François Bernier

For the politician in Lower Canada, see François Bernier (politician).

François Bernier
240px 1724 edition of Voyages dans les États du Grand Mogol

Engraving from Voyage de François Bernier, Paul Maret, 1710.

François Bernier (25 September 1620 – 22 September 1688) was a a French traveler, physician and epicurean philosopher.

Biography

Early life

He was born at Joué-Etiau in Anjou. Having lost his father at the age of four, who held farm lands from the chapter of Saint-Maurice d'Angers, François Bernier was entrusted, as well as his two sisters, Antoinette and Jeanne, to the guardianship of their paternal uncle François Bernier, parish priest of Chanzeaux, who had held him at the baptismal font. A little later, he owed it to the protection of two magistrates, Bochard de Champigny, intendant of Provence in 1637, and of an ally of the latter, François Luillier, Master of Requests and adviser to the Parliament of Metz, to be taken out of his native province in order to complete his studies.

It was through his two benefactors that Bernier was put in contact with the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, provost at Digne Cathedral, who had fought against the doctrine of Aristotle and was going to renew that of Epicurus. This relationship had a considerable influence on his whole life. In 1642, Gassendi, newly arrived in Paris, was teaching philosophy to Chapelle, the natural son of François Luillier, with whom he lived; if we are to believe what Jean-Léonor Le Gallois de Grimarest wrote in 1705 in his Vie de M. de Molière, he admitted several of the young man's friends, Molière, Hesnault, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bernier, to share his lessons. In 1645, the latter also followed the public astronomy course of his master, who had been appointed professor at the Collège Royal, and put himself in a position to instruct others in his turn. He was even for some time preceptor and repetiteur of philosophy.

First travels

Bernier's uncle intended him for the church and made him foresee that he would transmit his benefit to him. But the incumbent had to keep his place for a long time and his vocation was different. Circumstances, which had already prepared him to be a philosopher, also made him a traveler. From 1647 to 1650, he preluded, by a long journey through Europe, the enterprise which was later to illustrate his name. He accompanied to Danzig and Poland one of his friends, perhaps his former pupil, François Boysson, seigneur de Merveilles, charged by the government with a diplomatic mission. The return journey was made, with numerous breaks, through southern Germany and Italy. The travelers visited particularly Rome and Venice.

Bernier brought back from his long absence a strong desire to see the world and aspired from then on to a more distant expedition, but various causes, and especially the state of health of Gassendi, whom he had found sick in Provence, delayed the execution of his plan for several years. In the meantime, Bernier received his doctorate from the University of Montpellier (August 26, 1652), and from 1651 to 1654, he waged a feud against a royal professor, mathematician and astrologer, Jean-Baptiste Morin. Not content with criticizing the works that Gassendi, his colleague, had written in defense of Epicurus, Morin had predicted the death of the author for a certain period, at the risk of provoking it. In a Latin dissertation which dealt with the substance of the dispute, Bernier ridiculed Morin, as Gilles Ménage had done with Montmaur. There was reply after reply, sharp and insulting on both sides. But Morin, who was Mazarin's protégé and had credit in the court of Rome, having, in the end, denounced his adversary to the two powers and demanded both a Lettre de cachet and excommunication against him. Bernier yielded to the desire of the peaceful Gassendi by ceasing the dispute.

In 1653, Bernier, who had brought his master back to Paris, lavished the latter with the most assiduous care until his death and, says a biographer, he closed his eyes to him like a son to his father.

Oriental travels

After Gassendi's death, Bernier made his preparations for departure, and in the first months of 1656, he embarked for the Orient. He first visited Palestine and stayed more than a year in Egypt, where he was sick with the plague. He proposed to penetrate by Ethiopia, that is to say by Abyssinia, in the interior of Africa. The information that he had during his descent of the Red Sea having made him give up this plan, he went to land at Surat, on the coast of India and the borders of the Mughal Empire.

The sons of the emperor Shah Jahan were then fighting for the exercise of sovereignty in the name of their father, who was weakened by his old age. Having witnessed part of the struggle and seen the defeat of the eldest of the four brothers, Dara Shikoh, and the triumph of the third, Aurangzeb, Bernier devoted the first part of his Memoirs to the account of this "bloody tragedy".

One of the things the newly arriving Bernier noticed in Aurangzeb's capital was the embroidered dressing of the Mughal Emperor's subjects he writes in his Travels in the Moghal Empire: "Large halls are seen in many places, called Karkanahs, or workshops for the artisans. In one hall, embroiderers are busily employed, superintended by a master." He continued, "Manufactures of silk, fine brocade, and other fine muslins, of which are made turbans, girdles of gold flowers, and drawers worn by Mughal females, so delicately fine as to wear out in one night" were one of the most expensive forms of clothing ins the world, "or even more when embroidered with fine needlework."

Determined to remain in the country for a few years, Bernier became attached as a physician to the emperor's court. The particular friendship he contracted with agah Danechmend-Khan, his favorite, made him admitted, as part of his retinue, to visit the kingdom of Kashmir where Aurangzeb went in 1664-65, for the first time after his coronation. He described his stay in this country, a sort of terrestrial paradise long forbidden to Europeans by its rulers and where one could only arrive after enormous fatigue, caused by excessive heat, endangering the days of the most determined traveler. Bernier's constitution having withstood the test of the climate, he completed his journey through India and, after having spent eight years there, he returned via Persia and Turkey.

Return to France

Arriving in Marseille at the end of the summer of 1669, Bernier had remained twelve years away from his homeland, which he had left almost immediately after the troubles of the Fronde, and had been supported in his enterprise by the largesse of François Boysson, as well as by the encouragement of the poet Chapelain, who protected in him the beloved disciple of his friend Gassendi.

Under the auspices of Louis XIV and his minister, he published his Memoirs, in which he reviewed the contemporary history of India, the different parts of its administration, its mores, its religion, its sciences and its philosophy, at the same time as he described the main cities and provinces of the country. This publication, which filled the two years following his return, drew public attention to him and earned him the nickname of "Bernier-Mogol", by which Voltaire would still refer to him sixty years later. A translation of his work made him known almost immediately in England; it is from England that John Dryden must have borrowed the subject of his tragedy Aureng-zebe.

Later life

From 1672 on, however, Bernier seemed to have exhausted his travel portfolio and devoted himself almost exclusively to literature, science and philosophy. Shortly after his return, he saw the disappearance of the old friends of Gassendi who had first taken an interest in his adventures, La Mothe Le Vayer, Cureau de la Chambre, Guy Patin, and Chapelain himself. Under the auspices of Chapelle, his remaining youthful friend and correspondent during his long absence, Bernier formed new friendships with Nicolas Boileau, Jean Racine and Jean de La Fontaine, at the same time that he renewed his old liaison with Molière. It is believed that he provided La Fontaine with the technical details of his Poème sur le Quinquina. He certainly suggested to the latter the subject of several fables. As for Racine and Boileau, he participated with them in the drafting of the Arrêt burlesque which had, for a moment, the signature of the president Lamoignon, and he wrote alone the Requête which is supposed to be used as a basis for the Arrêt.

Of a cheerful and amiable character, Bernier frequented the literary salons of the time, like those of Marguerite de La Sablière or Ninon de Lenclos. He attended the classes of the chemist Lémery, which were also attended by Renault, Régis, Tournefort and several ladies. He took part in the weekly meetings held by doctor Jean-Baptiste Denys and Gilles Ménage. As the literary and scholarly journals multiplied, he would collaborate with them and deal with the issues of the day.

Bernier's main occupation in 1674 and the following years was the publication of an Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1678), whose complete works he had, because of his absence, allowed others to publish. A free translation of the Syntagma totius philosophia (1678) paid his debt and gave him the opportunity to assert his own doctrine, by exposing soon after, in 1682, his Doutes sur quelques chapitres de l'Abrégé in a separate work dedicated to Marguerite de La Sablière. The latter, who was La Fontaine's patron for twenty years, had also received Bernier, who was accustomed to living in other people's homes, in her opulent hotel. In return, he introduced her to the system of Gassendi, to the opinions of Descartes, and kept her informed of the movement of science through his talks and letters.

In 1685, de la Sablière converted to Catholicism and devoted herself to volunteer work for the Hospital for Incurables to atone for her worldly sins, keeping only La Fontaine in her house. Bernier continued to correspond with her, and she remained the soul of his writings until the end of her life. He addressed to her annually, under the title of Étrennes, various pieces that he gave then to the papers.

In the midst of his numerous works and despite the seductions of Parisian life, Bernier had not lost his taste for travel. He usually spent several months of the year in Languedoc and Provence, where he had kept friends, and he made trips to the neighboring provinces. Thus he was one of the first to describe the Canal du Midi.

In 1685, he was lured to England by Saint-Evremond, whom he had known in France before his exile. The small court held in London by Hortense de Mazarin kept him for some time. He returned via Holland, where one of his works was printed, and met Pierre Bayle, who remembered him several times in his publications. He thought of finishing his days in his native province, where he had nephews, born of his sister Antoinette (René and Philippe), but he died, without having had the time, after a few days of illness.

There is no engraved portrait of François Bernier but, after his trip to England, Saint-Evremond, reporting on this visit to Ninon de Lenclos, described him as a "pretty philosopher": "Pretty philosopher is hardly said, but his figure, his size, his manner, his conversation, made him worthy of this epithet". He had been appointed member of the Academy of Belles-lettres of Angers since its foundation.

In 1869, the city of Angers named one of the new streets in the city after him. His hometown, now called Valanjou, did the same.

Writings

The diversity of François Bernier's occupations and the number of his works make it difficult to summarize the work of this curious and observant spirit. As a traveler, he was the first to describe a country hitherto unknown to Europeans, fulfilling more or less for India the whole program that the science of his time traced out for him by the pen of the academician Chapelain, and his Memoirs have generally been put above those of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean de Thévenot, and even those of Jean Chardin. As a literary scholar, he was involved in the movement of the Grand Siècle, of which he knew and enjoyed the most famous writers, who accepted his collaboration.

As a philosopher, he supported the titles of Gassendism and, without joining the enemies of the persecuted Cartesians, he somewhat counterbalanced the credit of their doctrine, being, more or less like them, a spiritualist in his Letter to Chapelle, which made him qualified as a "Cartesian without knowing it". Bernier nevertheless indicated very clearly the points on which he was separated from Cartesianism: he does not admit with Descartes that we have a clearer idea of the soul than of the body; he remains faithful to the system of the atoms and of the vacuum which seems to him to be the only one suitable to explain the movement; he pronounces himself against the confusion of the freedom with the will, he is against the animal-machine, against the proof of the existence of God by his idea, against the occasional causes. His doubts about the doctrine of Gassendi are not more from an adversary who has moved to another camp, than they are from a skeptic. They concern the most difficult questions of metaphysics, space and place, eternity and time, the nature and cause of motion. Bernier's explanations are less reminiscent of Descartes than of Leibniz.

In India, Bernier came under the protection of Daneshmand Khan (Mullah Shafi'a'i, a native of Yazd), an important official at the court of Aurangzeb. Mullah Shafi'a'i was secretary of state for foreign affairs, grand master of the horse, later treasurer (Mir Bakshi) and governor of Delhi (died 1670). Bernier and Daneshmand seem to have been on terms of mutual esteem, and Bernier always refers to him as "my Agha".

Two excerpts from "Travels in the Mughal Empire" illustrate the interchange that followed. The importance of the detail could only fully be appreciated in the last decades of the 20th century, following the contributions by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr to the history of Islamic philosophy.

(Commenting on the yogi manner of meditation): "However I know that this ravishment and the way to enter it are the great mystery of the cabal of the Yogis, as it is of the Sufis. I say mystery because they keep it hidden amongst them and if it were not for my Pandit; and that Danishmand Khan knew the mysteries of the cabal of the Sufis, I would not know as much as I did."

"(...)do not be surprised if without knowledge of Sanskrit I am going to tell you many things taken from books in that language; you will know that my Agha Danismand Khan paid for the presence of one of the most famous pandits in India, who before had been pensioned by Dara Shikoh, the oldest son of Shah Jahan, and that this pandit, apart from attracting the most learned scientists to our circle, was at my side for over three years. When I became weary of explaining to my Agha the latest discoveries of William Harvey and Pequet in anatomy, and to reason with him on the philosophy of Gassendi and Descartes, which I translated into Persian (because that is what I did during five or six years) it was up to our pandit to argue."

A candidate for becoming Bernier's "pandit" probably would have come from the circle around Hindu scholars such as Jagannatha Panditaraja, who still was at work under Shah Jahan, or Kavindracharya, who taught Dara Sikhoh Sanskrit. Gode's argument that this pandit was none other than Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī himself has won general acceptance. His intellectual partner could be someone like Zu'lfaqar Ardistani (died 1670), author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib, an overview of religious diversity (Jewish, Christian Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim ...). He was educated perhaps by Mir Abul-Qasim Astrabadi Findiriski a link between the religious tolerance aspect of the great project of Persian translations, initiated by Akbar and continued by his great-grandson Dara Shikoh, and the School of Isfahan near the end of the Safavid reign; or perhaps he was educated by Hakim Kamran Shirazi, to whom Mir Findiriski referred as "elder brother", who studied Christian theology and the Gospel under Portuguese priests, traveled to India to study Sanskrit Shastra, lived with the yogi Chatrupa at Benares, and died, chanting the liberation of the philosophers, at the age of 100. Those were scholars who had a knowledge of Greek peripatetic philosophers (mashsha'un, falasifa—in the Arabic translations), as well as respect for Ibn Sina and Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi Maqtul (Hikmat al Ishraq).

France Battacharya notes that she removed, in her critical edition based on the 1724 edition, the chapter "Lettre à Chapelle sur les atomes"—as being not so relevant to the context.

In 1684 Bernier published a brief essay, the first theoretical attempt to divide humanity into races, distinguishing individuals, and particularly women, by skin color and a few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des sçavans, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled "Nouvelle Division de la Terre par les différentes Espèces ou races d'homme qui l'habitent, envoyé par un fameux Voyageur à M. l'abbé de la *** à peu en termes" ("New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races of Man that Inhabit It)." He considers skin color as an immutable physical attribute, unlike Boulainvilliers who equates races with families or Buffon, who attributes them to climate. In the essay he distinguished four different races: 1) The first race included populations from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, south-east Asia, and the Americas. 2) The second race consisted of the sub-Saharan Africans, 3) the third race consisted of the east- and northeast Asians, and 4) the fourth race were Sámi people. The emphasis on different kinds of female beauty can be explained because the essay was the product of French Salon culture. Bernier emphasized that his novel classification was based on his personal experience as a traveler in different parts of the world. Bernier offered a distinction between essential genetic differences and accidental ones that depended on environmental factors. He also suggested that the latter criterion might be relevant to distinguish sub-types.

His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted the role of climate and diet in explaining degrees of human diversity. Bernier had been the first to extend the concept of "species of man" to classify racially the entirety of humanity, but he did not established a cultural hierarchy between the races. On the other hand, he clearly placed white Europeans as the norm from which other races deviated. The qualities which he attributed to each race were not strictly Eurocentric, because he thought that peoples of temperate Europe, the Americas and India, culturally very different, belonged to roughly the same racial group, and he explained the differences between the civilizations of India (his main area of expertise) and Europe through climate and institutional history. By contrast he emphasized the biological difference between Europeans and Africans, and made very negative comments towards the Sami (Lapps) of the coldest climates of Northern Europe and about Africans living at the Cape of Good Hope. He wrote for example "The 'Lappons' compose the 4th race. They are a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don't know how to describe, except that it's long, truly awful and seems reminiscent of a bear's face. I've only ever seen them twice in Danzig, but according to the portraits I've seen and from what I've heard from a number of people they're ugly animals". The significance of Bernier for the emergence of what Joan-Pau Rubiés call the "modern racial discourse" has been debated, with Siep Stuurman calling it the beginning of modern racial thought, while Joan-Pau Rubiés think it is less significant if Bernier's entire view of humanity is taken into account.

By virtue of being the first to propose a system of racial classification that extended to all of humanity, Bernier’s racial categories contributed to the genesis of scientific racism. Inherently, his classifications were based on physical and biological differences in human appearance, and thus sought to suggest a scientific basis for human racial variation. As previously mentioned, Bernier makes a distinction between physical variation due to environmental factors and racial factors. For instance, he classifies Indians that he is exposed to during his stint in the Mughal courts as part of the white race. He asserts that Indians, like Egyptians, have a skin color that is “accidental, resulting from their exposure to the sun”. However, when it comes to categorizing Africans, he notes that “Blackness is an essential feature of theirs”. Bernier evidences the fact that their color is not due to environmental factors by asserting that they will be Black even when living in colder climes. Bernier’s conception of biological or racial difference and variation due to climatic features is blurry, but contributed to the eventual development of theories of scientific racism. At the time that he published his work, it did not cause a splash: he founded no school of thought at the time. Scientific thinking, upon the time he wrote the text, had shifted from systems where evidence was based on analogies, like Bernier had used, to a system supported by fixed laws of nature. Thus, the context of scientific discourse at the time meant Bernier did not receive huge attention for his classification in the second half of the 17th century, and "he remained a man of the salons".

Works

• Anatomia ridiculi Muris, hoc est dissertatiunculæ J.-B. Morini astrologi adversus expositam a P. Gassendo philosophiam. Itemque obiter prophetiæ falsæ a Morino ter evulgatæ de morte ejusdem Gassendi; per Franciscum Bernerium Andegavum (1651)
• Favilla ridiculi Muris, hoc est dissertatiunculæ ridicule defensæ a Joan. Bapt. Morino astrologo aduersus expositam a Petro Gassendo Epicuri philosophiam; per Franciscum Bernerium Andegavum, doctorem medicum Monspeliensem (1653)
• Mémoires du sieur Bernier sur l’empire du grand Mogol (1670-1671; 4 volumes)
• Voyage dans les États du Grand Mogol (1671; 1981)
• Requeste des maîtres ès-arts, professeurs et régents de l’Université de Paris, présentée à la Cour souveraine du Parnasse, ensemble l’Arrest intervenu sur ladite requeste contre tous ceux qui prétendent faire enseigner ou croire de nouvelles découvertes qui ne soient pas dans Aristote (The Arrêt burlesque is in all the complete editions of Boileau. The Requêste is joined to it in that of Lefèvre de Saint-Marc and it is given all alone in the Menagiana. The two pieces are reported in the Letters of Madame de Sévigné of September 6 and 20, 1671 and they were, it seems, published the same year in The Hague, Holland. The Dictionnaire des anonymes of Barbier describes moreover and there exists a booklet of 24 pages in-12 of this title, printed in 1702 at Libreville by Jacques Lefranc).
• Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (1678; 8 volumes; This edition is the first which is complete, but the author had already given separate parts of the work in Paris first, 1674 and 1675, in the format in-4°, and also in Lyon, 1676. In 1684, Bernier published again in Lyon an edition reworked and more extensive than that of 1678, in that it contains in addition all or part of the three opuscules which follow)
• Éclaircissement sur le livre de M. de La Ville (le Père Le Valois, jésuite) intitulé : Sentimens de M. Descartes touchant l’essence et les propriétés des corps, etc. (Bayle included this work in 1684 in his Recueil de quelques pièces concernant la philosophie de M. Descartes. He says in his preface that Bernier's book, printed in few copies, had appeared a few years earlier; it must have been in 1680 or 1681)
• Doutes de M. Bernier sur quelques-uns des principaux chapitres de son Abrégé de Gassendi (1682)
• Traité du libre et du volontaire (1685)
• Letter on Coffee, addressed to Phil.-Sylv. Dufour and published by this author in his Traités nouveaux et curieux du Café, du Thé et du Chocolate (1685; this piece was reprinted in 1864 by Dr. Mabille, as well as the important Letter to Chapelle, which, although its content is more philosophical than historical, is part of Bernier's Travels as having been sent from Shiraz in Persia)
• Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent, envoyée par un fameux voyageur à M. l’abbé de La *** (Journal des Savants, 1684; reprinted in the Mercure de France, 1722)
• Extrait de diverses pièces envoyées pour étrennes à Mme de La Sablière (Journal des Savants, 1688)
• Introduction à la lecture de Confucius
• Description du canal de jonction des deux mers
• Combat des vents
• Maximes touchant le mouvement
• Des Réfractions
• Épitaphe de Chapelle (died 1686)
• Observations médicales communiquées par un professeur de Montpellier
• Description du canal du Languedoc (Mercure galant, 1688; it gave rise to a controversy which ended with the death of Bernier)
• Mémoire sur le Quiétisme des Indes (Histoire des ouvrages des Savants de Basnage, 1688)

See also

• Pre-Adamites

References

• Frédéric Tinguely (dir.), Un libertin dans l'Inde moghole - Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669), Edition intégrale, Chandeigne, Paris, 2008. ISBN 978-2-915540-33-8.
• Francois Bernier, "Voyage dans les Etats du Grand Mogol", introduction de France Bhattacharya (Arthème Fayard ed. Paris, 1981).
• François Bernier, "A New Division of the Earth", in Journal des sçavans (April 24, 1684). Translated by T. Bendyphe in "Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London" Vol 1, 1863–64, pp 360–64.
• Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, "A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna 'Ashari Shi'is in India Vol II" (Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. ; Ma'rifat Publishing House : Canberra Australia, 1986).
• Tara Chand, "Indian Thought and the Sufis" (1961), in "The World of the Sufi, an anthology" (Octagon Press ed. London, 1979).
• Lens, "Les Correspondants de François Bernier pendant son voyage dans l'Inde -- Lettres inédits de Chapelain", in Memoires de la Société nationale d'agriculture, sciences et arts d'Angers (ancienne Académie d'Angers) Tome XV, 1872.
• Nicholas Dew. Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-19-923484-4. pp. 131–167.
• Jain, Sandhya, & Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books.

External links

• Works by François Bernier at Hathi Trust
• Works by François Bernier at Gallica
• Siep Stuurman, François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification, History Workshop Journal, Volume 2000 Issue 50, pp. 1–21.