Happy he who like Léry...

June 23, 2023

Happy he who like Léry...

Heureux qui comme Léry, a fait un beau voyage,Et au contraire de cestuy-là, a conquis les TupinambasPuis s'en est retourné plein d'humanisme et raison,Conter son aventure et célébrer les « sauvages »Quand reverrons-nous hélas, de ce superbe ouvrage,Un si bel exemplaire en précoce éditionQui inspira Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire et compagnons…

Heureux qui comme Léry, a fait un beau voyage,
Et au contraire de cestuy-là, a conquis les Tupinambas
Puis s’en est retourné plein d’humanisme et raison,
Conter son aventure et célébrer les « sauvages »
Quand reverrons-nous hélas, de ce superbe ouvrage,
Un si bel exemplaire en précoce édition
Qui inspira Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire et compagnons…

***

For those who share with Jean de Léry the motto: “More to see than to have”, the Edition-Originale investigation takes you this week in the footsteps of this contemporary of Du Bellay who traded for the sea air Burgundian sweetness and returned with the Story of a Journey to the Land of Brazil, which became the founding story of anthropology.

“And what can we say about the way [Léry’s] Journey is constructed? – That it couldn’t be more modern. Constructed like the monograph of a contemporary ethnographer [...] I have already written it, I repeat: this is really the first model of an ethnologist's monograph. » (Claude Lévi-Strauss)

The very first edition of this work appeared in La Rochelle in 1578. Three editions followed in French in 1580, 1594 and 1611, the fourth and last during the author's lifetime. Two others appeared in Latin, also in Geneva in 1586 and 1594.

A modest Burgundian shoemaker, Jean de Léry (1536-ca. 1613) converted very early to the Reformation and made a first trip to Geneva with John Calvin in 1552. In 1557, the theologian ordered him to join the Protestants of “France Antarctic" by Nicolas de Villegagnon, a French establishment with two hundred men, on Coligny Island, today Villegagnon, located in the bay of Rio de Janeiro. Although religious harmony initially seemed to work, the Protestants were chased from the island and forced to share the life of the Tupinambas Indians. Jean de Léry spent ten months alongside this warlike tribe, although he did not manage to evangelize them. This stay had a profound impact on young Jean de Léry, who was torn between his fascination with these cannibalistic people and his own rejection of paganism.

On his return to France in 1558, his friends urged him to give his testimony. However, the work was only published in 1578, Jean de Léry having misplaced his manuscript twice. The success was immediate and this astonishing text describing the different aspects of the life of the indigenous people of Brazil went through five editions during its author's lifetime.

It is nevertheless appropriate to place the publication of this important work in the context of the Europe of the wars of religion. Indeed, The History of a Journey to the Land of Brazil constitutes a direct response to the story entitled The Singularities of Antarctic France, published in 1557 by André Thévet, Catholic chaplain of the expedition of Vice-Admiral de Villegagnon. For Léry the book by Thévet, who only stayed a few weeks in Brazil in 1555 and frequented the same tribe of Tupinambas, is completely false. The engravings in Léry's book, unlike Thévet's, do not describe the Tupinambas as disgusting cannibals. They rather depict their celebrations and not human butcheries, because he considers that cannibalism is for the natives a matter of revenge, a traditional and warlike rite which he places in direct opposition to the massacre of innocent Protestants by Catholics, notably that of the night of Saint-Barthélemy. Jean de Léry even goes so far as to affirm that these cannibals from Brazil, whom Thévet represents as savages, are more humane and dignified than the Catholics who murder innocent Protestants without reason or rite.

Léry's work, far from falling into oblivion or going unnoticed, inspired one of his contemporaries, Michel de Montaigne, who in the first book of his famous Essays placed a chapter entitled "Des cannibales". The philosopher questions the anthropophagic practices reported by Jean de Léry and the perspective of European cruelties, denouncing what Christians inflict on themselves in Europe in the name of religion: "I think that there is more barbarity in to eat a man alive than to eat him dead, to tear a body still full of feeling by torments and hell, to roast him in the flesh, to have him bitten and bruised by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but seen in fresh memory, not between ancient enemies, but between neighbors and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the pretext of piety and religion), than to roast and eat it after he passed away. »

The text of Jean de Léry, deeply humanist, was also widely read in the Age of Enlightenment, inspiring its thinkers and helping to convey the myth of the "noble savage" dear to Montesquieu (Usbek the Persian), Voltaire (L'Ingénu) or even Rousseau (Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men).

In March 1935, Claude Lévi-Strauss, aged twenty-seven, set foot on Brazilian soil for the first time. In Tristes Tropiques (1955) he says: “I walk down Avenida Rio-Branco where the Tupinamba villages once stood, but I have in my pocket Jean de Léry, the ethnologist's breviary. » In 1994, in an interview with Dominique-Antoine Grisoni, he returned to the importance of this text, discovered shortly before his trip and which he described as a “masterpiece of ethnographic literature”: “The book is enchanting. It's literature. Let us leave ethnology to the ethnologists and let the public read the History of a Journey to the Land of Brazil as a great literary work. And also as an extraordinary adventure novel. »

This “ethnologist’s breviary” is a capital and founding work praised to the skies by the greatest humanist thinkers.

Voir notre exemplaire de l'édition de 1611 illustrée de 9 planches gravées :

Jean de LERY
Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, dite Amérique
Pour Jean Vignon, à Genève 1611, in-8, relié.

Investigations

Everything you’ve always wanted to know — and also what you think you already know, what you didn’t realize you couldn’t ignore, what you assumed no one knew, along with a few other erudite secrets. The Feu Follet investigations are like your curiosity: sharp and spirited.