From Allegory to Revolution: The Inca Empire in the Eighteenth-Century French Imagination

Author

Agnieszka A. Ficek, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Art History

Advisor

Judy Sund

Committee Members

Tara Zanardi

Meredith Martin

Amanda Wunder

Keywords

Eighteenth Century, France, Peru, Brazil, Rococo, Illustration

Abstract

Péruvienophilie was one of the many exoticisms that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe. It was born out of the French desire to build an outpost of their colonial empire in South America, a desire that was thwarted several times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dissertation examines French portrayals of the Inca and their transatlantic impact. It is an interdisciplinary project with strong literary, sociological, historical, and anthropological dimensions but grounded in a rich visual culture. French prints and paintings, stage sets and costumes, porcelain figures, and panoramic wallpapers promulgated the image of an exotic land inhabited by a Native culture of "natural” nobility, who presented an alternative to the artificiality of the ancien régime. Péruvienophilie was a politically charged exoticism that occupied a liminal space between Rococo fantasy and the purported rationalism of France"s philosophes.

These imagined Inca were introduced to French audiences by Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Les Indes Galantes (1736) and Voltaire's tragedy, Alzire (1736). A decade later, Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747) cemented the Inca Princess's prominence in discourses of race, gender, and governance. Written under the influence of Alzire and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Graffigny's epistolary novel satirized French society – particularly the expectations and strictures placed on French women. Graffigny's idealizing image of the Inca, illustrated in its 1752 edition by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen, had been shaped by the sixteenth-century chronicles of "El Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega, and grounded fantasy in history. A similar admixture characterized Jean François Marmontel's Les Incas ou le destruction de l'empire du Pérou (1777); Marmontel – incensed by the censure of his 1767 philosophical novel, Bélisaire – drew on scientific and political texts and used the Spanish conquest of South America as a vehicle for his republican politics. An enormous success, Marmontel's novel and its illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune influenced depictions of the Inca in the visual, performing, and decorative arts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Taking cues from exotic stage costumes and the illustrations produced for Graffigny's and Marmontel's novels, artists including Jean-Jacques François le Barbier, Alexandre-Joseph Desenne, Alexandre-Marie Colin, and Louis Hersent elaborated a fantastical vision of Inca society centered on the trope of the Inca Princess who, like the allegorical America before her, was a projection of European desires and insecurities. Her idealized form allowed writers and artists to project through her a critique of their own society, subverting the censorship of the ancien régime. In the Americas, French illustrations, prints, and paintings of the Inca inspired Peruvian artists and writers and were consumed by champions of independence such as Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre. In the early nineteenth century, these fantasies of Peru found their way into decorative arts in the form of wallpapers, porcelain figures, and printed fabrics, wherein colonial subjects and subjugation itself were romanticized and domesticated.

In its broad geographic and historic reach, this project enriches present understandings of the political functions of exoticisms in ancien régime France, and more particularly defines the role played by the Noble Savage in French critiques of absolutism. While my project addresses misrepresentations inherent to colonial and pseudo-colonial views of the indigenous body, my intent is not to critique those misrepresentations, but instead to present them as foils through which the image creator (the colonist) can explore and critique his (and it is almost always "his”) own society. Throughout its long history, péruvienophilie served to both subvert and reinforce dominant narratives of colonialism, gender, and the construction of an "ideal” society. In elucidating this history, this dissertation further problematizes the ever-elusive construct of "America” and its multitude of meanings.

Recommended Citation

Ficek, Agnieszka A., "From Allegory to Revolution: The Inca Empire in the Eighteenth-Century French Imagination" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5572