Le ‘pays où tous les habitants savent lire :’ à propos de Philippe-Édouard Foucaux et des études tibétaines d’Alexandra David-Neel Article - Juillet 2023

This paper first traces the trajectory of Philippe-Édouard Foucaux (1811-1894) and the twists and turns of the early inception of Tibetology in France since the second third of the nineteenth century. It then analyzes Alexandra David-Neel’s (1868-1969) relation both to this pioneering scholar and to his presentation of Tibet as a country of knowledge. In considering David-Neel’s positioning in the then-emerging field of Tibetan studies and her own varying narratives of such an intellectual genealogy, one can observe consistent patterns of David-Neel’s literary staging of "Master" figures in her work. As it turns out, these patterns provide a key to understanding her coherent self-fashioning as an author throughout her long career as a writer and tie together her successive and partly cumulative engagements in esotericism, anarchism, feminism, and modern Buddhism.