Engraving depicting the arrival of Bougainville in Tahiti in April 1768 • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, youngest son of a notary from Châtelet in Paris, was already 27 years old when he boarded a long-distance ship for the first time. Indeed, he is making his first crossing of the Atlantic on La Licorne , in 1756, to take up his post as aide-de-camp in the Canadian War. While not an experienced sailor, this brilliant mind is interested in everything from astronomy and navigational instruments to food and health issues. But his military career was cut short in 1761 when King Louis XV decided to abandon Canada to England. The Falklands Expedition What does it matter! Bougainville is a man of resources. With a privateer named Nicolas-Pierre Duclos-Guyot, he developed a plan to establish a colony of Acadians driven from Canada to the Falkland Islands, near the coast of South America. Minister Choiseul is enthusiastic, but the state coffers are empty. Bougainville therefore decides to invest his fortune in the construction of two ships from the Saint-Malo shipyards. The Sulky is a fast flute, but cannot carry much supply. It must therefore be followed by L’Étoile , a less elegant and much less maneuverable building. The Commander's ship will always be forced to wait for this floating store. The expedition left in 1763 to carry out a survey. However, neither the English nor the Spaniards wanted its success and, in 1764, Louis XV ceded the small archipelago to his cousin the King of Spain, a Bourbon like himself. As compensation, Bougainville receives a large sum from the Spanish crown, as well as a mission at the origin of his extraordinary adventures:to return to France after the Falklands session by the Pacific route, that is to say to be the first Frenchman to complete a world tour. A sign of the times, it was the first to take three scientists on board:astronomer Pierre-Antoine Féron, cartographer Charles Routier de Romainville and naturalist Philibert Commerson. Fruits and not shy women By leaving the Strait of Magellan and approaching the Pacific Ocean in January 1768, the explorer hopes to find the mysterious lands observed by the Portuguese Quirós in the 17 th century. He first seeks the large island interviewed by the English pirate Davis and which is probably Easter Island. However, turning south, it is actually heading towards the archipelago of Tahiti. The crew, welcomed by the population in April, believes they are arriving in a “new Cythera”:abundant fruit and not very shy women remind them of the Garden of Eden. But the Tahitians are asking for more and more gifts, and Bougainville understands that another ship has passed before them, giving large quantities of objects to the inhabitants. After nine days, the situation becomes tense and the ships leave. Also read:Easter Island, the land of stone giants They take on board a Tahitian who wants to know the country and the wives of these foreigners. Aoutourou will be the first Polynesian to arrive in Europe. More observant than the other crew members, he discovers that Commerson's valet is actually a woman, Jeanne Barret, the first to circumnavigate the world. After the first moment of surprise, the whole crew must recognize that Jeanne has behaved perfectly since the beginning of the trip. It is therefore accepted. Quickly, the heat becomes unbearable, the winds, insufficient, and venereal diseases are declared among the men. We cross islands where the population is very aggressive. After two months, the squadron reached the island of Borneo, belonging to the Dutch. The crew is hungry, thirsty, they are in rags. The Dutch secure their monopoly Bougainville had been instructed to collect during his trip spice plants that he was to leave on the Ile de France and the Ile Bourbon (current Mauritius and Reunion Islands) in order to make these highly sought-after products prosper there. . But the Dutch are on the watch:they prevent plant purchases, check shipments and, in places they cannot control, purely and simply burn the spices that grow there so as not to lose their monopoly. Bougainville therefore left empty-handed for the Ile de France, where he undertook the necessary repairs on his two ships in November 1768. It was at the same time that the writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre arrived in the Mascarenes. However, the captain has no time to waste. He identified the English ship which preceded him by eight months in Tahiti. The Swallow now only a few days ahead, and Bougainville embarks on a race to Europe to be the first to reveal the existence of the Tahitian paradise. The Sulky arrived on March 16, 1769 in Saint-Malo, theSwallow on March 20 in England, while L’Étoile will not reach Rochefort until April 24. Three days after his arrival, Bougainville caused a sensation at Versailles with Aoutourou. But times have changed:his protector, the Pompadour, is dead, replaced by the Du Barry, and some criticize the uprooting of the "noble savage". So much so that the captain decides to finance the return trip of his protege, who will die of smallpox on the way. A pointless world tour? If he publishes his Journey around the world in 1771, the hours of glory of Bougainville are behind him. He is accused of having made a useless world tour which brought nothing to France, not even the spices which could have restored the financial situation of the Crown. Married in 1781 at the age of 51, he will have four sons. He goes to war in America and miraculously goes through the Revolution, saved by the death of Robespierre. He joined the Bureau des longitudes, participated in the preparation of the Egyptian expedition of Bonaparte who, having become emperor, made him count of the Empire. In 1811, the mortal remains of Louis Antoine de Bougainville were deposited in the Panthéon, but his name remains above all attached today to a Brazilian plant to which naturalists have given the name of bougainvillea. Find out more • Bougainville, D. Le Brun, Tallandier, 2019.• Supplement to Bougainville's Journey, D. Diderot, Pocket, 2019. Bougainville Trip Supplement This book written by Diderot in 1779 is a response by the philosopher to the work published by Bougainville in 1771 entitled Journey around the world . Diderot humorously describes the navigator as “a curious man who passes from a sedentary life and pleasures to the active, painful, exhausting and dissipated profession of the traveler”. Above all, the philosopher of the Enlightenment praises the natural life of the Tahitians compared to that of the Europeans. He considers that navigators taught "good savages" greed, theft, in a word, evil. The writer takes the opportunity to criticize the Christian religion and the social organization of the kingdom of France. This book will not appear until 1796, during the Revolution, posthumously. However, it's a safe bet that Bougainville, still alive, read it.
