Adventurers

The first French-language travelogues in the late Middle Ages

Following the trading with the Roman Empire, the development of the Mongol Empire in the 13^th century saw a resurgence in European voyages to Asia. The first Frenchman known to have travelled to India was Jourdain de Séverac. He arrived on the Malabar Coast in 1321, accompanied by Italian Franciscan missionaries. He spent the next few years living in Quilon, a city also mentioned by Marco Polo in his written account, in French, of a visit three decades earlier. Upon returning to Europe, Séverac was appointed bishop of Quilon. While further traces of him have been lost, a manuscript entitled Mirabilia descripta has survived. During that same 14^th century, Jean de Mandeville’s Voyage or Itineraria proved to be a big hit across Europe. Of disputed origin – he is believed to have been either French, English or Belgian – the author fused key factual and mythical elements of the time, such as the legend of Prester John, making the authenticity of his account questionable.

From Vasco da Gama’s maiden voyage to 1664: numerous accounts

The crews aboard the European ships that began setting sail for the Indian Ocean in the 16^th century were cosmopolitans. The dawn of transoceanic expeditions sparked a boom in the printing of travelogues from journeys to the Indies – both West and East –, as well as in the compilation of extracts of translated works, the most renowned compiler being the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio.

The early vessels that departed France in the first half of the 16^th century were fitted out by Norman ship-owners. And so it was that the 1529 naval expedition to Sumatra by brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier was conducted with the support of Dieppe ship-owner Jean Ango. After nearing the coasts of the Maldive Islands, the expedition reached the shores of the Indonesian Archipelago, before returning to Normandy the following spring. Marseille-born explorer Vincent le Blanc is said to have sailed India’s coasts between 1570 and 1575. In 1601, apothecary François Martin and Pyrard de Laval travelled on the Corbin and the Croissant, two ships owned by the Compagnie des Marchands of Saint-Malo, Laval and Vitré, bound for the Indian Ocean. In Goa, Martin met another traveller by the name of Jean Mocquet, while de Laval’s fascinating account was recorded by royal geographer Pierre Bergeron. Pierre-Olivier Malherbe also hailed from Vitré, and, as a result of his cross-continental expedition from east to west, is considered by some to be the first globetrotter in history. Having landed in Goa, he became a friend of the court of Emperor Akbar, and is believed to have taken part in an expedition to the sources of the Ganges and travelled to Tibet. It was also in the early 17^th century that cartographer Pierre Berthelot de Honfleur produced some of the most accurate maps of his time while working for the Estado da India, the Portuguese East India Company.

The birth of a literary genre?

In 1665, Jean de Thévenot, a famous French traveller in India who notably visited the Ellora cave temples, mentioned ‘the amount of wonderful printed travel accounts that have been published over the last twenty years.’ It was an observation that was confirmed at the start of the following century by Jean Chardin, who documented his travels through Persia and India. Even before Colbert established the French East India Company in 1664, travelogues from India had already begun to spark curiosity and imaginative ideas, the most famous example of this being Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and his six voyages, which François Bernier, a student of Gassendi,  turned into a literary and philosophical project. These two accounts would go on to become references in the history textbooks of independent India.

The French Crown joined the adventure that was maritime trade with the Indian Ocean through the Compagnie des Indes Orientales (French East India Company) led by François Caron. It also continued exploring existing routes – including overland – through an expedition documented by François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz. The account served as both a summary of past relations and an introduction to upcoming journeys. Meanwhile, abbot Barthélémy Carré, ‘the king’s messenger’, had the privilege of witnessing the early days of the French East India Company. The specifics of the trading were documented by Georges Roques, a company agent posted to Surat from 1676 to 1691, in his manuscript entitled La Manière de Négocier dans les Indes orientales... (The Method of Trading in the East Indies…). Italian adventurer Niccolò Manucci, who arrived nine years prior to this manuscript and stayed for more than half a century, is another privileged witness of these times. Through the centuries, his Histoire de l’Inde de Tamerlank jusqu’à Orangzeb (History of India from Tamerlane to Aurangzeb), written in French, has been brought to life with magnificent miniatures by Indian artists.

From Malherbe to Manucci, these travellers invented and reinvented their professions and identities to suit their journey and the opportunities that arose, improvising as merchants, advisors or doctors. Their accounts bear influences of the Mughal dynasty, and the Europeans’ maritime routes built on from those of the Indian Ocean merchants already frequenting these ports. Surat was the Mughal Empire’s largest port in India. Others included Chaul, Dabul, Goa, which became the capital of the Portuguese East India Company, the ports of the Malabar Coast (namely Calicut and Cochin), those along the Coromandel and Masulipatnam coasts, which provided access to the rich Golconde, and those of northern Orissa and Bengal. The maps and accounts tracing these maritime routes are heavily centred on islands, such as Ceylon, and other archipelagos, such as the Maldives, the Laccadive Islands and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the latter indeed constituting points of reference essential to navigation. In the 17^th century, maps also featured the overland routes linking the ports of Surat and Masulipatnam with Golconde, as well as the river routes along the Ganges and its tributaries.

17-18^th centuries: Explorations, and knowledge transfers

Direct contact increased with the successive French East India Companies (1664-1793). Ships were now setting sail from France, particularly the port of Lorient, a royal port built to serve the Company’s needs. Observations of the local inhabitants, their techniques, their rituals and other aspects of the Indian Subcontinent intensified over the course of what was a period involving a significant transfer of technology from Asia to Europe. Le Jardin de Lorixa (The Garden of Orixa) is one of the finest contributions to have emerged during this time. Unknown until its recent discovery, the herbal is a collection of more than 720 plants inventoried by Nicolas Lempereur, a surgeon of the East India Company based in Balasore, then in Chandernagor, and depicted in paintings by Indian artists between the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries.

The traveller accounts inspired not only the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but also artists – in literature, painting and music. The Queen of Golconda, an opera acclaimed by the court of King Louis is still relatively well known to this day.

The travellers who penned published or unpublished accounts during these years of frequent, direct trading and exchange had varying professions: They were soldiers (La Flotte, Maissin, Louis de Féderbe de Modave, Maistre de la Tour, Charles Joseph Patissier de Bussy, Bailli de Suffren, Étienne de Jouy), salesmen (Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, Jean Law de Lauriston), missionaries (Joseph Tiefenthaler, Jean Calmette, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, Francis Xavier Wendel, Jean-Antoine Dubois, Jean-Charles Perrin, Paulinus of St. Bartholomew), sailors (Foucher d’Obsonville, Louis de Grandpré), intendants (Pierre Poivre), legal officers (Bailli de Suffren, Collin de Bar), doctors (Charles Dellon, Brunet), naturalists (Pierre Sonnerat), architects (Legoux de Flaix), astronomers (Alexis-Marie de Rochon, Le Gentil), and secret agents (Pallebot de Saint-Lubin, Dehaies de Montigny, Stanislas Lefebvre, Guy de Courson). The second half of the 18^th century saw intensified conflict between Bengal and the Deccan.

Second half of the 18^th century: Serving Indian princes

This conflict between the European East India Companies and between Indian sovereigns prompted a gradual intensification in British control following the annexation of the Bengal Subah that resulted from the British victory in Plassey in 1757, France’s loss of Chandernagor and the Dutch’s loss of Chinsura. The French Empire in India, for a time under the governance of Dupleix, fell apart, giving the Indian sovereigns access to French military labour ready to serve them.

These French military officers sometimes played the role of merchant military, such as in the case of the incredible travels of Jean-Baptiste Chevalier in Bengal and Assam, who left notes in the hope of toppling British power. Many of these notes provided valuable evidence of the rivalries existing between the princes they were serving or against whom they were fighting, and of the upheaval swiftly being caused by the ever-progressing British rule.

Several French officers, such as René Madec, Antoine de Polier, Pierre Cuillier a.k.a. Perron, de Boigne, Jean-Baptiste Gentil and Joachim Raymond joined the military and administrative organisation run by the sovereigns of the Subcontinent and even the East India Company, as was the case for Claude Martin, a businessman, collector and patron for the sovereigns of Awadh. Those who rose highest in the ranks became part of court life, upholding their patronage traditions and commissioning manuscripts and miniatures, several of which would survive and go on to enrich the collections at European libraries, notably those of the Bibliothèque Royale. And so it is that the bequests of Boigne, Polier and, in particular, Gentil’s exquisite collection, today serve as priceless resources from a rarely studied period.

Inspired by his stint in India between 1755 and 1762, Abraham Anquetil-Duperron painted an uncompromising picture of the British rule and laid the foundations for Indology in France. His initiative to translate Zoroastrian texts would serve as the basis for a long and close relationship between the Parsi community and France.

19^th century: Ethnography and tourism

By the early 19^th century, Victor Jacquemont and Alfred Duvaucel were among the final orientalists to still be on the ground in India. The two naturalists died early deaths there, leaving behind letters that have gone down in history.

Traveller accounts and iconographic representations began to adopt a more ethnographic flavour. Even before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, travelling to India had become a form of ‘tourism’, such as with Pierre-César Briand’s Les jeunes voyageurs en Asie, ou Description raisonnée des divers pays compris dans cette belle partie du monde (Young Travellers in Asia, or a Reasoned Description of the Various Countries in This Beautiful Part of the World) in 1829. This was also a time that saw travellers dedicate entire works to navigation, such as the Journal de la navigation autour du globe de la frégate "la Thétis" et de la corvette "l'Espérance" pendant les années 1824, 1825 et 1826 (Journal of Sailing Around the Globe of the Frigate Thetis and the Esperance Corvette During the Years 1824, 1825 and 1826)  by Hyacinthe de Bougainville, son of the famous explorer, and, in particular Essai sur la construction navale des peuples extra-européens, ou Collection des navires et pirogues construits par les habitants de l'Asie… (Essay on Non-European Naval Architecture, or Collection of Ships and Pirogues Built by the Inhabitants of Asia…), published in 1841 by Admiral Pâris, which remains a reference text on this subject to this day.

With the industrialisation of prints, the Le Tour du Monde journal began publishing stories whose images made just as much of an impression on readers as their text did. Such was the case for Voyage dans les Provinces méridionales de l’Inde, 1862-1864 by Alfred Grandidier (1869) and, especially, L’Inde des Rajahs by Louis Rousselet, published between 1870 and 1874. With 317 illustrations – many based on photographs – of Rousselet’s train journey to India’s royal states in the late 1860s, this account would eventually be made into a book, and the story would inspire a certain Jules Verne.

The opening of the Suez Canal made for faster voyages. An 1883 edition of Le Tour du Monde featured "Voyage d’une Parisienne dans l’Himalaya occidental (Koulou, Cachemire, Baltistan, Dras)" ("Voyage of a Parisian woman in the Western Himalayas [Koulou, Kashmir, Baltistan, Dras]") by Ujfalvy-Bourdon and, in 1888, "Huit jours aux Indes" ("Eight Days in the Indies") by collector Émile Guimet. Whether for culture, the mountains or, from the late 19^th century onwards, even driven by mysticism or politics, India’s tourism era had certainly begun.

Published in november 2024