This study has aimed neither to overstate the commercial and political importance of India to French interests, nor to understate the impact on France's global position of the 1763 Treaty of Paris or the events of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Instead, by focusing on how the French conceived of India during the European encounter with the declining Mogul empire, it has revealed a significant counter-narrative to the grand récit of the British empire in India. Moreover, it has demonstrated that the colonial policy long associated with the ‘second’ French empire (that of the Third Republic), the so-called mission civilisatrice, had its antecedents in the French response to increasing control of the subcontinent by the British East India Company.

The strategies used to represent India in the diverse range of texts examined are both atemporal and historically contingent. Certain techniques are equally evident in British cultural production: feminization, mythologization and the employment of other markers of alterity to designate the inferiority of Indians and their mores. The historicizing and philosophizing strategies, however, are distinctively French. From 1744, the mémoires of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and Voltaire's investigations introduced the history of ancient India to the French reading public. After 1763, the history of India in the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, the French presence on the subcontinent, became a prominent subject matter in various genres, from drama (tragedies, melodramas and operas) to popular history writing. Indeed, after the publication of Roubaud's Le Politique Indien (1768), the construction of India in the French imagination frequently went beyond any simple dualistic opposition of India and France, revealing a compulsion to establish oppositional European identities. In literary genres, where the India represented was divorced from its geographical referent, as well as in travelogues, histories, philosophical meditations, economic treatises and reports sent back to France from the comptoirs, India was used as a means of counterpointing a hypothetical, benevolent French rule overseas with the despotism of the British East India Company and the oppression of Indians.