3 - Trading with men, dealing with God: abbé Pluche’s ideas on travel

Summary

Of the entire corpus of French dissertations on pedagogical travel, abbe Pluche's programme is the one that could, and theoretically should, have been the most famous, second only perhaps to the chapter on travel in Rousseau's Émile. Indeed, Pluche's programme is included in one of the absolute best-sellers of its time, his Spectacle de la Nature. It was among the five most frequent items on the shelves of private libraries in the eighteenth century, and remained a defining reading experience for authors of various ideological convictions. Works on Pluche have concentrated on describing the massive publishing phenomenon, the teleological aspect of the work and its role in the interpretation and dissemination of scientific discoveries, with a more recent interest in his biography. Only limited attention has been devoted to the fact that Pluche also discusses human behaviour and society, and that this is inseparable from other aspects of his work.

The Spectacle de la nature is a multi-faceted work – educational handbook, scientific vulgarisation, teleological demonstration, social commentary, and, in more than one respect, a novel. Among the large variety of topics, it also contains a sub-chapter on travel – a section that seems to have been entirely neglected not only in scholarly literature, but even by most of his contemporaries. In what follows, I will discuss the place of the section on travel within Pluche's entire pedagogical and ideological conception, his possible inspirations, and I will attempt to interpret both its unusual nature and its apparently limited impact. Pluche introduces the idea of travel in a chapter on trade: this invites an inquiry into the question of travel in models of mercantile education, and to consider whether we can speak of an interaction between the various models of education in different social classes.

The educator and the idea of travel

Despite his undeniable impact on his century, relatively little is known about the life of abbe Pluche. Much of what we know comes in fact from one text published after his death, the Éloge historique de Monsieur l’abbé Pluche: a ‘praise’ piece written by Robert Estienne, the son of the publisher of the Spectacle de la nature, and himself the publisher of Pluche's later works.