Morelly et la legende des Incas au dix-huitieme siecle

Button, Jennifer Ann. (1975) Morelly et la legende des Incas au dix-huitieme siecle. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This study shows that Morelly, one of the most important pre-Marxist communist philosophers, was strongly influenced by the legend of the Inca empire in the development of his political theories. The legend, which grew out of numerous histories written about Peru and especially the highly romanticized and idealized report of Garcilaso de la Vega, described an evolved political state in which crime was practically nonexistent and poverty unheard of. French readers of the eighteenth century were highly amenable to the idea that an empire of happiness and equality had existed in the no-too-distant past, as witnessed by the quantity of Peruvian histories published in France, and by the numbers of French authors who were inspired by all aspects of the civilization of the Incas. -- Morelly’s three politically-oriented works are subjected to a detailed comparison with the more valid of the two contemporary French translations of Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales. The conclusion reached is that the Inca empire, as described by Garcilaso, was directly related to the development of Morelly's plans for a communist state, even though this writer's more evolved theories surpass some of the Inca political philosophy. One of the most important legacies of the legend of the Incas lies in this influence which it exerted on Morelly and on the budding communism of the eighteenth century, which finally found an active partisan in the person of Babeuf, at the time of the Revolution of 1789.

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