A Global Enlightenment by Alexander Statman;

Author:Alexander Statman; [Statman, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI000000 SCIENCE / General, SCI034000 SCIENCE / History, HIS008000 HISTORY / Asia / China, HIS010000 HISTORY / Europe / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

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The Invention of Eastern Wisdom

The End of Early Modern Chinese Studies

The Revolution brought Chinese studies in France to a generational pause. A few holdovers tried to keep the torch burning through tumultuous times. The last volume of the Mémoires concernant les Chinois came out in 1791, and new essays continued to appear in the publications of the Académie des inscriptions for a while after that. But by the end of the year 1800, the scholars who had been responsible for these projects, including Bréquigny, de Guignes, and Deshauterayes, were all dead.1 Their aristocrat patrons, meanwhile, had already decided that China was far from their most pressing concern. Bertin emigrated in the summer of 1791. He died the next year in Belgium, bringing an abrupt end to the “literary correspondence” between Paris and Beijing.2 The comte de Mellet fled around the same time. He proved to be an “old soldier” after all, rising to the rank of field marshal in the Army of Condé and fighting against the Revolution through to his seventies, despite a rifle shot to the leg and recurrent bouts of rheumatism.3 He died in exile in Konstanz in 1804.4

Amiot survived to hear about the chaos engulfing France, and it rapidly accelerated his own decline. The septuagenarian missionary knew that the country he had left some forty years earlier was changing beyond recognition. He lamented the loss of “these ancient mœurs, this piety, these virtues” of his youth and condemned the “frivolity, levity, inconsistency” that seemed to have replaced them.5 He spent his final days mostly alone and rarely left his quarters except to visit a park in what was then still the Beijing suburb of Haidian.6 He called the place a “pleasure palace”; in fact, it was a cemetery.7 Explaining himself to his brother in Toulon, he wrote, “I have no other company than that of the dead: you know that the dead are not importunate and, tranquil in their tombs, they only wait for us to go to them, without bothering to come to us.” Old age had tempered his vivacity, but not his acerbity; the comment was apparently intended as a rebuke to his brother, who, very much alive, had asked him for a loan.8

When Amiot’s death finally came, it was unexpected to no one. Writing to his sister in the spring of 1793, he predicted: “If I suffer even a slightly serious attack tomorrow, I sense that, my forces at the age of seventy-six being capable of no more than a certain resistance, I will certainly succumb. It will be as it pleases God.”9 The letter survives only because it arrived in Toulon too late for his sister to burn it along with the rest of her correspondence in fear of the advancing Republican troops who brutally occupied the city that winter.10 On the morning of October 8, Amiot woke up, recited his breviary, and wept—this, too, seems to have become a habit. He spent the day as usual, walking alone among the headstones of Jesuits past.

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