Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer

focusing on information about the land, geography, and agricultural resources. The Spanish accounts were written for administrators and were narrowly focused on technical issues of management and resources.

      The French relations succeeded in reaching a wide audience. They took France’s reading public by storm, becoming more popular than novels, according to Jean Chapelain, a member of the French Academy, who had observed that travel accounts held the French imagination captive and were all the rage. In 1663, he noted: “Our nation has changed its reading tastes and instead of novels which have fallen out of favor with La Calprenède, travel narratives have become so prized that they are now very popular at court and in the city.”⁸ The relations stirred up such great interest that some were occasionally excerpted in the newspaper Mercure François. Others were compiled into anthologies. For example, in 1674, voyager Henri Justel compiled a Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en Amérique qui n’ont point este encore publiez. He prefaced this anthology with the statement that “the current taste for Relations and Voyages has become so widespread” that some information about Africa and America is “shared by almost all Europeans in even the smallest detail.”⁹ In short, these popular texts stimulated the reading public’s awareness of France’s colonial explorations and encounters.

      The relations were so popular in France that they nourished other genres of writing. If the relation cultivated novelistic features of plot, character development, and dialogue, the French novel in turn borrowed many features from the relation. A good case could made for seeing the novel as emerging, in part, from the relation. Many novels framed their narratives as relations, as did Denis Vairasse’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1672), which began with the narrator’s observation: “I took an incredible pleasure in reading the books about Travel, the relations about foreign countries and all that has been said about the new discoveries.”¹⁰ The narrator then described how, contrary to his parents’ wishes, he traveled to the New World. On his voyage back, he met a severely wounded Captain Siden who had lived there for fifteen years. The Captain recounted the tales of his adventures in the form of a relation, which constitutes the novel’s story.

      If some novels imitated the relations, Descartes’ Discours de la méthode reads like a travel narrative.¹¹ Descartes created the persona of a wandering explorer of truth who learns more from travel than from books written by “a man of letters in his private study, concerned with speculations that have no impact on the real world.” Rather than accept theoretical truths, Descartes’ narrator prefers “to look at no science other than the one that can be found in the great book of the world.”¹² In the text, Descartes’ thought process is motivated by the diversity of customs found in other nations, which seems inspired by the relations as a genre.

      The relations influenced many other different forms of writing. For example, in 1609, a French magistrate, Pierre de Lancre, had presided over the most important witchcraft trial of the century in the Labourd region. Afterward, he wrote a text, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, to understand why this French region near Spain supposedly had more witches than any other part of the country. He framed this text as a relation, as if he were traveling to a foreign land and describing its manners, traditions, beliefs, and daily life in a way that corresponded to the relations of foreign lands and peoples.¹³ The relations also helped shape another form of writing—the dictionary. They served as one of Furetière’s major sources, enabling him to name and conjure up in considerable detail the world of the other in his Dictionnaire universel.¹⁴

      It seems likely that the relations de voyage inspired the rise of a very different kind of writing, one that featured the fictional foreigner. Sylvie Romanowski’s Through Strangers’ Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France analyzes this genre, exploring texts about foreigners from Persia, Peru, Africa, or the New World who come to France to observe and criticize its customs.¹⁵ This genre flourished in the eighteenth century. For the most part, the fictional foreigners were used to articulate and uphold the idea that French culture was universally valid, thereby supporting the nation’s colonial endeavors.

      The Relations de Voyage and the Catholic Reformation