Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville

Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (in the original French "Supplément au voyage de Bougainville") was written in 1772 and published posthumously in 1796. It is a fictional philosophical dialogue that serves as a critical and ironic response to Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (1771), an account of France’s first official circumnavigation. The Supplément adopts the form of a conversation—“Dialogue entre A. et B.”—and explores the cultural and moral implications of European colonial expansion, particularly focusing on the encounter with Tahitian society. It is widely considered one of the most powerful Enlightenment critiques of colonialism, ethnocentrism, and the imposition of European moral values. Diderot openly argues that incest is not as bad as Monasticism, and that incest is not "against nature". Like most Enlightenment Atheists, Diderot called for a total renunciation of all moral standards, and saw self-control and religious virtues as worse than incest and total moral relativism. This modern edition contains a new Epilogue by the translator, a glossary of Philosophical Terms used by Diderot, a chronology of his core life and works, and a summary index of all of Diderot's works. With a clean, modern translation of Diderot's Enlightenment-era French, this edition brings Diderot's thoughts directly into the modern intellectual sphere, tracing the intellectual forces which swept along Diderot and impacted today's secular world. The dialogue contrasts the supposed "natural" freedom and sexual openness of Tahitian society with the rigid, hypocritical norms of 18th-century Europe. This is, of course, an Enlightenment-secular exoticization of foreign cultures and is not true at all- Tahitian society had extremely rigid social norms and expectations of behavior that were not understood by the European colonizers. Diderot uses the character A (the more skeptical voice) and B (the reader’s surrogate, often the more conventional thinker) to reflect back and forth on issues such as property, religion, law, and especially morality. The famous section involving the Tahitian elder Orou condemns the Europeans' arrival as a corrupting force and articulates a proto-anthropological defense of indigenous ways of life. Diderot here anticipates later anti-colonial critiques and shows how Enlightenment ideals could be turned inward to challenge European assumptions of superiority. Diderot's argument here is that faithfulness between spouses, self-control and the practice of monasticism is worse than the normalization of incest, which did not age well. Supplément au voyage de Bougainville critiques the moralization of physical acts, particularly around sexuality and social norms through an exoticization and romanticization of the "other", and argues for a relativist understanding of human behavior based on cultural context and natural law- allowing anything that feels natural or right to the individual, including pedophilia. Diderot’s use of a fictional supplement to a real voyage blurs the boundary between fact and philosophical fiction, transforming travel literature into a medium for radical critique. It is a vital text within both Enlightenment literature and the history of anti-colonial thought, and displays the amorality of the Post-Protestant Atheistic religion which developed after the Protestant Reformation laid the foundation of the Enlightenment. Still, Diderot is still revered by today's secular philosophers as an important forerunner of modern Secular thought.