Utopian vision and cultural pluralism in early modern fiction: the case of Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé

Voyages et avantures (sic.) de Jacques Massé is a novel that marks an important transformation in the tradition of utopian fiction in eighteenth-century Europe. Having originated in the 16th century as a mode of fantastic narrative with a critical function, utopian fiction evolved in the 18th century into a narrative form exploring the possibilities of cultural hybridization. The novel depicts the travels of a French sailor Massé who stumbles upon an island country, which has developed independently while benefiting from ideas introduced by foreign visitors. The theological debates between Massé and the island residents echo Spinoza’s immanent philosophy, often compared by contemporary thinkers to materialist thought from Eastern cultures, and their discussions of political and legal institutions on the island draw on seventeenth-century European conceptions of Chinese and Indian societies. The novel attests to the confluence between Utopian ideals emerging in early modern Europe and knowledge traveling from the Orient. It illustrates the ways in which what has been referred to as “radical Enlightenment” was reinforced by the circulation of Eastern thought in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.