Lire et penser le monde : une analyse numérique d’un long siècle de géographies imaginées dans l’imprimé de langue française (1700-1815)

Historians have tried to determine what francophones read during the long 18th century for over a hundred years. To do so, they have studied library inventories, printing permits, and the archives of printer-editors, but these sources are fragmentary and of uncertain representativeness. This thesis reframes the question by studying, with a combination of computational methods and close reading, large digitized corpora that approximate the entire French-language print market of the long 18th century. Using these vast corpora, the thesis proposes and demonstrates that it is possible to pinpoint ideas to which readers were probably exposed frequently enough that the ideas influenced the readers’ mental maps of the world, regardless of what precise texts were involved in each case. Thus, the thesis shows that digital approaches constitute a major new tool for historians of reading and print, including (under some circumstances) when the only data at their disposal is OCR results plagued with high error rates. As an illustrative case study, the thesis examines imagined geographies, i.e., mental models of the world produced by exposition to print media containing direct or indirect descriptions of territories and their inhabitants. Concepts drawn from psychology, behavioural economics and media studies suggest how readers may have interiorized the messages transmitted by print and used them, consciously or not, to build their own imagined geographies.  A study of some 70 000 volumes printed in French between 1700 and 1815, extracted from the Hathi Trust collection, shows that the Europe discussed in print expands eastward with time, that England draws most of the attention, and that discourses regarding most of the European powers are both remarkably stable and centred on war and aristocracy. Studies of major periodicals, cheap popular booklets (the Bibliothèque bleue), geography manuals and Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes corroborate these findings. Examining the 14,547 geography articles published in Diderot’s Encyclopédie reveals a largely urban imagined geography that changes focus during publication, from Diderot’ purely descriptive science to a tool for cultural transmission when Louis de Jaucourt takes over primary writing duties; a parallel study of 6,053 articles drawn from all fields of knowledge shows that the Encyclopédie describes America as a young world rich in resources, primarily botanical, that are ripe for the taking. The way in which the colonial French Atlantic world is portrayed in the Ancien Régime’s main periodicals suggests that they may have played a role in the French public’s notoriously low interest for emigration to the colonies. Travel narratives of expeditions to the Pacific and around the world show tensions between the step-by-step construction of a utilitarian geography and the need to retain readers’ interest by multiplying picturesque or terrifying anecdotes. In all, print media propose to their readers imagined geographies that treat the outside world with distrust.

Keyphrases: histoire, France, history, reading, digital humanities, digital history, print, Atlantic world, Early Modern history