Aristocratic Encounters
European Travelers and North American Indians

This 1999 book relates how European aristocrats visiting North America developed an affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies.

Harry Liebersohn (Author)

9780521640909, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 December 1998

192 pages, 17 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.45 kg

"Harry Liebersohn has provided a compact, concise addition to the burgeoning literature on European contact with non-Europeans and European constructions of the 'other'...this book is truly European in its authorship and approach. The entire book, indeed, is a series of useful summaries of historical knowledge to date...admirable book." American Historical Review

Aristocratic Encounters, first published in 1999, relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated French and German visitors to North America, mindful of the French Revolution, developed a new belief in their affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies, whom they viewed as fellow aristocrats. The book includes chapters on major figures, such as Chateaubriand and de Tocqueville, and on lesser, often instructive, travelers. For European historians, the book offers fresh evidence for the creation of a post-Revolutionary 'aristocratic' culture through overseas travel. To the interdisciplinary audience of readers interested in colonial encounters, it opens up a Romantic vision of aristocrats from two worlds struggling to defend their code of valor and honor in an age of democratic politics. Aristocratic Encounters is a contribution to a burgeoning form of historical writing; it moves across national boundaries to ask how Europeans understood cultures vastly different from their own.

Introduction
Part I. From Neoclassicism to Romanticism: France and American Indians 1682–1815
1. Indians in the French Enlightenment
2. Chateaubriand and the fiction of Native Aristocrats
Part II. Ending a Tradition: The French Romantic Travelers, 1815–48
3. Critics and nostalgics
4. Tocqueville and the sociology of native aristocrats
Part III. Founding a Tradition: The German Romantic Travelers: 5. Immigrants and educated observers
6. Maximilian and the ethnography of Native Aristocrats
Epilogue: a world of new aristocrats.

Subject Areas: Travel writing [WTL], Anthropology [JHM], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK], European history [HBJD]