Beňovský on Madagascar: The Self-fashioning, Career and Knowledge Production of a Central European Actor in the French Colonial Empire

In the eighteenth century, the French administration usually did not appoint foreigners to leading functions. The Upper Hungarian nobleman Móric Beňovský, who was commissioned by the French king to build a colony on Madagascar, was an exception. Soon, Beňovský developed fanciful accounts of his experience on Madagascar and eventually he became famous across Europe. His case raises the question about the conditions that foreigners had to fulfil in order to make a career in the French empire. This article seeks to answer the question of whether Beňovský’s Upper Hungarian origins contributed to shaping his career, self-fashioning, policy and knowledge production, that is, orientated these in a way that differed from the French colonisers. It claims that Beňovský chose to fictionalise his life and to conjure lies about his experiences on Madagascar because it was the only way to make a career in a system otherwise dominated by established networks of patronage. Furthermore, Beňovský’s fanciful information policy gives some insight into the way information was produced in the French empire: it shows that Versailles was very much dependent on a few informants, and that the logic of court patronage played a great role in knowledge production. Beyond that, the fact that Beňovský’s fantastic stories were considered trustworthy by the elite across the continent says a lot about European colonial imagination in the Enlightenment period.