specialcollections@tulane.edu / This dissertation looks at the complex set of representations of Native Americans of the upper and lower Mississippi Valley at stake in four French cultural productions of the late 17th to mid-18th century (1683-1753). These cultural productions extend throughout the French colonial effort in Louisiana. They include two travel narratives – Louis Hennepin’s Découverte de la Louisiane (1683) and Jean-François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny’s Mémoires Historiques (1753) – a newspaper chronicle from the Mercure de France, which relates the visit of five Louisianan Natives to Paris in 1725, and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s entrée Les Sauvages (1736) from his opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes. Through a close literary and musical analysis of these four cultural productions, this dissertation uncovers the multifold and dissonant discourses displayed when representing Native Louisianans. This research is grounded in the understanding that representations of indigenous characters provide limited knowledge about the Louisianan tribes, yet reveal extensive information about their authors, intended audience, and consequently about French identity and culture during this time. These dissonant discourses reflect major uncertainties about the French colonial venture in Louisiana, inquiries into other models of societal organizations and sets of values, interrogations about the potential degeneration of European civilization, questioning of the universality of the Christian faith, and epistemological contradictions associated with the curiosity toward foreign cultures. Moving away from the binary opposition between the “noble” or “ignoble” savage, this dissertation demonstrates how the complex image of Native Americans is fabricated and used to mirror the contemporaneous conflicting epistemologies characterizing the late years of early modern France. / 1 / Sophie Capmartin