The " fable of Tahiti " fed European imaginations at the end of the 18th century, sparking not only reveries on the state of nature, but also debates on the perils of civilization and on relations between Europeans and other parts of the world. After mentioning a few examples of Tahiti's diffuse presence in the literature of the period, the lecture focuses at greater length on three examples : a political utopian, L'an 2440 by Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1771), a sentimental novel, Lettres tahitiennes by Joséphine de Montbart (1784) and a London pantomime, Omai (1785).
L'an 2440 was one of the great bestsellers of the years 1770. In one chapter of the book, the author imagines the history of Tahiti after the passage of Bougainville, and deploys an anti-colonialist discourse that is not without ambiguity, because it contrasts European imperial ambitions with an ideal that is that of a Europe that has become peaceful, spreading progress and the Enlightenment, guiding other peoples towards a common future whose contours it itself outlines.
Lettres tahitiennes also proposes a narrative hostile to European imperialism, but with a double inflection. The island paradise is now lost, destroyed by violence, and we must not seek to return to it, but to repatriate to Europe, in the simple life of the countryside, the utopia of harmonious communities, far from the corruption of the big cities. Above all, Joséphine de Montbart emphasizes the sexual violence perpetrated against Tahitian women by European men with the complicity of Tahitian men. In so doing, she offers a salutary counterpoint to the essentially male gaze (from Bougainville to Diderot and Voltaire) that idealizes the myth of Tahitian sexual freedom. Lettres tahitiennes (Tahitian Letters ) attest to the fact that the sentimental novel, at the end of the eighteenth century, possessed great political force.
Finally, the pantomime Omai, performed at Covent Garden for Christmas 1785, a veritable musical comedy, boldly blends fantasy elements from the Comedia dell'Arte, characters and episodes from Cook's voyages, and praise for the British Empire as guarantor of the happy union of all Pacific peoples. The mixture of pure entertainment and a concern for ethnographic realism has often come as a surprise. It reflects the burgeoning power of the entertainment industry, which was able to combine scholarly curiosity with the pleasure of play, offering London audiences an exotic and safe voyage for a reasonable sum.
