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One must always take into account this French addiction to performing and making an impact on their public, whether dealing with the intellectual fireworks in honour of China in the eighteenth century, or on the occasion of more recent and far less pleasant pyrotechnics, somewhere in Polynesia.
So the Philosophes' encounter with China had, at its own level, contributed to the fall of the French monarchy. And for more than a century, French intellectuals were to be concerned with a completely different range of issues: political revolutions and counter-revolutions, France's position in Europe, industrial development and its social fall-out, freedom of speech and of thought, as well as colonial expansion. China had very little to do with these French-centred debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It had by then become a target for Western imperialism including France, and its cultural prestige was accordingly declining. China only mattered for a few isolated if not eccentric French intellectuals. China in this period was a very marginal feature in French intellectual life.
Some of these marginal Sinophiles of the nineteenth century were belated admirers of an ideal and abstract China in the grand philosophical tradition. In a little-known novel by Balzac, L'Interdiction — a legal measure depriving a spendthrift of control over his estate — a Marquis d'Espard spends all his fortune on reprinting old Jesuit memoirs on China. He is a devoted right-wing monarchist; he admires the Chinese imperial monarchy for allegedly maintaining a social order the French kings had been unable to maintain. His wife, a typical Balzacian marquise, has a legal interdiction passed on him.
The Marquis d'Espard is a lonely figure in Balzac's little world — the Human Comedy — and equally solitary was the young Baudelaire, who was at college when Balzac was flourishing. In one of his strongest poems, Le Voyage (or 'the trip', also with the colloquial connotations of this word), his concern for China is expressed through brief but extremely challenging verses — a concern he must have developed in his college years:
De même qu'autrefois nous partions pour la Chine
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One must always take into account this French addiction to performing and making an impact on their public, whether deal- ing with the intellectual fireworks in honour of China in the eighteenth century, or on the occasion of more recent and far less pleasant pyrotechnics, somewhere in Polynesia.
So the Philosophes' encounter with China had, at its own level, contributed to the fall of the French monarchy. And for more than a century, French intellectuals were to be concerned with a com- pletely different range of issues: political revolutions and counter- revolutions, France's position in Europe, industrial development and its social fall-out, freedom of speech and of thought, as well as colonial expansion. China had very little to do with these French- centred debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It had by then become a target for Western imperialism including France, and its cultural prestige was accordingly declining. China only mattered for a few isolated if not eccentric French intellectu- als. China in this period was a very marginal feature in French intellectual life.
Some of these marginal Sinophiles of the nineteenth century were belated admirers of an ideal and abstract China in the grand philosophical tradition. In a little-known novel by Balzac, L'Interdiction a legal measure depriving a spendthrift of con- trol over his estate—a Marquis d'Espard spends all his fortune on reprinting old Jesuit memoirs on China. He is a devoted right- wing monarchist; he admires the Chinese imperial monarchy for allegedly maintaining a social order the French kings had been unable to maintain. His wife, a typical Balzacian marquise, has a legal interdiction passed on him.
The Marquis d'Espard is a lonely figure in Balzac's little world the Human Comedy and equally solitary was the young Baudelaire, who was at college when Balzac was flourishing. In one of his strongest poems, Le Voyage (or 'the trip', also with the colloquial connotations of this word), his concern for China is expressed through brief but extremely challenging verses — a con- cern he must have developed in his college years:
De meme qu'autrefois nous partions la Chine
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