François Bernier

Life and Travels

François Bernier was born in 1620 in Joué, near Angers in western France, into a milieu that allowed him access to education despite modest origins. He studied philosophy and later medicine, eventually becoming a close student, secretary, and friend of the atomist philosopher Pierre Gassendi, one of the major critics of Aristotelian scholasticism in 17th‑century France. Through Gassendi, Bernier entered Parisian intellectual circles that included writers such as Cyrano de Bergerac and Jean Chapelain.

Trained as a physician, Bernier combined medical practice with an interest in empirical observation, geography, and politics. In the late 1650s he left France and embarked on the travels that would make him best known. He passed through the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia, eventually reaching Mughal India in 1658. There he entered the service of the Mughal court, practicing medicine and moving among high-ranking officials and intellectuals.

Bernier spent around a decade in the Indian subcontinent, witnessing the war of succession that brought Aurangzeb to the throne, the functioning of the imperial administration, and everyday social and religious life. These experiences provided the basis for his later travel narrative and political reflections. He finally returned to France in the early 1670s, resuming life in Paris as a writer and translator and staying in contact with leading members of the Republic of Letters until his death in Paris in September 1688.

Works and Intellectual Context

Bernier’s most famous work is the multi-volume Voyages de François Bernier contenant la description des États du Grand Mogol, de l’Hindoustan, du royaume de Kachemire, &c. (1670–1671), often cited in English as Travels in the Mogul Empire. Written in an engaging, report-like style, it offered European readers one of the earliest detailed and relatively systematic descriptions of northern India under Mughal rule. The work covers geography, court ceremony, taxation, landholding, religious practices, and philosophical debates among Indian scholars.

Bernier framed his observations comparatively, repeatedly contrasting Mughal institutions and customs with those of France and other European polities. His assessment of the Mughal land-revenue system and centralized power was read by some contemporaries as an implicit comment on French absolutism under Louis XIV. In particular, his critique of systems in which the sovereign is considered ultimate proprietor of all land was used by later political thinkers as a case study in “Oriental despotism,” though historians have since debated the accuracy and fairness of this label.

Alongside his travel narrative, Bernier played a significant role as a mediator of Gassendi’s philosophy. He produced an abridged and more readable version of Gassendi’s massive Latin Syntagma philosophicum under the French title Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1674–1675). Through this work he helped transmit Gassendist atomism, empiricism, and a mitigated form of skepticism to a broader educated audience, influencing the reception of early modern natural philosophy in France and beyond.

Bernier’s philosophical outlook combined:

• Empirical observation learned from medicine and travel;
• A Gassendist emphasis on sense experience and corpuscular matter;
• A generally comparative style of reasoning about customs, climates, and political structures.

However, his empirical orientation coexisted with many assumptions typical of 17th‑century European elites, including a tendency to frame non-European societies through hierarchical comparison with Europe.

Human Classification and Early Racial Thought

Bernier is often discussed in the history of science and philosophy for his 1684 essay commonly known as Nouvelle division de la terre (“A New Division of the Earth”), published in the Journal des sçavans. In this text he proposed one of the earliest systematic classifications of humans into distinct “races” (he uses terms such as espèces and races), going beyond earlier, more loosely defined groupings.

He outlined several major categories based primarily on bodily traits—especially skin color, facial features, and body shape—linked to geographical regions:

1. A broad “European” type (including parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia’s ruling elites as he perceived them);
2. A category for populations of sub-Saharan Africa;
3. A category for peoples of East and Southeast Asia;
4. Additional regional subgroups informed by his own travel experience.

Bernier’s scheme attempted to move from theological or purely climatic explanations of human diversity to a more anatomically grounded taxonomy, drawing analogies with natural history. At the same time, he associated certain physical traits with intellectual and moral stereotypes, and he sometimes ranked groups in ways that reflected Eurocentric and class-based prejudices. His portrayal of South Asians, for example, often distinguished between lighter-skinned elites and darker-skinned laboring populations, embedding social hierarchy into bodily classification.

Scholars differ in their interpretation of this essay:

• Some regard Bernier as a pivotal figure in the transition from older humoral and climatic theories of difference to a more racialized discourse that treats physical characteristics as stable and inheritable markers of human groups.
• Others emphasize the instability and inconsistency of his categories and note that he did not yet articulate a fully developed biological theory of race in the 18th- or 19th‑century sense.

Nonetheless, the essay has been widely cited as an early example of the scientific rhetoric of race, in which observational claims, measurement, and geography are combined to naturalize human hierarchies. Later critics have highlighted how Bernier’s account helped provide a conceptual vocabulary that could be adapted to justify colonial domination and enslavement, even though he wrote before the peak of European colonial expansion.

Reception and Legacy

During his lifetime, Bernier was well known as a travel writer and participant in Parisian intellectual life. His reports from Mughal India circulated in manuscript before publication and influenced early modern European understandings of South Asia, including in Voltaire’s later reflections on religion and politics in India.

Over time, however, his reputation as a travel writer was overshadowed by other accounts, and his name became more prominent in specialized histories of philosophy and anthropology. In the 20th and 21st centuries, historians of ideas, postcolonial theorists, and critical race scholars have reexamined Bernier for two main reasons:

• As a source on Mughal India, his work is mined for empirical detail but also scrutinized for bias. Some historians argue that, compared with many contemporaries, he was relatively attentive to local voices and scholarly debates; others stress that he still interpreted India primarily through European categories and frequently reproduced stereotypes.
• As an early racial theorist, Bernier is cited in genealogies of modern racism. Proponents of this interpretation highlight his effort to create coherent, quasi-scientific groupings of humans tied to physical traits and geography. Critics of an overly linear narrative caution that Bernier’s essay is only one node in a complex, multi-origin history of racial thought and should not be treated as a singular point of origin.

In contemporary scholarship, Bernier is often presented as a liminal figure: a physician and empiricist shaped by Gassendi’s philosophy, a curious and sometimes sharp observer of non-European societies, and at the same time an author whose descriptions and classifications contributed to frameworks later used to support racial and cultural hierarchies. His life and works thus serve as a case study of how early modern natural philosophy, travel writing, and political reflection intersected in the making of modern ideas about human difference and global order.