Moore, Fabienne2020-09-152020-09-152020Copyright © 2000 Trustees of Boston University. This article first appeared in Studies in Romanticism, Volume 59, Issue 3, Fall 2020 pages 273-298. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press.https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2556526 pagesIn 1799 Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840) published an equivocal exotic, sentimentalist, and epic novel La Tribu indienne, ou Édouard et Stellina set in Ceylon. Likely pressured by his brother Napoléon Bonaparte, Lucien quickly suppressed a novel avowedly anticolonial. This article analyzes Lucien Bonaparte’s critique of colonial practices and commerce as politically equivocal or “compromised,” and traces the ambivalence of his post-revolutionary novel to its main sources of inspiration, the best-selling Histoire philosophique des deux Indes published by Guillaume Raynal in 1780. Ultimately, La Tribu indienne reflects the impossible construction of an enlightened or soft colonialism à la française.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USLucien BonaparteGuillaume Raynalcolonial tradeColonialismEast IndiaFrench literatureArticle