L’Autre Jésuite : civilisation, exploration et espionnage dans le récit de voyage de Fusée-Aublet en Guyane (1762-1764)

Abstract

Our article analyses the Jesuit espionage practised and recounted by the botanist Jean-Baptiste Christophe Fusée-Aublet in his account of his travel in Guiana (1762-1764). In the first part, we discuss the “civilizing” approach of the Kourou expedition in the context of the policy aimed at banishing the Jesuits from the French kingdom. Secondly, we observe how the method of espionage is part of the exploration, the prospection of nature carried out by the botanist during his peregrinations in Guyana. Finally, we find that Fusée-Aublet's rhetoric constitutes an imitation of Jesuit rhetoric, which inverts its propositions and thus proceeds to the narration of a new representation of the colonists, the Jesuits and the Indians of Guiana idealised by the theoreticians of the Kourou expedition.

Keywords

• otherness
• exploration
• Jesuit
• Guiana
• espionage