| This dissertation analyzes the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment's championing of rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as a way to comprehend truth. The French philosophes struggled to proffer their shocking ideas on religious theology and dogma at a time when any intellectual work not in conformity with religious doctrine was regarded with skepticism and contempt. This climate of ideological suspicion forced the philosophes to use innuendo, allegory, irony, and other literary techniques such as cross-referencing, when advancing their rational methodology and attacking Christian doctrine. My thesis argues that as we endeavor to distinguish between what they thought about theology---and other key ideological issues---and what they actually said, we can see the philosophes' use of Oriental motifs as one of the leading methods of subterfuge by which they tried to avoid the heavy hand of censorship. Writing in a context of a society that had been captivated by all things Oriental since the seventeenth-century European travel diaries of such voyagers as Jean Baptiste Tavernier and Sir Jon Chardin, and Antoine Galland's translation into French of A Thousand and One Nights (1704--17), the philosophes established a subgenre of Orientalist discourse in eighteenth-century French literature that used the topos of the Oriental as "Other" as a lens through which to provide an indirect, albeit potent, means of cultural self-criticism. |
