Huguenots and noble savages

In an essay in Stephen Greenblatt’s New World Encounters (Representations Books, 6) , Frank Lestringant examines the work of Huguenot adventurer Jean de Lery, whose Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578) influenced Locke, Bayle, Diderot, and Rousseau and was, in Levi-Strauss’s words, the “breviary of the ethnologist.”

Lestringant notes that the “Huguenot corpus on America” worked on two main themes: “a denunciation of the crimes of the Spanish conquest,” dependent on Las Casas, and “a defense of the free and happy savage, whom the bloody conquerors should have left to his native ignorance, even at the risk of his eternal damnation.” Anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic Protestants contributed mightily, it seems, to the development of the myth of the noble savage.

Lery’s own work was more complex.

On the one hand, Lery had concluded that the “American savages” were beyond redemption. Despite all efforts, they would not convert. But that meant that the Spanish should leave them alone, since the only valid excuse for occupying their lands was evangelization, and that was not going to happen.

Thus, Lery combined this grim prognosis of the future of American missions with a strongly anti-colonialist stance. And, Lery had sincere admiration for the savages, who had not been “monstrous or prodigious towards us.” Their virtues put the Europeans to shame. As Lestringant puts it, “The Indian, admirable in everything but for the notable exception of religion, was saved in this life but lost in the next.”

Lery’s book had a mixed legacy. Many readers oversimplified and developed the “noble savage” elements that were part of his work. Others noted that the lack of religion among the Indians opened the possibility of atheist peoples, a revolutionary idea at the time. Most ignored the centrality of his religious concerns, and this, Lestringant says, makes the book pointless: “Once the omnipresent curse springing from original sin is left out of Lery, what remains of the poignancy of condemned children? His remarks become insipid when deprived of their theological dimension. The ambiguous myth of exile on earth of Eden becomes reduced to a philosophical novelette.”