La première description de Célèbes-sud en français et la destinée remarquable de deux jeunes princes makassar dans la France de Louis XIV
Authors: Pelras Christian 
Published: September 2009

Christian Pelras

This article results from an investigation about the origins of the first book ever published in the West in the last quarter of the XVIIth century about South Sulawesi, then a place quite out-of-the-way except for a handful of Dutch traders and perhaps a few Portuguese smugglers as well as for very occasional stranded travellers. In any case, none of these could possibly have provided the wealth of detailed and accurate details which the book is teeming with and which can only have been reported by somebody well acquainted with the Makassar language and society (although with a shallow historical knowledge).

From research about the author, Nicolas Gervaise, a French priest of the Company of the «Missions-Étrangères», whose family background, individual character, and life story might provide fantastic materials for a talented biographer, it appears that, although he did travel to the East, this was in quality of prospective pupil at the French Catholic Seminary of Ayuthia, and that he never travelled beyond the Kingdom of Siam from where he was sent back home in 1685 by his superiors. On his return he set to write a Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam, in which he displays the usual prejudice over, and no particular knowledge of, the cultures of the Muslim peoples such as the Malays, the Cham and the Makassar then living in Ayuthia. Probably at the time the latter book was sent to press, Nicolas Gervaise was appointed the private tutor of two young Makassar princes called Daéng Ruru and Daéng Tulolo (aged 14 and 13 years) who had arrived in Paris in September 1687. They appear to have been the sole survivors of a rebellion which their father Karaéng Mangallé had led the previous year against the Siamese King Phra Narai. Taken on the battlefield with their arms in hand they were however, due to their young age, not put to death but confided to the representative of the French East India Company who sent them to the French King Louis XIV for their education. As Gervaise published his Historical description of the Makassar kingdom a few months only after having been put in charge of the two youths, they seem to have been his main informants, although there is some evidence that some supplementary information may have had another origin.

Of the subsequent life story of these so-called « Indian » princes with French- Makassar names (Louis-Pierre Daén Rourou de Macassar and Louis-Dauphin Daén Toulolo de Macassar), much still remains to be brought to light. From what is already known, one can point to the fact that they were raised in the best college of their time in Paris together with the flower of the French society, that they received all their life long an allowance directly taken from the French King's civil list, and that they were later admitted in the most prestigious French Naval Academy with the best titled French nobility, thus showing their full acceptance as aristocrats among others aristocrats, without apparently suffering the slightest trace of any racial prejudice.