How the vision of the utopian societies of the New World developed

It was at the end of the seventeenth century that Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan wrote his famous short books on the nation of the Hurons of Canada based on his stay with them from 1683 to 1694.

The Hurons, who had already had contact with Europeans, criticized in particular the European obsession with the money that led European women to sell their bodies to lustful men, and men to sell their lives to the armies of ambitious men who they used them to enslave even more people.

In contrast, Hurons lived a life of freedom and equality. According to the Hurons, the Europeans lost their freedom in their incessant use of the pronouns of you and me. One of the Hurons explained to Lahontan. "We are born free and united brothers, each one as lord as the other, while you are all slaves of one man, I am the master of my body, I dispose of myself, I do as I want, I am the first and the last of my Nation ... subject only to the Great Spirit ".

The Hurons had no social classes, no government different from their kinship system and no private property. To this political situation, and reviving an old Greek root, Lahontan called it "anarchy". The books of Lahontan had immediate fame throughout Europe provoking the inspiration of Delisle de la Drevetiere who wrote the play "Arlequin Sauvage" which was represented in 1721 in Paris. The work ends with a young Parisian named Violette who falls in love with an American Indian and escapes with him to live in the freedom of America beyond law and money.

In the following decades there were dozens of works inspired by the "Arlequin Sauvage": farces, burlesque works and operas that were about the wonderful freedom of the Indians of America (for example, the "Indes Galantes", "Le Nouveau Monde") .

The influence of Rousseau

"Arlequin Sauvage" had a lot of influence on Jean Jacques Rousseau who wrote an operetta about the discovery of the "New World" where Columbus sang to the Indians, while brandishing the sword: "Lose your freedom!". This contrast between the freedom of the Indians and the virtual enslavement of the Europeans led Rousseau to write his famous "Discourses".

The first of them was the "Discourse on Sciences and Arts" in 1750. In this radical work Rousseau states:

"The sciences and the arts ... are like ... garlands of flowers around the chains of irons that bind them (to the people), creating the feeling of the original freedom for which they seem to have been born, making them love their slavery and transforming them into what is called civilized people. " The following year in his "Observations" he stated: "The primary source of evil is inequality; inequality has made possible the accumulation of wealth. The words rich and poor are only relative terms; Wherever men are equal, there can be neither rich nor poor. Wealth leads inevitably to lust and leisure; lust allows the cultivation of the arts and leisure the cultivation of science. "

Some years later in his "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men" Rousseau pointed out the negative role that iron and wheat had in the emergence of civilization and private property: "It is iron and wheat that has civilized men and ruined the human race .... The cultivation of the earth necessarily followed its division. When the inheritances increased in number to the point of covering the whole earth and touching each other ... The nascent society gave rise to the most terrible state of war. " Later Rousseau wrote an "education treatise" called "Emile: ou de l'Education" and finally his famous work "Del Contrato Social". In 1780 Rousseau translated the "Utopia" of Thomas More showing how closely the approaches of the "enlightened" European utopians of the eighteenth century were united with the utopian precursors of the sixteenth century.

Also in the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu's production included the book "The Spirit of Laws" (1748), where he emphasized the concept of freedom and equality among the Indians. As they had no possessions there was no inequality, no cause for theft, or abuse of others for money reasons.

  

Several models

In an analogous way, other French authors were inspired by the Polynesian models of the South Seas. In particular, Denis Diderot, editor and principal author of the "Encyclopedia". Among the many works, many of which published after his death, is the "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage" of 1772, published in 1796, after his death, includes a dialogue between a Tahitian and a chaplain where the incoherence of European approaches to morality and good manners. Diderot's approach is comparative between two visions of love relationships and sex and in it, it clearly takes sides with the Tahitian way of life.

Later, Voltaire, in his book "Candide" of 1759, told of a journey from the Guarani land to the Guianas through Brazil, noting all the virtues of the natural societies he was going through.

Another important utopian author of the late eighteenth century was Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. In his work "The Daedalus" Restif also used as an excuse an imaginary trip to show an egalitarian society that he located in America, which he called "Megapatagonia". In it, the author proposed a model of country where work was shared equally among its inhabitants. In another of his works, "L'Andrographe", Restif presented a liberal model on marriage in which it is shown as a rationally and carefully planned institution. Restif's works were very numerous and successful, and to a large extent they represented the prevailing feeling at the time, as a culmination of the long process that More, Lahonte and Rousseau had unleashed in earlier times.

From "Amerrique, Orphans of the Paradise", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones