Universalism Calling: French Distortion and Invention of the Image of China, From Jesuits to Enlightenment Philosophes, circa 1560-1800

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Therefore, there were mainly three kinds of people who wrote about China in early modern France. There were Jesuits, who were the conservative intellectuals aiming to spread Christianity in China and to preserve Catholic power in France. There were political writers who were in favor of China, represented by Voltaire. And, of course, there were people like Montesquieu, who were intellectuals showing contempt for China. The identities of all three kinds of writers mingled with their distinctive judgments of China, complicating the second question I posed: What made them diverge on the idea of China? In order to solve this question, I studied the writings of the Jesuits, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and consulted with secondary sources on the topics. I will argue in three following chapters that the French writers who wrote about China in the early modern period, no matter if they were Jesuits or Enlightenment philosophes, or if they were praising or criticizing China, all fell into a recurring pattern: The conceptions of China in their writings were dynamically shaped by the universalistic beliefs they individually held and they all needed to process, to some extent, the image of China by distortion, invention, or selection, to match their original intellectual purpose in using China for a larger cultural purpose.

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