New College Historian David Harvey Furthers Research on French Enlightenment Thanks to Franklin Research Grant

(October 12, 2010) – New College history professor David Harvey spent this past summer in Aix-en-Provence, France, knee-deep in rare records from 18th century colonial society.

He had received the coveted Franklin Research Grant last spring from the American Philosophical Society (APS) to further his study of French Enlightenment thinkers. In June and July, Harvey lived overseas, devoting every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to perusing files at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM).

Harvey examined private papers and obscure correspondences of officials from the French colonies, and concentrated on the collections of men who were both civil servants and aspiring philosophers (such as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Poivre and Mercier de la Rivière).

“I spent my days reading old handwritten documents, and I came back with a lot of information (about 70 Word files totaling around 500 pages),” Harvey says.

During the period of grant support, Harvey composed a scholarly monograph about the causes of racial differences advanced by the thinkers and scholars of Enlightenment-era France. He had developed an interest in the topic while studying occult “metahistories” of human kind for his book, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (2005). In the summer of 2007, Harvey conducted research in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, focusing mainly on books and periodicals that were not easily obtainable in the United States.

“I was excited to be able to spend the summer in the south of France, as I had previously made research trips to Paris and Strasbourg, but never to Provence before, and it was beautiful,” Harvey says. “Most importantly, however, this grant allowed me to do research that will be very helpful for my next book, which will look at ideas regarding race and human origins in the French Enlightenment.”

Harvey had already done a fair amount of work from published sources (writings of major and minor Enlightenment figures), but this trip allowed him to add another dimension—to compare the views of writers based in Paris with those of officials, merchants and missionaries on the ground in the colonies.

“I teach courses on Old Regime France, the Enlightenment and French colonialism, and I will surely integrate some of the new information I found into those classes,” Harvey says. “I also had the chance to do some traveling in the region, and visited places that I lecture about in my history classes but had never seen before. Now I can give an eyewitness view of what they’re like, which, hopefully, will make things more real for my students.”

Harvey is currently on faculty-assigned research leave, which is not funded by the Franklin Grant. He had accumulated enough credit to take a semester off to analyze the findings from his trip to Provence, and to begin writing the manuscript for his third book, which is tentatively entitled, The Varieties of Man: Human Origins and Racial Difference in French Enlightenment Thought.

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