This final chapter examines the role of India in the philosophical questions generated by increasing French contact with the wider world. Adopting a comparative approach, it considers overtly philosophical texts on India, produced by the luminaries of the French ‘high Enlightenment’ (Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Raynal), alongside those texts which sought scrupulously to define and categorize the subcontinent from a commercial or a political perspective. After the publication of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois in 1748, India, and more particularly Mogul despotism, became a recurring theme in philosophical debates. At the same time, thanks largely to the works of Voltaire, the figure of the Brahmin became a synecdoche for religious hypocrisy. As philosophical interest grew, and European trade with India increased, India evolved from a vague signifier of oriental despotism and religious superstition to a crucial theme in the ‘anti-colonialism’ that became widespread in the last decade of monarchical rule. Once Britain's administrative responsibility on the subcontinent had been established, the moral implications of rule by the East India Company became a sensitive political issue in Britain, culminating with the impeachment and trial of Hastings in 1788. In France, where events in London were closely followed, India came to be perceived as a locus of British despotism. As a corollary of this, throughout the 1790s and 1800s, in a range of political treatises and commercial mémoires, British India functioned as a foil for ‘French values’ (be they republican or otherwise) and hypothetical imperial identities.

Voltaire, Brahmins and Despots

During the last forty years of the eighteenth century, India attracted French scholarly attention as never before, with mémoires on ancient Indian history being presented to the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and a growing collection of genuine and forged Indian manuscripts being collated in the Bibliothèque royale. Alongside the interest in Indian texts was a concern with the role which India could play in providing answers to philosophical questions about European civilization. At the forefront of this speculation was Voltaire.