The session opens with a tribute to Daniel Roche, who passed away on February 19 2023. From 1999 to 2005, he held the chair at the Collège de France, Histoire de la France des Lumières, and profoundly renewed the social and cultural history of the modern era.
Then we return to the story of the Tahitians who came to Europe. Mai's stay is now the focus of our analysis. He arrived in London in June 1774. Immediately under the care of Joseph Banks, he was presented to the King of England, vaccinated against smallpox, and introduced to all the circles of English high society. His presence caused quite a stir, as the British public became fascinated with travelogues in a context not only of enthusiasm for scientific discoveries, but also of effervescence around imperial culture. While the colonial revolt broke out in North America, the new imperial horizon was Asia, India and increasingly the Pacific, with Chinese trade in the background. Two episodes are of particular interest : the double encounter with Fanny Burney, which shows the limits of imitating English manners as a social performance, and Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Mai, which demonstrates the difficulty of representing difference (tattoos, tapa dress) within a neo-classical ideal of portraiture (refined features, aristocratic pose). We conclude by showing that Mai's stay in Europe corresponded to a rapid transformation in representations of human diversity, as the universalist ideal of a single human nature was increasingly challenged by the rise of racial typologies, based on perennial physical differences, notably skin color.
