The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton

Author:Alain De Botton [Botton, Alain de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-83350-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

It was all undeniably peculiar. Montaigne did not find any of it abnormal.

He was in a minority. Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human face’ (‘ce sont des bêtes portant figure humaine’); the Calvinist minister Richer argued they had no moral sense (‘l’hébétude crasse de leur esprit ne distingue pas le bien du mal’); and the doctor Laurent Joubert, after examining five Brazilian women, asserted that they had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the human race.

Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. Montaigne read of the barbarism in Bartolomeo Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (printed in Seville in 1552, translated into French in 1580 by Jacques de Miggrode as Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées es Indes occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde). The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the Spanish, to find their guests turning on them when they were least prepared. Their primitive weapons were no match for Spanish cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night.

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