Study Guide for Week 7
Assigned Document
DIDEROT, Dennis.
Excerpt from Supplement to the
Voyage of Bougainville (1772).
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
was a French thinker and writer (a philosophe) most well known for his work as
one of the co-editors of the Encyclopédie project.
This project, which tried to bring together all of human knowledge in a
multi-volume publication, was considered one of the major projects of the
Enlightenment. This excerpt is not from that project.
In 1771, Louis Antoine de
Bougainville published A
Voyage around the World, recounting his circumnavigation of the earth in 1766-1769.
In his account, de Bougainville described a brief stop in Tahiti, where he
commented on Tahitian people’s attitudes toward sexuality. A Tahitian named
Aotourou traveled with Bougainville back to France,
where Aotourou’s reactions to French society were accorded
great interest. Diderot’s 1772 Supplement
to the Voyage of Bougainville (Supplément
au Voyage de Bougainville) was a response to de Bougainville’s Voyage
and a 1770 book that claimed to report Aotourou’s
views on France. Your reading is an excerpt from this Supplement by
Diderot. Keep an open mind, as you read
it, as to what sort or genre of writing this is.
Here is the excerpt by Diderot, click here.
Questions:
1a. What does Diderot find
objectionable in French social organization?
1b. What does he find
objectionable in Christianity as practiced in France?
2a. According to
Diderot, how is the Tahitian family organized?
2b. According to
Diderot, what constitutes desirability in Tahiti?
In the case of the following two questions, rather than
having you turn in written answers, I am instead asking you to prepare notes
for yourself, so that you can speak about any of them if you are called on in
class. Your notes should include both points you would make in addressing
the questions and quotations and page citations that you would need to support
your answer.
A. Diderot compares
Tahitian society to French society. What evidence does he offer in favor
of one or the other?
B. What do you think is Diderot’s
point in writing this text? And what genre of writing do you think this is?