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early Manchu emperors. The Jesuits' basic strategy was to establish the compatibility of a conversion to Christianity with the continuation of the Confucian ceremonies of respect to the Emperor and to family ancestors. They had to defend this strategy against other influential church lobbies in Rome, especially the Dominicans. The Jesuits were defeated, eventually, but they had produced in the course of this epoch-making controversy La Querelle des Cérémonies Chinoises an enormous wealth of material highly favourable to Chinese culture and society, among which the standard collections of Father Lecomte and Father Du Halde are best known. After these Jesuits' memoirs had lost their polemical value within the Church, they found a new lease of life with the Philosophes, who turned them against the whole ancien régime.
China's position in this Age of Enlightenment is well-known. Rather than chart it in greater detail, I should like to emphasise that for the French Philosophe, China was a perfectly abstract entity, an ideological construct, an intellectual artefact. Needless to say, almost none of them had ever visited China or had contemplated doing so. The Philosophes, and the Jesuits before them, knew nothing of the deeply rooted dissatisfaction of the Chinese people with foreign Manchu rule, of the rampant peasant unrest, the bureaucratic control of the economy, the atmosphere of intellectual rigidity, or the repression against dissidents. In their eyes, China was not so much idealised, but rather completely reprocessed, reconstructed so as to fit into French intellectual and political controversies.
Yes, China was an abstraction, and this was not considered a handicap. For China as reconstructed by the Philosophes was an essential prerequisite for the achievement of a genuine philosophical universality, for a universal and world-wide approach to human nature and human society. China enabled these Philosophes to break away from a Eurocentric view of world history, founded only on Greek and Roman cultures and on earlier Hebrew traditions. To include China in their views on modern progress, to appeal to China as much as to Greece and Rome, was a major intellectual and philosophical advance towards universality. Voltaire was most concerned with this generalising approach to world
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early Manchu emperors. The Jesuits' basic strategy was to estab- lish the compatibility of a conversion to Christianity with the continuation of the Confucian ceremonies of respect to the Em- peror and to family ancestors. They had to defend this strategy against other influential church lobbies in Rome, especially the Dominicans. The Jesuits were defeated, eventually, but they had produced in the course of this epoch-making controversy La Querelle des Cérémonies Chinoises an enormous wealth of ma- terial highly favourable to Chinese culture and society, among which the standard collections of Father Lecomte" and Father Du Halde' are best known. After these Jesuits' memoirs had lost their polemical value within the Church, they found a new lease of life with the Philosophes, who turned them against the whole an- cien régime.
China's position in this Age of Enlightenment is well-known. Rather than chart it in greater detail, I should like to emphasise that for the French Philosophe, China was a perfectly abstract entity, an ideological construct, an intellectual artefact. Needless to say, almost none of them had ever visited China or had contem- plated doing so. The Philosophes, and the Jesuits before them, knew nothing of the deeply rooted dissatisfaction of the Chinese people with foreign Manchu rule, of the rampant peasant unrest, the bureaucratic control of the economy, the atmosphere of intel- lectual rigidity, or the repression against dissidents. In their eyes, China was not so much idealised, but rather completely repro- cessed, reconstructed so as to fit into French intellectual and polit- ical controversies.
Yes, China was an abstraction, and this was not considered a handicap. For China as reconstructed by the Philosophes was an essential prerequisite for the achievement of a genuine philosophi- cal universality, for a universal and world-wide approach to hu- man nature and human society. China enabled these Philosophes to break away from a Eurocentric view of world history, founded only on Greek and Roman cultures and on earlier Hebrew tradi- tions. To include China in their views on modern progress, to appeal to China as much as to Greece and Rome, was a major intellectual and philosophical advance towards universality. Vol- taire was most concerned with this generalising approach to world
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