret descendant à droite et à gauche,
qui va s'emparer des trois quarts du reste de la petite figure . . . (Lettres, p. 55n)

For all that his appearance in official dress was ridiculous, de Brosses
had a precise mind well suited for bureaucratic administration and legal
matters. (His clear intelligence—his mind was lively of wit though not
poetic, and logical though not quantitative — also caused him to wonder
at thinkers whose insights came by way of digressions. In his first meet
ing with Diderot, de Brosses was so struck by the philosopher's "per
petual digressions" that he amused himself by counting them: "He made
a good twenty-five of them in my room yesterday, from nine o'clock
to one."8) Limited in his active public life by his tiny stature, as well as
by his ironic sensibility, de Brosses at a young age turned to the intellec
tual project bequeathed him by his father: the writing of a universal
history consisting of volumes devoted to each of the four "continents,"
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His father having covered the first
two, the young de Brosses began reading voyage accounts ("navigations")
of the latter two. At least as early came de Brosses' other lifelong intel
lectual pursuit: his curious project and deep identification with Sallust,
the Latin historian famous for his literary style and infamous for his
corruption as a public official. (In his biography of Sallust, de Brosses
would write: "il ne fut guère moins méprisable par son cœur qu'estima
ble par son esprit," Vie de Salluste, p. ii.)
De Brosses' youthful trip to Italy was in part a search for lost texts
of Sallust, whose history he planned to restore from the remaining frag
ments, and in part a way, through his letters, to establish an identity
among the literate French circles he desired to enter. These two aims
were one insofar as they involved the acquisition through travel in Italy

7. Denise Diderot, Œuvres complètes, vol. 11 (Paris: Garnier, 1876), p. 246.

8. Quoted in Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot: The Testing Years, 1713-1759 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1957), p. 224.

Vol. XXV, No. 3 89

 L'Esprit Créateur

of an aesthetic sensibility and literary style able to make cosmopolitan

judgements not bound by the narrow usages of French society. Italian
travel was, of course, above all an education in taste and worldly wisdom.
From de Brosses' letters it becomes clear that the sign of the trans
cendence of provinciality was the emergence of a visible theatricality,
pleasing in its "singularity," out of mundane social scenes. Social forms
were not thereby transgressed, but aesthetically surpassed through the
extra-social judgement of taste. It is precisely theatricality that de Brosses
looks for upon arriving at his first Italian city, Genoa: a city he describes
as built around its harbor like a giant amphitheater, and whose "rues
ne sont autre chose que d'immense décorations d'opéra" (Lettres, pp.
51, 52). But Genoa proves disappointing: the old hierarchy of nobles
is static and drab; the doge is a prisoner of the system, without autono
my. At a procession of the Genoan notables and a cathedral service
celebrating St. John's day, the only saving element of the spectacle was
"un abbé à talons rouges et un éventail à la main, qui, pendant la com
munion, joua supérieurement de la serinette" (Lettres, p. 55).
The ideal of taste that de Brosses looks to Italy to impart is revealed
at such moments of "singularity" which are composed by an extreme
juxtaposition of opposed qualities. Such is the sight of young ragamuf
fins on donkeys, eating oranges amid a manure heap ("des petits
polissons sur des ânes, manger des oranges en menant du fumier") or
carters in workers' overalls having ices at a cafe ("des charretiers en sar
reau de toile, prenant des glaces dans un café") (Lettres, p. 98). Aesthetic
pleasure here comes from the singular conjunction of social and sensual
opposites: poor children amid dung, gorging on luscious oranges; com
mon laborers at leisure, in crude workclothes but eating the most deli
cate and superfluous of foods.
The ideological gratification of this aesthetic ideal, which de Brosses
locates in the Italians' "goût des spectacles" {Lettres, p. 124), is perhaps
most clearly exemplified in his description of an occurrence during the
performance of a popular comedy in Verona. This spectacle took place
in a huge ancient Roman amphitheater, which de Brosses claimed could
and that evening did hold 30,000:

Que je n'oublie pas de vous dire la surprise singulière que j'eus à la comédie la première
fois que j'y allai. Une cloche de la ville ayant sonné un coup, j'entendis derrière moi un
mouvement subit tel que je crus que l'amphithéâtre venoit en ruine, d'autant mieux qu'en
même temps je vis fuir les actrices, quoiqu'il y en eût une qui, selon son rôle, fût d'abord
évanouie. Le vrai sujet de mon étonnement étoit que ce que nous appelons VAngelus

90 Fall 1985
 PlETZ

ou le pardon venoit de sonner, que toute l'assemblée s'étoit mise promptement à genoux,
tournée vers l'orient; que les acteurs s'y étoient de même jetés dans la coulisse; que l'on
chanta fort bien l'Ave Maria; après quoi l'actrice évanouie revint, fit fort honnêtement
la révérence ordinaire après l'Angélus, se remit dans son état d'évanouissement, et la pièce
continua. (Lettres, pp. 125-26)

The "surprise singulière" is the juxtaposition of conventional social forms

of piety (kneeling at the tolling of the Angelus) and purely theatrical
postures enacted for the sake of pleasure in spectacle (the actress who
in her role has swooned). That this is managed without conflict within
a fundamentally theatrical space, which yet accommodates social cus
tom, makes it for de Brosses a kind of Utopian moment. It is the effort
less movement from convention to pleasure, the equanimity of gesture
between religious fullness and theatrical emptiness, which marks the
singularity and exceptional desirability of the event.
Such episodes of ineffable gratification in the simultaneous viola
tion and respect of social forms define a style of taste whose aesthetic
ground allowed both the radical intellectual criticism of society and the
ultimate political conservatism which the philosophe- noble desired, and
which he found embodied in the figure of Sallust. Sallust was a cau
tionary "role model" for de Brosses, a possible self whose public virtue
was corrupted by an aesthetic sensibility which was responsible for both
his acute insights into the ironies of history and for his taste for worldly
pleasures. De Brosses, for all his intellectual radicalism, satiric view of
society, and "erudite libertinage," was throughout his life a hardwork
ing and honest public servant, the very opposite of Sallust in terms of
civic virtue.
De Brosses' peculiar historical project was not merely the collection
of the fragments of Sallust's lost work, but the reconstruction of the
text itself, almost the way one restores an ancient masterpiece of paint
ing. The restoration involves a method of intertextual hypothesis: in re
storing Sallust's chapter on the Black Sea, de Brosses read all relevant
extant texts which Sallust himself might have read or whose authors
might themselves have read Sallust. The content of such relevant pas
sages was then woven between the remaining actual fragments of Sallust
into a whole written (albeit in French) in the voice and person of the
ancient historian. De Brosses' authority for doing this rested on his ability
to acquire the literary style and sensibility of the master, to become the
writer that Sallust was in spirit.
Beyond restoring the chapter on the Black Sea ("cette curieuse

Vol. XXV, No. 3 91

 L'Esprit Créateur

digression géographique"9 that testified to the "goût particulier que ce

fameux historien avoit pour la Géographie," p. 627), de Brosses chose
to restore Sallust's account of the slave revolt of Spartacus, an "incident
singulier"10 of a gladiator who escaped from the "spectacles de l'Amphi
théâtre" to attack the social order itself. ("J'ose à peine donner le nom
de guerre à cette étrange & nouvelle espèce de tumulte," writes Sallust/de
Brosses, p. 24.)
A perfect imitation of an author's style of writing and, what is the
same thing for de Brosses, a perfect identification with another's singular
style and taste, provide de Brosses with his first method for retrieving
history beyond the limits of the document. A second method, which de
Brosses used to restore world history, also had its beginnings in his travels
in Italy. But in this case the site was not the amphitheater of ancient
spectacles still present in Italian social life; rather it was the ancient city
itself, dead but perfectly preserved in its materiality through the cata
strophic caprices of nature. This was Herculaneum. "La découverte de
la ville souterraine d'Herculée près de Naples, est un événement si
singulier et si curieux, que je ne suis pas surpris que vous [the reader
addressed in this "letter"] cherchiez à rassembler tout ce qu'en peuvent
rapporter les témoins oculaires."11 One entered Herculaneum "comme
dans une mine" (p. 4), only to discover in the density of nature a preserved
city: all the mundane objects of social life, as well as whole buildings
and street corners, revealed in the smoky light of torches. Here the past
is restored (or rather has been hidden and preserved outside history until
rediscovered by man) in its material externality; all that is missing is the
life and spirit (precisely what de Brosses believed could be restored
through a literary aesthetics of style and taste). The past is captured,
not through an aesthetics of the spectacle, but through a mechanics of
the material which provides a method for collecting and ordering "les

Charles de Brosses, Le Périple de l'Euxin, tel qu'on peut présumer que Salluste l'avoit
décrit, vers la fin du IIP livre de son Histoire: rétabli sur les fragments qui nous en
restent, à l'aide des anciens Écrivains que Salluste a pu consulter, & de ceux qui ont eu
son ouvrage entre les mains in Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de l'académie
des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1768), vol. 32, pp. 627-649,
and vol. 33, pp. 475-538.
Charles de Brosses, La Seconde guerre servile, ou La Révolte de Spartacus en campante:
fragmens de Sallust, tirés des IIP ά IVe livres de son Histoire générale in Mémoires de
littérature, tirés des registres de l'académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Paris:
Imprimerie royale, 1774), Vol. 37, p. 23.
Charles de Brosses, Lettres sur l'état actuel de la ville souterraine d'Herculée (Dijon: 1750),
pp. 1-2.

92 Fall 1985
 PlETZ

témoins oculaires." Even though in the underground city "l'objet princi

pal étoit un Amphithéâtre dont on avoit commencé à découvrir les
degrés, ou peut-être plutôt un Théâtre" (p. 8), the space of discovery
itself "est presque entièrement semblable aux caves de l'Observatoire"
(p. 7). The material past is here discovered through observation and "une
recherche méthodique" (p. 11).
For de Brosses, the space of archaeology and the space of navigation
are the same: nature. Nature is the realm of brute materiality beyond
or below any theatrical transmutation into the social and the personal;
it is a region of happenings which are both mechanistic and capricious,
and hence a realm knowable through a combination of systematic
method and empirical observation, a space of bodies and facts rather
than spirit and sensibility. Language too has its archaeological space
for de Brosses. His materialist, mimetic theory of language and etymol
ogy, as much as archaeological discovery and navigational observation,
was intended to enable a methodical reconstruction of the geographi
cal movements of peoples throughout history.
For de Brosses, the ground of language was not voiced sound but
the material, physiological apparatus which produced the voice. This
mute physiological architecture was made up of a finite, tabulable set
of features which determined the shape of words as, according to de
Brosses' theory of the first human language, they were invented as names
for things through a mimicking of the noises entities in the infinite realm
of nature happened to make. Vocal physiology provided the small num
ber of "organic roots" which could be used along with a comparatist's
knowledge of world languages (just as, in de Brosses' other method, the
imitation of a singular stylistic taste would supplement documentary
knowledge) to construct "le grand Archéologue ou Vocabulaire uni
versel."12 "Si jamais on exécute l'archéologue universel, ou tableau de
nomenclature générale, par racines organiques pour les langues qui nous
sont connues," de Brosses writes (Traité, I, xliv), then the reconstruc
tion of world history would become possible:

L'histoire des colonies et de leur parcours sur la surface de la terre, tient de fort près
à l'histoire des langues. Le meilleur moyen de découvrir l'origine d'une nation est de suivre,
en remontant, les traces de sa langue comparée à celles des peuples avec qui la tradition

12. Charles de Brosses, Traité de la formation méchanique des langues et des principes
physiques de l'étymologie (Paris: Terrelonge, an IX), II, 466.

Vol. XXV, No. 3 93

 L'Esprit Créateur

des faits nous apprend que ce peuple à eu quelque rapport... à expliquer l'histoire par
la signification des mots et des noms imposés aux choses. (Traité, I, xlvii—xlviii)

This mechanistic system of derivation —de Brosses' materialist etymol

ogy — founds a science of history: what de Brosses, in a lost work, calls
Géographie Etymologique (Foisset, p. 585). The observations and dis
coveries of navigations, such as de Brosses collected in his Histoire des
navigations aux terres Australes, would provide material out of which
the materialist etymologist might retrace the geographical displacements
of peoples, thereby restoring an accurate picture of history as a whole.
By archaeological discovery, "navigational" observations, and etymo
logical geography, on the one hand, and aesthetic sensibility, social taste
and stylistic imitation, on the other, de Brosses tried to formulate
methods for restoring both the material past and its living spirit to
history. Above all, his work sought ways to restore order in a history
and to restore this true and rational history to an age in which the socia
place and ethical role of a provincial "noble of the robe" such as de
Brosses was becoming increasingly unsettled.

Pitzer College

94 Fail 1985