Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, dite Amérique

”And what can be said on the way Voyage is constructed? - It could not be more modern. Like the monograph of a contemporary ethnographer [...] I already said it, I repeat it: it is really the first founding model of an ethnologist's monograph” (Claude Lévi-Strauss)

Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, dite Amérique [History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise called America]
Pour Jean Vignon, à Genève 1611, 8° (11x17,5cm), (80 p.) 489 pp. (15 p.), contemporary brown calf.

Illustrated with 8 full-page engravings with the folding plate titled “Pourtrait du combat entre les sauvages Tououpinambaoults & Margaias Ameriquains”, missing from most copies. Fourth edition, last one in French in the author's lifetime, after the first edition published in La Rochelle in 1578, and the ones published in 1580 and 1594. Two Geneva editions were published in Latin in 1586 and 1594.
Contemporary brown sprinkled calf binding, elaborately gilt spine, double gilt fillet on the covers. Spine-ends, joints and corners restored. Small tears on two pages, very small worm holes to the margins of some pages not affecting the text. Expertly restored folding plate with discreet strips of paper. Ink trace p. 324, not affecting reading. Nudity on p. 121 covered with an ink stroke. Contemporary marginal note on the dedication page.
Modest cobbler from Burgundy, Jean de Léry (1536-ca. 1613) turned to the Reformed church at an early age and made his first trip to Geneva in 1552 to study the Reformed Gospel under Calvin. In 1557, Calvin ordered him to join the Protestant settlement “France Antarctique” led by Nicolas de Villegagnon, on Coligny Island, located in the bay of Rio de Janeiro. Although religious harmony seemed to work at first, Léry and his fellow Protestants were driven off the island and had to live among Tupinambas Indians. He spent ten months with this warlike tribe but failed to evangelize them. His stay in South America deeply affected young traveler Jean de Léry, who was torn between his fascination for this cannibal people and his own rejection of paganism.
On his return to France in 1558, his friends urged him to write an account of his travels. However, Jean de Léry misplaced his manuscript twice and did not publish it until 1578. Histoire d'un voyage was an immediate success, and his vivid, detailed observations of the Tupinamba were published five times during the author's lifetime.
Nevertheless, the publication of this important work should be placed in the context of Europe marked by Religious Wars. L'Histoire d'un voyage is a direct response to the account entitled Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, published in 1557 by André Thévet, Catholic chaplain to the expedition of Vice-Admiral de Villegagnon. Léry thought the book of Thévet utterly false. Thévet only stayed a few weeks in Brazil in 1555 and also visited the Tupinamba people. Contrary to Thévet, engravings in Léry's book do not portray Tupinambas as repulsive cannibals.
He rather focuses on their celebration rituals and not human massacres, considering cannibalism to be a matter of honor in indigenous culture. He places this traditional and warlike rite in direct opposition to the slaughter of innocent Protestants, especially referring to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Jean de Léry even goes so far as to consider cannibals in Brazil – described by Thévet as ruthless savages – to have more humanity and dignity than Catholics who murder innocent Protestants without reason.
Far from going unnoticed, de Léry's account inspired Michel de Montaigne who wrote the chapter “Of Cannibals” in his famous Essays. The philosopher describes the anthropophagic practices reported by de Léry and compares them to the “barbarianism” of 16th-century Europe, denouncing what Christians inflict on each other in the name of religion: “I believe that there is more savagery in eating a man when he is alive than eating him when he is dead, more in tearing apart by tortures and the rack a body full of feeling, roasting it piece by piece, having it mauled and eaten by dogs and pigs—treatments which I have not only read about but seen done a short time ago, not among ancient enemies but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the pretext of piety and religion—than there is in cooking and eating a man once he is dead.”
Jean de Léry's humanist text was also widely read by Enlightenment philosophers, contributing to the myth of the “noble savage” dear to Montesquieu (Usbek in Persian Letters), Voltaire (Huron or the Pupil of Nature) or especially Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality).
In March 1935, Claude Lévi-Strauss set foot on Brazilian soil for the first time at twenty-seven years old, carrying a copy of de Léry with him: “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” (A World on the Wane). In a 1994 interview with Dominique-Antoine Grisoni, he stresses once more the importance of this text, describing it as “a masterpiece of anthropological literature”: “The book is an enchantment. It is literature. Let us leave ethnology to the ethnologists and let the public read Histoire d'un voyage as a great literary work. And also as an extraordinary adventure novel.”
Rare copy of this “breviary of the anthropologist”, a seminal account praised by the greatest humanist thinkers.