Franco-Brazilian relations long predate the independence of Brazil. They go back to the sixteenth century, to the first exchanges between Europeans and the New World and to the early days of colonization. The French frequented the coasts, coming to harvest brazilwood and returning to Normandy, sometimes taking a few inhabitants with them. A short-lived colony was established on a small islet in Guanabara Bay in 1555, near the site of today’s Santos-Dumont Airport. From this “Antarctic France” there remains a testimony and a literary work of the highest significance, Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil, by Jean de Léry (1534–1613), whose importance and evocative power were always emphasized by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). According to him, Jean de Léry was capable of bringing the “Toüoupinambaoults” (Tupinambás) to life and immersing the reader in Guanabara of the 1550s. The sixteenth-century author figures prominently in the pages of Tristes Tropiques (1955), a work in which Claude Lévi-Strauss, who in 1935 came to teach sociology at the newly created University of São Paulo, examines the role Brazil played in his formation and in his work.

It is under the auspices of these two philosophical journeys that this documentary journey through two centuries of Franco-Brazilian relations begins.

Citation:

“I ambled along the Avenida Rio Branco, where once the Tupinamba villages stood; in my pocket was that breviary of the anthropologist, Jean de Léry.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 1955.

 

História de uma viagem feita à terra do Brasil:

Among the many treasures of the FBN is a copy of the third edition of Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil, by Jean de Léry (1534–1613), published in Geneva in 1585. It is the humanist account of a unique journey undertaken to Brazil thirty years before the work’s first publication.

 

In 1555, Admiral Coligny, head of the Protestant party in France, commissioned the knight Nicolas de Villegagnon to establish a colony in Guanabara Bay. In March 1557, fourteen Protestants landed, among them Jean de Léry, but their relations with the Catholics deteriorated. The Huguenots were expelled from “Fort Coligny” in October, and several were executed under Villegagnon’s orders. The exiles lived among the Tupinambás until a ship brought them back to France in January 1558. In the year following Léry’s return to France, the “wars of religion” erupted, causing massacres and atrocities for some forty years. Jean de Léry was a distressed witness and wrote that the Europeans were far more ruthless than the so-called “savages.” During Jean de Léry’s lifetime, the book was issued in five editions (1578, 1580, 1585, 1599–1600, 1611), a testament to its success. Historian Paul Gaffarel proposed an annotated edition (without the engravings) in 1880. This was the edition chosen by Monteiro Lobato and Sérgio Milliet for translations in Brazil.