The Making of “Taoïsme” in 18th–19th Century French Scholarship

Abstract

This study examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French scholarship constructed the concept of “Taoïsme” and shaped the modern understanding of Daoism. Early European representations, influenced by missionaries and Enlightenment thinkers, emphasized Confucian rationalism while portraying Taoist thought as mystical or superstitious. In the nineteenth century, the rise in philological methods and historical contextualization allowed Taoist texts to be studied systematically, leading to clearer distinctions between philosophical Daojia and religious Daojiao. By the early twentieth century, ethnographic and textual approaches further grounded the study of Taoism in historical and cultural reality. The shift from Taoism to Daoism reflects both a terminological refinement and a broader epistemological transformation toward more rigorous, context-sensitive, and historically informed scholarship.

1. Introduction

This study investigates the origins of scholarly engagement with Taoism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, focusing on how French intellectuals constructed the concept of “Taoïsme”. The period under study is crucial because it marks the transformation of Taoist thought from incidental observation by missionaries into a subject of systematic academic inquiry. Early sinologists and missionaries, operating within a Christian moral framework, emphasized Confucianism as a rational ethical system while portraying Taoist ideas as mystical or irrational. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French scholars, however, began to reinterpret Taoist texts—particularly the Daodejing—through philological and comparative methods, seeking to uncover their internal coherence and philosophical sophistication.

This intellectual evolution laid the foundation for the modern scholarly study of Taoism. By distinguishing between Daojia (the philosophical school) and Daojiao (the religious institution), this study not only traces how French scholars gradually systematized and philosophically framed Taoist thought but also examines how, through continuous engagement with classical texts, they progressively separated philosophical Daojia from religious Daojiao. This increasing conceptual differentiation reflects a deepening level of academic specialization. The term Taoism is retained here to reflect the terminology and conceptual framework used by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French sinologists, whereas Daoism denotes the contemporary academic understanding of Daoist philosophy and religion.

Using a historical–historiographical approach, this paper engages directly with primary sources to analyze how Taoist ideas were observed, interpreted, and gradually incorporated into French intellectual discourse. It highlights the critical role of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship in establishing Taoism as a subject of rigorous academic inquiry, illuminating the processes through which French knowledge of Chinese philosophy was constructed and systematized.

2. Literature Review

Modern scholarship increasingly recognizes that “Taoism”, as understood in Western intellectual and popular culture, is not a timeless, self-evident religious category but rather a construct shaped through successive layers of translation, philosophical projection, and academic classification. Contemporary historians trace its formation from early orientalist encounters through twentieth-century sinology to recent theoretical critiques, revealing how Western “Taoism” emerged as a hybrid object—philosophical, religious, and ideological—within specific epistemological frameworks. Early Orientalist fascination, or Sinophilia, played a central role in this process. Gerlach (2005) emphasizes the active transmission of Chinese wu-wei to Europe between 1648 and 1848, showing how it shaped European economic thought and the early conceptualization of laissez-faire. As Goodfield (2011) demonstrates, eighteenth-century thinkers such as Leibniz, Voltaire, and Quesnay projected Enlightenment ideals onto classical Chinese texts, producing interpretations of wu wei (non-action) that were detached from the Daodejing’s metaphysical framework and reframed as secular, political doctrines compatible with modern liberalism. J. J. Clarke (1997), McCormick (1999), and Dorn (2003) similarly perpetuated claims that wuwei anticipated Western laissez-faire, reflecting conceptual misreadings rather than historical influence. This trend effectively created one of the first modern Western “Taoisms”: a rationalized, de-metaphysicalized philosophy suited to Enlightenment categories.

The nineteenth century saw the further institutionalization of “Taoism” through emerging sinological frameworks. Cheng (2014) highlights how early French sinology, formalized in prestigious Parisian institutions, interpreted Chinese thought through European philosophical disciplines. This academic environment privileged textual and philosophical sources such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi, while largely marginalizing ritual, institutional, and liturgical dimensions of Taoism. In this way, European disciplinary boundaries produced a conception of Taoism that was primarily metaphysical, ethical, and textual, rather than religious in the sense understood within China.

Twentieth-century Western scholarship continued to propagate distortions. Barrett (2005) traces English-language constructions of Chinese religion from the Opium War to the 1970s, showing how Jesuit scholarship and Protestant categories encouraged the treatment of Taoism as a “degenerate” or superstitious counterpart to philosophical Taoism. Even well-intentioned textbooks, such as Joseph Gaer ([1953] 1929) and John B. Noss’s (1949) work, reproduced caricatures portraying Taoist priests as irrational or animistic. Barrett emphasizes that these misrepresentations resulted not from poor observation but from the lack of historically grounded research, with Western scholars inventing evolutionary narratives premised on degeneration or decline.

By the late twentieth century, scholarship began to reconstruct Taoism through historical and ritual studies. Girardot (1983) critiques the Western separation of “philosophical” and “religious” Taoism, urging attention to ritual bodies, liturgies, and sectarian traditions that emerged after the Han dynasty, including movements such as the Heavenly Masters, Shangqing, and Lingbao. Russell Kirkland (1997) exposes how modern Western understandings of “Taoism” rest upon deeply ingrained intellectual prejudices rather than Chinese historical realities.Similarly, Teiser and Verellen (2011) highlight Taoism’s historical entanglement with Buddhism, showing how formative periods coincided with crucial Sino-Indian religious exchanges that reshaped liturgy, scripture, and ritual practice. Parallel work on textual hermeneutics, such as Chang (1998), demonstrates that interpretation of the Daodejing is conditioned by historical, social, and intellectual contexts, with both Chinese and Western translations producing layered and contingent meanings.

In France, early recognition of these issues appears in Etiemble’s (1961) Le mythe taoïste en France au XXe siècle, which documents the construction of an “imagined Taoism” by intellectuals, writers, and esoteric circles. Étiemble traces ideological appropriations across modernist, Orientalist, spiritualist, and anti-industrial discourses, showing how French cultural contexts shaped the understanding of Taoism long before contemporary historiographical critique. Lebranchu (2017, 2024) further synthesizes this trajectory, situating Western representations of Taoism within a four-century genealogy—from seventeenth-century missionary translations to Enlightenment systematization, nineteenth-century Orientalist classification, and twentieth-century spiritualist reinventions. He highlights the paradox of modern secular reception, in which Westerners seek an “authentic” Taoism while simultaneously denying its historical religiosity, producing a hybrid that is both spiritualized and secularized.

Taken together, these studies establish a consensus: “Taoism” in the West is not a straightforward import but a historically contingent construct, shaped by intellectual appropriation, disciplinary frameworks, translation practices, and cultural reinterpretation. The Western construction of Taoism is thus best understood as a layered process of projection, reinvention, and reinterpretation, reflecting broader patterns of knowledge production, cross-cultural engagement, and historiographical critique.

3. The Jesuit Genealogy of Taoism: Christian Categories and Early Misreadings

In the 17th century, European exposure to Chinese thought began in earnest through the Jesuit missions and the importation of Chinese culture, especially in the Low Countries. Jesuit reports and visual representations of China’s prosperous economy highlighted the practical effects of wu-wei (non-action), which gradually entered European intellectual discourse and influenced thinkers such as Grotius and Quesnay, linking Chinese political economy with early notions of laissez-faire (Gerlach 2005, p. 14).

In 18th-century France, European engagement with Chinese thought was shaped by political, economic, cultural, and religious factors that favored Confucianism while marginalizing Taoism. Confucian principles of hierarchy, ritual, and bureaucratic order aligned with debates on enlightened monarchy and rational governance, whereas Taoist ideas such as wu-wei (non-intervention) and attunement to nature were politically perceived as irrelevant or even subversive. Economic and agrarian discourses further reinforced this preference, as Confucian ethics could inform statecraft and reform, while Taoist practices—including alchemy, esoteric rituals, and emphasis on simplicity—offered little guidance for governance. Cultural and intellectual currents also shaped reception: Enlightenment thinkers valued Confucianism as a secular, rational ethical philosophy, whereas Taoism, with its deities, magical practices, and immortality rituals, was often dismissed as superstition.

The foundations of eighteenth-century French scholarship on Taoism were shaped in large part by Jesuit missionary observations. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) provided an early framework for interpreting Chinese religious life, distinguishing Confucianism as rational and ethical from Taoist practices, which he described as institutionally organized yet theologically misguided, involving immortality cults, ritual exercises, and syncretic deities (Ricci and Trigault 2010, pp. 102, 110–14). Ricci’s depiction cast Taoism as hybrid, esoteric, and morally ambiguous, establishing a conceptual template for later Jesuits. Kircher et al.’s China Illustrata (Kircher et al. 1670, p. 184 ) similarly observed that the “mountain diviners” (Oreomantes) and “earth diviners” (Geoloves) in China, in pursuit of their false idolatries, relied solely on the mountains, rivers, and countryside rather than any texts or teachers, boldly spreading their fraudulent prophecies throughout villages, markets, and towns—a practice pervasive in Chinese society. Although Kircher never explicitly names Taoism, his description reveals that he had already formed a broad, albeit imprecise, impression of Taoist practices and their social presence. Couplet’s (1687, pp. XXV–XXVI) Confucius Sinarum Philosophus presents Li-Lao-Kiun, older than Confucius, as a philosopher whose teachings emphasized virtue, detachment from worldly honors, and the soul’s transcendence. His famous maxim—“Tao is born of Nothing, Virtue is born of Being, Things are born of Virtue; these three generate all things”—signals awareness of a supreme, governing principle. Li-Lao-Kiun was also credited with founding and teaching alchemy, with later disciples practicing magic and claiming elixirs of immortality.

Du Halde’s (1735) Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’Empire de la Chine synthesized early Jesuit observations, including those of Ricci, for a European audience. Although Du Halde never visited China or mastered Chinese, his four-volume work—praised by Voltaire as “the most detailed and excellent description of the Chinese Empire ever written by someone who never left Paris” (Voltaire 1751)—assembled reports from Jesuits into a coherent narrative. Du Halde presented Confucius as a moral reformer restoring civic virtue and social order (p. 353), while portraying Taoist elements in a textually grounded, ethically legible framework consistent with Enlightenment ideals of moral governance.

Following these syntheses, Jean-François Foucquet (1665–1741), representing the figurist school, pursued a distinctive interpretive approach. He sought hidden Christian truths within Taoist texts, particularly the Daodejing, interpreting the Tao as equivalent to both Tian and God, and reading the text as symbolically concealing doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. Drawing on the I Ching, Foucquet linked each hexagram line to virtuous figures, messianic truths, or significant Church events. While theologically motivated, his work contributed to early European conceptualizations of Taoism as a philosophically coherent and textually encoded system (Witek 2006, pp. 138–39, 195–97, 201).

Later in the century, Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–1793), in Mémoires concernant l’histoire… des Chinois (Amiot 1776, p. 296), emphasized the ethical and philosophical aspects of early Chinese culture, noting that idol worship arose only during the Han dynasty. Pierre-Martial Cibot (1727–1780), in Essai sur l’antiquité des Chinois (Cibot 1776), situated Taoism within the broader evolution of Chinese thought, portraying it as a doctrine shaped by political turbulence and syncretic influences (pp. 32–39). Cibot argued that Laozi composed the Daodejing to preserve ancient precepts amid the decline of the Zhou dynasty, paralleling Confucius’ moral program, while later rulers selectively adopted Taoist teachings for political purposes (pp. 32–36). He also critiqued speculative and mythological elements, including alchemy and immortality practices, as historically unreliable and less rational than Confucian classics (pp. 93–184).

Building on the detailed observations and textual analyses of Jesuit missionaries eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers in France engaged with Chinese philosophy indirectly, relying heavily on the Jesuit corpus as their primary source. Voltaire’s interpretation of Chinese thought played a formative role in shaping eighteenth-century French understandings of what later came to be termed “Taoïsme”. Voltaire adopted and popularized a hierarchical framework in which Confucianism represented rational morality and natural religion, while Taoist traditions were relegated to the realm of superstition. In L’Histoire générale, et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, he famously writes that “shortly before Confucius, Lao-tseu founded a sect devoted to evil spirits, sorcery, and magical illusions” (Voltaire 1757, p. 21). This characterization reduced Taoism to a composite of divination, occult practices, and technical arts, erasing its philosophical dimensions and distancing it from the ethical rationality Voltaire admired in Confucian teaching. Within this Enlightenment framework, Taoism functioned less as an object of inquiry than as a rhetorical contrast. By dismissing Laozi’s teachings as irrational and associating them with “maleficent” or esoteric practices, Voltaire reinforced an idealized image of Confucius as a philosopher embodying reason, moderation, and civic virtue. The Zhuangzi, whose metaphysical insights and critique of conventional norms would later attract significant scholarly attention, is barely mentioned; its intellectual complexity remained outside the conceptual horizon Voltaire inherited from Jesuit accounts.

Building on this evaluative contrast between Confucian rationality and Taoist “superstition”, Joseph de Guignes in his 1780 essay Observations sur quelques points concernant la Religion et la Philosophie des Égyptiens et des Chinois offered one of the earliest European attempts to conceptualize what later French scholarship would call “Taoïsme”. De Guignes sought to demonstrate structural parallels between Chinese and Egyptian cosmology, beginning with their shared recognition of a supreme first principle and secondary forces governing natural phenomena. His most influential claim concerns the interpretation of the Tao, which he identified with the Nous of Timaeus of Locri and with the “Intelligence souveraine” of the Egyptian philosophical tradition. Drawing on the Yijing, which he regarded as the oldest Chinese sacred text, de Guignes argued that the Chinese believed the first principle ordered matter “according to geometric proportions expressed by numbers or lines” (p. 167). In this reading, Tao is neither a uniquely Chinese metaphysical idea nor a religious notion, but part of a universal ancient wisdom tradition linking China to Egypt and Greece.

De Guignes also provided a simplified yet influential explanation of Yang and Yin, presenting them as a pair of cosmological forces analogous to the Egyptian Osiris and Isis: Yang representing the male, celestial, active principle; Yin the female, terrestrial, receptive one (p. 179). He further associated Chinese elemental categories with these two principles, arguing that this dualistic system mirrored earlier Egyptian models (pp. 166–75). While his comparisons were speculative, they helped shape the early French understanding of Chinese cosmology by situating Yin-Yang within a familiar Western framework. By interpreting Tao as a universal rational principle and reducing Yin-Yang to an Egyptian-style dualism, de Guignes helped create the conceptual vocabulary through which eighteenth-century French scholars began to imagine Taoism as a coherent philosophical system. His work marks an early stage in the transformation of Chinese cosmological ideas into objects of European scholarly discourse, laying important groundwork for the more systematic treatments developed in nineteenth-century sinology.

Importantly, 18th-century French scholarship did not yet distinguish systematically between philosophical Taoism (Daojia) and religious Taoism (Daojiao). Instead, Taoist texts and practices were selectively interpreted to serve European intellectual purposes: they were framed as a philosophical foil to Confucianism, a counterpart for exploring natural order, and—crucially—as a medium for revealing potential correspondences between Chinese thought and Christian theology. Jesuit missionaries engaged deeply with Taoist classics, including the Yi Jing and Taoist texts, in order to identify hidden prefigurations of Christian truths, such as the Trinity, the Messiah, and divine unity. Allegorical readings by missionaries like Bouvet (Bouvet 1697) further linked Chinese cosmology, numerology, and mythic narratives to Christian, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic symbolism, producing a version of Taoism intelligible within a European religious and moral framework. Moreover, the roots of this reconstruction can be traced to the first contacts between 16th-century Jesuit missionaries and Chinese society. Missionaries like Matteo Ricci engaged with Confucian literati and initially assumed Chinese society was rational and receptive to Christianity. Influenced by these interactions, they framed Taoism and Buddhism as rival traditions, labeling Taoism as idolatrous superstition and creating an early “spiritual gap” between Chinese practices and Western expectations (LaRochelle 2016, p. 430).

In sum, the 18th-century French reception of Taoism was marked by selective transmission, Christianized interpretation, and a conceptual conflation of philosophy and religion, producing a representation of Taoism that was both exoticized and moralized, and positioned as a counterpart to Confucianism while revealing perceived convergences with Christian theological principles.

4. Philological Reinterpretations of the Daodejing

While eighteenth-century French representations of Taoism remained largely mediated through Jesuit reports and Enlightenment moralizing frameworks, the early nineteenth century witnessed a shift toward a more systematic and philologically informed engagement with Chinese thought. This shift unfolded against a broader backdrop of profound social and political transformation: rapid regime changes, the crises of post-revolutionary legitimacy, and the rise in modern individualism in France and across Europe. These developments heightened intellectual interest in alternative moral and metaphysical resources, particularly those that seemed to offer models of inner autonomy, non-coercive governance, and self-cultivation beyond institutional religion. In this climate, Taoist ideas—long filtered through missionary polemics—began to appear as potential philosophical interlocutors rather than merely exotic curiosities. Moreover, as the century progressed, Taoism itself began to acquire a more positive intellectual valence in France. No longer dismissed merely as a body of superstitious rites or as an irrational counterpart to Confucian moralism, it increasingly appeared as a coherent philosophical tradition offering sophisticated reflections on nature, governance, and the cultivation of the self.

Victor Cousin (1792–1867), France’s leading philosopher of the first half of the century, though not a specialist in Taoist or Chinese studies, laid important intellectual groundwork for this shift. Cousin sought to construct a secular history of philosophy in which non-Western traditions could be understood as autonomous intellectual systems. His eclectically oriented project, with its insistence on the plurality of philosophical traditions, helped open a conceptual space in which Chinese thought—Taoism included—could be reassessed beyond the hierarchical and moralizing paradigms inherited from the eighteenth century.

In Cousin’s Cours de philosophie. Histoire de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle (1829), Cousin situated the Orient as a critical yet uneven source for European intellectual development. He emphasized that eighteenth-century scholars such as William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron revealed the richness of Eastern traditions to Europe, primarily relying on intermediaries like Colebrooke (p. 26). Cousin distinguished between the religious and philosophical dimensions of Eastern thought: while religious traditions permeated culture, cities, and mythologies, philosophy emerged later as an independent, rational enterprise (pp. 50–51). He praised Indian Nyāya logic for its analytical rigor but contrasted this with Chinese philosophy, which he regarded as primarily moral and political, with a relatively limited systematic or theoretical scope (pp. 175–76, 209). Although he acknowledged the contributions of scholars like Abel Rémusat, Cousin suggested that Chinese philosophy, including Taoist thought, had not yet reached the stage of rigorous syllogistic reasoning, remaining largely in an intuitive, enthymematic form. Importantly, Taoist concepts such as the tao, wu-wei, and harmony with nature could be integrated into Cousin’s eclecticism, providing a framework for combining rational, empirical, and spiritual dimensions within a coherent philosophical synthesis.

In a word, the republicanism and anti-clerical thought in nineteenth-century France further reshaped the intellectual framework through which Chinese philosophy was studied. Challenging the Church’s prior authority and the Jesuit-led transmission of Chinese knowledge, scholars increasingly approached Taoist texts on their own terms, independent of Christianized allegorical readings. Figures such as Rémusat, Julien, and Pauthier emphasized philology, historical contextualization, and textual fidelity, analyzing Taoist cosmology, ethics, and ritual as autonomous intellectual and religious phenomena. This shift allowed Taoism to be treated not merely as a moral or theological counterpart to Confucianism, but as a distinct system with its own philosophical depth, cosmological insights, and practical rationality. By prioritizing critical scholarship over ecclesiastical mediation, these sinologists helped construct “Taoïsme” as a recognizable object of European academic inquiry, laying the groundwork for its inclusion in comparative philosophy, religious studies, and the historiography of ideas.

Abel Rémusat (1788–1832), appointed the first professor of Chinese at the Collège de France in 1814, laid the groundwork for a philologically rigorous study of Taoist texts, particularly the Daodejing, and related cosmological and ethical ideas. In Rémusat’s (Rémusat 1811) Essai sur la langue et la littérature chinoises, Rémusat analyzed key concepts such as taiji (太極) as the supreme principle of all things and tiande (天德, heavenly virtue), while clarifying Yijing formulas (yuan 元, heng 亨, li 利, zhen 貞) in terms of their ethical, cosmological, and metaphysical significance (pp. 65–67). These analyses demonstrated that Daoist notions could be understood as historically situated intellectual categories rather than exotic curiosities, mystical deviations, or purely theological curiosities. Rémusat’s (Rémusat 1824) Mémoire sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-Tseu combined philological scrutiny with historical contextualization, producing the first substantial European study of Laozi’s life and teachings, while Julien’s translation of Le Livre des Récompenses et des Peines. Manuel de morale taoïste (Julien 1835) introduced European audiences to a moral and cosmological framework of Taoist ethics.

Rémusat’s reconstruction of Taoist cosmology and his insistence on treating the Daodejing as a text of abstract reasoning, rather than religious superstition, had a direct impact on contemporary philosophy. Hegel drew heavily on Rémusat’s philological findings in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, using them to argue that Chinese thought indeed possessed “abstract categories”. While Hegel ultimately framed Confucianism as a formalistic state morality, he acknowledged—precisely on the basis of Rémusat’s work—that Taoism articulated fundamental metaphysical concepts (Dyck 2005, p. 30). Through these contributions, Rémusat not only established new methods for reading Taoist texts but also shaped their reception in European philosophy, helping to constitute “Taoïsme” as a coherent and intellectually significant object of study.

Rémusat’s student, Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), extended and deepened this approach. His annotated translation initiated by Cousin, Julien’s (Julien 1842) Lao-Tseu, Le Livre de la voie et de la vertu, emphasized Taoism as a coherent philosophical system rather than a collection of mystical or oracular claims. Julien interpreted the Tao as an impersonal principle and highlighted concepts such as wu-wei and ziran (naturalness), presenting them within their textual, linguistic, and historical contexts. Central to Julien’s method was a rigorously philological approach: he systematically consulted early Taoist commentaries and exegetical traditions in Chinese in order to establish precise meanings, thereby grounding his translation in indigenous hermeneutics rather than Western philosophical or theological analogies (Zhang and Xie 2022, p. 3). Julien himself expressed a deep awareness of the difficulty of translating the Daodejing (pp. II–IV, XV–XVI), noting that the text is highly obscure and that complete understanding is nearly impossible without careful study of Chinese commentaries. He meticulously compared multiple editions, including the 1588 Varioram edition and the earliest Han dynasty commentary by He-Chang-Kong (p. XV), revising his translation multiple times over more than a decade (pp. XV–XVI). Julien also provided permanent commentary alongside his translation, presenting multiple interpretations for difficult passages and ensuring that no meaning was introduced without authoritative textual support (pp. XV–XVI). This demonstrates his extraordinary care for philological precision, textual fidelity, and clarity for readers unfamiliar with Chinese. By meticulously controlling textual production—including overseeing over eight hundred Chinese movable types—Julien not only ensured the philological accuracy of his work but also materially embedded the study of Taoism within French academic institutions. His translations and commentaries transformed European understanding of Taoist thought, laying the groundwork for treating Taoism as an autonomous intellectual and religious system, distinct from earlier Christianized or Jesuit-influenced interpretations.

Complementing the philological focus of Rémusat and Julien, M.G. Pauthier approached Taoism with a historical–philosophical lens. In Pauthier’s (1831) Mémoire sur l’origine et la propagation de la doctrine du Tao, he presented Laozi not merely as a historical figure but as the founder of a religious–philosophical tradition whose text, the Daodejing, functioned over time as a revealed scripture. Pauthier aligned the Tao with European notions of eternal reason (ratio, logos), portraying it as both immanent—accessible through human practice—and transcendent, embodying a cosmic order and divine wisdom beyond humanity (pp. 4–5). He examined cosmological principles such as yin and yang as generative forces of matter and explored potential historical and philosophical interactions with Indian thought, particularly Sânkhya and Vedânta philosophies (pp. 11–12, 24, 38). Moreover, Pauthier argued for the practical relevance of Taoist principles, such as wu-wei, as guidance for moral and intellectual reflection in politically turbulent societies, connecting the study of Taoism to contemporary European concerns (p. VIII).

Together, Rémusat, Julien, and Pauthier illustrate how nineteenth-century French scholarship reshaped European understandings of Taoist philosophy and religious practice by transforming scattered Taoist ideas into the conceptual category of Taoism. Through translation, philological analysis, historical contextualization, and philosophical interpretation, they moved French representations beyond earlier Christianized or exoticized portrayals and toward recognition of Taoism as a systematic ethical and cosmological tradition. Building on this, they creatively reconsidered and critiqued the legacy of Jesuit missionaries, expanding the study of the Daodejing from a theological framework to a scientific and scholarly one. Importantly, the Daodejing was recognized as a philosophical text rather than a religious or poetic work, and for the first time, the concept of Tao received a scientific interpretation. Alongside the Jesuits’ earlier translation of Tao as “reason”, a new translation as the “Way” emerged and later became the dominant interpretation in the twentieth century. They also introduced hypotheses regarding the foreign origins of Laozi’s philosophical ideas, among which Pauthier’s Indian-origin hypothesis has persisted in scholarly discourse (Kapranov 2020).

Within this broader transformation, the controversy between Julien and Pauthier played a pivotal role in drawing European attention to the Daodejing. Surviving evidence indicates that Pauthier translated only the first nine chapters (published in 1830 and 1838) (Pauthier 1830, 1838), whereas Julien’s (Julien 1842) Lao-Tseu constituted the first complete French translation and marked a decisive shift in European Daodejing studies. Julien’s translation, praised by contemporaries for its scientific rigor and philological precision, corrected numerous misunderstandings present in earlier translations and set new methodological standards for sinology. By contrast, Julien barely acknowledged Pauthier’s draft, dismissing it as too inadequate to merit discussion (Zhang and Xie 2022, p. 3).

Through their combined efforts—Rémusat’s philological groundwork, Julien’s methodological rigor, and Pauthier’s popularizing role—Taoism emerged as a coherent object of academic inquiry in nineteenth-century France. Their work not only redefined Taoist thought for European readerships but also institutionalized Taoism as a category within modern scholarly discourse, thereby shaping the broader European reception of Chinese religion and philosophy.

5. Differentiating Taoist Philosophy from Taoist Religion

This growing emphasis on accurate, textually grounded translation and interpretation in 19th-century French sinology set the stage for later scholars to critically examine Taoism not merely as a repository of mystical or esoteric ideas, but as a coherent intellectual and religious system. Building on Julien’s philological rigor and awareness of earlier interpretive distortions, subsequent scholars increasingly sought to separate philosophical doctrines from ritual and religious practices, aiming to clarify Taoist concepts on their own terms rather than through Christianized analogies. It is within this context that Charles De Harlez’s critique emerges, exemplifying the next step in the French scholarly construction of Taoism: the careful differentiation of Taoist philosophy from Taoist religion.

In Harlez’s (1891) Les Religions de la Chine, Charles De Harlez critiques earlier attempts—by missionaries such as Amyot and Prémare, as well as by scholars like Rémusat—to interpret Taoist texts as prefiguring Christian doctrines, particularly the Trinity and the Messiah (pp. 7–8). For instance, the Taoist formula “One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, Three gives birth to all things” was taken by some to signal the Christian Trinity, while the terms i, hi, wei were misread as a variant of Jehovah (pp. 7–8). De Harlez carefully refutes these claims: the three words are conventional Chinese terms with contextually precise meanings, the numerical sequence merely indicates generative order, and the Tao itself is a rational principle or first cause, not analogous to the Logos of Christian theology (pp. 7–8). This correction reinforces a rigorous, textually grounded understanding of Taoism, moving the study beyond imaginative or apologetic readings toward a scholarly framework that treats Taoist thought on its own terms.

Beyond philology, De Harlez situates Chinese religious development within historical and social frameworks. He notes that early religious practice was largely individual and utilitarian, later becoming family-centered, and eventually regulated by political authority, with the emperor alone authorized to perform rites for the major sacred mountains, rivers, and state altars (pp. 12–13). He criticizes imaginative reconstructions that ignore documentary evidence, including Reville1’s theory of a continuous evolution from primitive animism and shamanic practices to organized religion (pp. 12–13), emphasizing that historical claims must be grounded in textual and epigraphic sources rather than speculative narratives.

De Harlez complements Cousin’s assessment of Chinese thought. Like Cousin, he distinguishes between ethical-moral-philosophical traditions (including Taoism) and systematic, analytical philosophies such as India’s Nyāya (Cousin 1829, pp. 96–98, 175–76, 209). Both emphasize careful textual study and the limits of European interpretive projection, highlighting the importance of philological rigor and historical contextualization in understanding Taoist and broader Chinese intellectual traditions.

This nineteenth-century intellectual climate—marked by growing philological specialization and the differentiation of “philosophy” from “religion”—created the conditions in which later scholars could propose more precise conceptual categories. Léon’s (1892) Le taoïsme—the first French scholarly monograph explicitly titled “Taoism”—marks a major turning point in the European conceptualization of Taoist thought. Rosny is the first to articulate with precision the distinction between “Taoïsme”, the philosophical and naturalistic tradition associated with Laozi, and “Taosséisme”, the ritual and priestly religion shaped by later Taoist institutions and mystical commentaries (p. XXI). This analytical separation, building on earlier philological groundwork by Julien, provided a vocabulary through which French scholarship could describe Chinese philosophy and Chinese religion as two different, though historically intertwined, domains.

Central to Rosny’s project is a reconstruction of the intellectual contrast between Confucius and Laozi. Drawing on Chinese sources and French sinological debates, he argues that Confucius embodies a practical, socially oriented wisdom that permeates all levels of Chinese society, whereas Laozi represents speculative and introspective inquiry, esteemed only by a small community of reclusive adepts and long misunderstood outside China (Introduction, pp. V–VI). In doing so, Rosny replaces the eighteenth-century missionary dichotomy—one that cast Confucianism as rational and Taoist traditions as superstitious—with a more balanced comparative framework grounded in philological evidence and intellectual history (p. 138). These two traditions, he suggests, illustrate a defining feature of the Chinese cultural spirit: a collective preference for pragmatic, ethically grounded instruction over metaphysical speculation, even as both modes of thought are recognized as essential to human intellectual development (Introduction, pp. V–VI, XV).

Rosny also endorses the philological rigor of Julien’s French translation of the Daodejing, affirming its accuracy and methodological solidity (Introduction, pp. XI–XII). In discussing Laozi’s celebrated opening line—“常無欲以觀其妙，常有欲以觀其徼” (“With constant non-desire one perceives its subtle wonders; with constant desire one perceives its external manifestations”)—Rosny goes so far as to compare its philosophical clarity to Spinoza’s rationalism (p. XII). He rejects earlier missionary and scholarly (Rémusat, Pauthier) attempts to identify a personal creator God or a Christian Logos in the concept of Tao, arguing that Laozi’s text contains no trace of a personal deity, creative will, or metaphysical agent comparable to Judeo-Christian theology (p. XIII). In this respect, Rosny directly corrects the projections of the Jesuits, whose readings sought to graft Christian dogma onto Taoist metaphysics (pp. 85–87).

Although Rosny admits that Laozi left no systematic philosophical structure—only a series of aphoristic formulations—he maintains that these fragments express a remarkably profound understanding of the law of Becoming (la loi du Devenir) and of the natural unfolding of the cosmos, without attempting to derive ethical, social, or religious norms from it (pp. XXII, 100–101). This emphasis reinforces Rosny’s argument that “Taoïsme” is a distinct philosophical tradition grounded in naturalistic metaphysics and non-interventionist principles, fundamentally different from the priestly and ritual forms of “Taosséisme”.

While the Confucianism lends itself to political organization and moral governance, Taoism offers insight into the structures of nature and being rather than prescriptions for social progress. Through these analyses, Rosny consolidates “Taoïsme” as a coherent philosophical category within European scholarship—one stripped of Christian allegory, grounded in philology, and clearly distinguished from the diverse ritual practices of Taoist religion.

Building on this concern with intellectual and social contexts, Raoul de La Grasserie (La Grasserie 1898) treats Taoism not merely as a set of doctrines but as part of a broader cosmo-société, an organized universe of gods, spirits, ancestors, saints, and humans connected by religious bonds (pp. 5, 8). For him, religion constitutes a cosmic sociology (cosmo-sociologie), a discipline superior to ordinary sociology because it examines how transcendent beings generate relations and hierarchies analogous to those among humans (pp. 4–5). Within this framework, Taoism is treated as a structured, hierarchical pantheon rooted in ancient Chinese naturalism (nature-worship) and later shaped by animism and philosophical speculation (pp. 131–32). The pantheon extends from Shangdi (the Supreme God) and the Six August Ones (sun, moon, and seasonal stars) down to the Five Sacred Mountains and myriad chin spirits, which animate rivers, winds, constellations, and other natural forces (pp. 131–32). Taoist deities are gendered—Heaven and the sun are male, the moon and earth female—reflecting yin–yang symbolism and an anthropomorphic impulse. Later, Taoist theology incorporates refined triads: the Sanqing (Three Pure Ones), the Sanguan (Three Officials of Heaven, Earth, and Water), and the Three Blessings (happiness, posterity, longevity) (pp. 225–26).

Significantly, La Grasserie’s study exemplifies what appears to be the first systematic scholarly distinction between Taoist philosophy (Daojia) and Taoist religion (Daojiao). He situates Taoism firmly within the domain of religion and social organization, treating its pantheon, rituals, and cosmological structures as objects of scientific sociological analysis. This division continues the academic tradition established by Rosny, who also differentiated philosophical Taoist texts from religious Taoist practices, while La Grasserie extends it further by framing Taoism as part of a cosmo-société. This approach allows for a more precise understanding of both Taoist thought and Taoist religious practice, marking a critical innovation in the 18th–19th century French construction of “Taoïsme”.

La Grasserie also interprets Taoism as a progressive religion, in contrast to what he calls the retrograde tendency of Confucianism, which he views as rigid and conservative (pp. 187–88). Taoism, by absorbing popular cults and promoting techniques of self-cultivation, allows humans to transcend mortality and participate in the power of the Tao—a process akin to deification (p. 253). Its openness to folk practices, however, coexists with low social status for Taoist clergy (pp. 324–25). He stresses that Chinese society is a religious confluence, where people draw selectively from Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship, often combining rituals from different traditions (pp. 365–66). Yet La Grasserie predicts that Confucianism and Taoism will ultimately decline before the moral universality of Buddhism, just as minor religions elsewhere succumb to missionary faiths (pp. 379–80). This teleological vision—foreseeing a future dominated by Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—reflects a 19th-century evolutionist horizon in comparative religion, positioning European monotheisms and world religions as endpoints of progress.

6. The Reinvention of Taoist Metaphysics in French Scholarly Discourse

Building on the descriptive and comparative accounts of Taoism offered by De Harlez, Rosny, et La Grasserie, later French scholars increasingly sought to move beyond broad sociological and teleological assessments toward a more precise understanding of Taoist philosophy and religious practice. While La Grasserie emphasized Taoism’s adaptive and integrative nature within Chinese society, subsequent interpreters such as Matgioi aimed to reconstruct its doctrinal and metaphysical foundations, attending not only to the textual fidelity of the Taoist canon but also to the experiential and initiatory dimensions of its practice. This shift marks a move from observing Taoism as a cultural phenomenon to analyzing it as a systematic intellectual and religious tradition.

Matgioi (Albert de Pouvourville, 1861–1939), drawing on what he presented as firsthand exposure to Taoist teaching during his years in Indochina, sought to redefine the French understanding of Taoist philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the philological and often Christianizing approaches of earlier translators, he positioned himself as a mediator of Taoism’s “inner meaning”, claiming both linguistic immersion and initiation into a living Taoist lineage. This background informed his sharp critique of European misreadings of the Daodejing and guided his effort to produce what he called a “traduction exacte”, faithful to both the letter and the spirit of Laozi’s text.

In Matgioi’s (1894a) Le Tao de Laotseu, Matgioi attacks the prevailing French practice of rendering Taoist ideas into European philosophical language. He criticizes Julien’s translation as a “paraphrase” shaped by French conceptual habits and by interpreters unfamiliar with Chinese culture (p. 2). Against such indirect mediation, he argues that a competent translator must have lived experience of the language and the intellectual world that produced the text (pp. 2–3). His method seeks maximal fidelity: added words are bracketed in italics and no commentary is included (p. 4), giving his translation a more austere and sometimes opaque character.

In Matgioi’s (1894b) Le Te de Laotseu, Matgioi goes further, correcting what he sees as Julien’s fundamental misunderstandings of Taoist vocabulary and metaphysics (pp. 1–3). He reports that his own teacher in Vietnam mocked French scholars for distorting Chinese philosophy, and he insists that, while Laozi is subtle and elliptical, the Daodejing is no more obscure than modern psychology or contemporary French poetry.

Matgioi’s writings of the mid-1890s extend his earlier effort to define “Taoïsme” as a coherent philosophical doctrine and to separate it sharply from popular religion—a distinction already initiated by Rosny but which Matgioi radicalizes and systematizes. In Matgioi’s (Matgioi 1895) L’esprit des races jaunes, he frames Taoist thought as part of an ancient metaphysical science centered on the septenary structure of the human being, a doctrine he sees consistently expressed across Buddhism, “mystical Taoism”, and the metaphysical Yijing (p. 5). By treating these systems as unified by a single, irreducible principle, he elevates Taoism from a collection of beliefs or rituals to a rigorous doctrinal metaphysics that shaped all later forms of East Asian knowledge. Even when comparing Taoist ideas to Christian eschatological notions—such as the continuity of the personality across multiple existences (p. 39)—he insists on their philosophical, not theological, character. In doing so, Matgioi repositions Taoism within the French scholarly landscape as an intellectual tradition with conceptual depth and internal coherence.

This philosophical framing appears even more explicitly in Matgioi’s (1896) Le traité des influences errantes de Quangdzu. Matgioi insists that the text “does not belong to any Eastern religion” and must not be attributed to “the Taoist spirit” in the sense of ritual or ecclesiastical religion (pp. 1–2). He argues that Taoist dogma properly resides in canonical texts such as the Kan-ying, which articulates the Taoist doctrine of moral causation—the idea that human actions generate corresponding movements and sanctions in the cosmos (pp. 1–2). By distinguishing between doctrinal Taoism, popular manuals, and non-canonical writings, Matgioi contributes to a taxonomy of Taoist textual corpora, an essential step in constructing “Taoïsme” as a legitimate domain of academic inquiry.

At the methodological level, Matgioi’s insistence that Taoist doctrine must remain “obscure” and resistant to vulgarization (p. 4) reinforces his belief in Taoism as an esoteric metaphysics rather than a moral or devotional religion. Even when acknowledging shared ritual formulas with Confucianism (p. 32), he treats ritual as secondary to the doctrinal structure of the tradition. His comments on gender transformation in Taoist hermetic anthropology (p. 43) further exemplify his effort to recover the internal logic of Taoist cosmology, independent of both Christianizing readings and Enlightenment moralism.

Taken together, Matgioi’s works in 1895 and 1896 mark a conceptual shift already underway in 19th-century France: moving from interpretations of Taoism shaped by missionary distortions or comparative theology toward treating Taoism as a philosophical, doctrinal, and cosmological system with its own methods and categories. This reorientation set the stage for his later and more systematic treatment of Taoism. Matgioi occupies a distinctive place in the French construction of “Taoïsme” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly through his 1905 work La Voie Métaphysique (Matgioi 1905). In this book, he presents Taoist thought not merely as a collection of aphorisms or ritual prescriptions but as a coherent metaphysical system grounded in the natural order of the universe. He emphasizes that the Tao, understood as the sum of all cosmic modifications, expresses the principles of spontaneity, transformation, and balance, independent of moral, theological, or supernatural interpretations (pp. 34, 42). Central to his interpretation is the idea that human life, like all forms of existence, participates in these universal processes, moving through cycles of becoming and transformation in accordance with the Tao, ultimately progressing toward harmony and perfection (p. 42).

Matgioi stresses that the Taoist world view is rational, systematic, and intelligible. He critiques European misunderstandings of Laozi as a mystical or obscure poet, attributing misinterpretations to linguistic limitations or the imposition of Western categories on Chinese texts (pp. 2–3, 80). For Matgioi, the concepts of Tao, Te, ziran, and wu-wei form a coherent philosophical framework reflecting universal laws, rather than esoteric doctrines or religious superstition. He also highlights the subtle social and political insights embedded in Taoist thought, particularly its emphasis on decentralization, non-domination, and spontaneous social harmony, distinguishing these ideas from moralistic or prescriptive readings of Confucianism (p. 77).

While Matgioi builds upon the earlier philological and conceptual foundations laid by scholars such as Léon de Rosny, who first distinguished philosophical “Taoïsme” from religious “Taosséisme”, his approach is more ambitious in scope. Where Rosny emphasizes textual analysis and the separation of philosophy from ritual, Matgioi situates Taoist thought within a comprehensive cosmology, connecting metaphysics, natural law, and social philosophy into an integrated system (pp. XXI, 138). His work thus advances the French scholarly understanding of “Taoïsme” as a rational, naturalistic, and philosophically sophisticated tradition, moving beyond both mystical interpretations and moralized appropriations.

Building on the metaphysical foundations laid out in La Voie Métaphysique, Matgioi’s 1907 work La Voie Rationnelle (Matgioi 1907) develops a systematic, practical exposition of Taoist thought. Whereas La Voie Métaphysique emphasized the cosmic and metaphysical dimensions of the Tao, La Voie Rationnelle presents the Tao as a rational principle that governs human action, social order, and ethical responsibility. Across nine chapters, Matgioi treats Laotseu not as a mystical poet but as a rational thinker, articulating the doctrines of Tao, Te (virtue), and Kan-Ing (the law of cause and effect) in relation to both personal cultivation and societal governance. Finally, he situates Taoism in contemporary China, emphasizing its continuing spiritual relevance and the resilience of its initiatory traditions under modern pressures. Together with La Voie Métaphysique, La Voie Rationnelle positions Matgioi as a central figure in the French scholarly construction of “Taoïsme”, presenting it as a coherent, rational, and historically grounded system rather than a mystical or religious curiosity.

However, this rational and systematic framing of Taoism in French scholarship contrasts with the selective appropriation and reinterpretation that occurred when Taoism was received in the West, where philosophical coherence often overshadowed the lived religious practices. Western interpreters, consciously or not, also tended to neglect Taoist ritual and religious practices, including belief in deities and immortals, body-internal cults, Laozi deification, religious festivals, exorcisms, and the use of charms—core elements of traditional Taoism in China. This selective omission shaped a “Protestantized” image of Taoism in the West: like Protestant emphasis on personal Bible study and direct relation to God, Western “Taoists” emphasized individual practice and philosophical understanding while downplaying institutional rituals and religious authority (LaRochelle 2016, p. 432).

7. Taoism as Religion: Ethnographic Reconstruction and Documentary Scholarship

A distinctive and influential strand in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French construction of “Taoïsme” emerged from the work of Léon Wieger, a Jesuit missionary based in Hebei Province, whose scholarship—despite his ecclesiastical vocation—departed sharply from the theological frameworks that had shaped earlier Jesuit interpretations of Chinese traditions and the I Ching in the seventeenth century. Ordained as a priest on 31 July 1887, Wieger departed the same year for the mission of Southeast Zhili, where he initially focused on hygiene and medical practice. From 1893, under the guidance of his religious superior, he shifted to Chinese studies and more intellectually oriented work. This trajectory—moving from practical missionary duties to sustained scholarship—laid the foundation for his later contributions to Chinese folklore, Buddhism, and Taoism, and justifies his selection as a central figure for examining French constructions of “Taoïsme”.

While many of his statements remained oriented toward the propagation of the Gospel and in some ways inherited the perspectives of his Jesuit predecessors, Wieger’s research was based on sustained local observation and extensive reading of both Chinese and Western sources. Importantly, his earliest work, Rudiments de parler et de style chinois, dialecte de Ho-Kien-Fou (Wieger 1895), focused on the dialect of the region where he resided and already demonstrated his meticulous philological approach; this work was subsequently recognized with the Prix Stanislas-Julien in 1905. Although a Jesuit missionary, Wieger could not remain insulated from the secular sinological scholarship that was already laying the foundations of a French tradition of Taoist studies. His own observations and analyses, shaped by long-term engagement with local society and by extensive textual work, thus not only intersected with but also reinforced the emerging secular understanding of Taoism as a historical and cultural phenomenon. Building on this foundation, Wieger recorded Taoist practices and ideas in unprecedented detail, and his presentations of Taoist canonical texts became standard reference points for subsequent studies. Unfortunately, Wieger has largely been forgotten in contemporary scholarship, which tends to foreground twentieth-century sinologists such as Édouard Chavannes, Paul Pelliot, and Marcel Granet. From Wieger onward, French Taoïsme began to approximate the modern sense of “Daoism” as an autonomous intellectual and religious tradition.

His Histoire des croyances religieuses et des opinions philosophiques en Chine depuis l’origine jusqu’à nos jours (Wieger 1917) constitutes one of the first attempts to reconstruct the historical and doctrinal development of Taoism as a religion through rigorous philological analysis, systematic comparison of early texts, and close observation of contemporary Chinese practices. It represents a critical bridge between nineteenth-century French scholarship on Taoism and the development of modern Daoist studies. While the work extends beyond the chronological focus of this study, its importance lies in how it consolidates previous philological, historical, and ethnographic approaches into a comprehensive reconstruction of Taoist thought.

Wieger’s treatment of Taoism is grounded in textual history rather than theological polemics. He traces how Taoist thinkers reinterpreted classical notions—such as the graph 鬼 koèi—to articulate a cyclical ontology in which life and death are merely alternating phases of a single continuous process. He shows that Taoist exegetes drew on the derivative sense of 歸 (“to return”) to redefine koèi as “the returned ones”, aligning this with the “great Taoist thesis” of reversion to the whole (p. 54). Yet he emphasizes that the older meaning—ghosts as “dependents” reliant on their descendants’ offerings—remains the key to understanding ancestral cults (p. 54). Such analyses reflect Wieger’s broader project: reconstructing Taoist categories in their historical contexts rather than filtering them through Christianized or evolutionist models.

Wieger also situates Laozi and early Taoism within a reconstructed intellectual genealogy. He stresses that Jou should not anachronistically be called “Confucianists” before Confucius (p. 69), and that Laozi did not “invent” Taoism, but compiled its earliest extant text from doctrines preserved in the Zhou archives (pp. 143–44). While acknowledging the legendary accretions surrounding Laozi, Wieger insists that the origins of philosophical Taoism lie earlier, in pre-Laozian thinkers who left no writings but influenced the formation of the Daodejing (pp. 143–44). On this basis he describes Taoism as the moment “when Chinese philosophy is born” and begins to challenge the ritualist orientation of the Jou (p. 141).

In reconstructing Taoist cosmology, Wieger highlights the introduction of yin–yang dualism—first mentioned in a text attributed to Confucius—and explains how this new binary cosmology replaced the earlier system of the “five agents” and offered Chinese thinkers an alternative to the “High Sovereign” of archaic belief (p. 144). The Taoist system he outlines is a form of realistic pantheism: an original, subtle, material principle called Tao emits Te, which, operating in alternating modes of yin and yang, produces heaven, earth, and the myriad beings (pp. 145–56). Human beings share the cyclical destiny of all existence, undergoing transformations across different categories of being, including the animal, vegetal, and even mineral realms (pp. 145–56). Here, Wieger interprets Taoist doctrine not as superstition but as a naturalistic metaphysics.

Wieger further reconstructs Taoist ethics through classical and commentarial sources. He cites the Taoist “True Men”—sages who neither fear death nor prize life (p. 170)—and explains traditional metaphors for survival: life as a bundled faggot, death as its untying, and the soul as a flame passing naturally to new matter (pp. 175–76). His portrait of the Taoist sage emphasizes non-intervention, emotional equanimity, and conformity to cosmic rhythms: resting in yin, moving in yang, rejecting artificial morality, precedent, and ritual, and acting only when compelled by necessity (p. 182). Such depictions position Taoist ethics as a radical naturalism embedded in a cosmological vision.

Taken together, Rosny, Matgioi, and Wieger represent three distinct yet interconnected moments in the French construction of “Taoïsme”. Rosny sought to differentiate philosophical “Taoïsme” from ritual “Taosséisme”, offering the first systematic attempt to classify Taoist materials within a modern intellectual taxonomy. Matgioï, by contrast, advanced a metaphysical and esoteric reading of the Taoist tradition, emphasizing its universal, perennial, and mystical dimensions, and interpreting Taoism through a comparative, transcendental lens. Wieger, meanwhile, introduced a historical-ethnographic and philological dimension, grounding Taoism in textual, linguistic, and social contexts and establishing rigorous scholarly standards for its study.

It is within this broader transformation that Léon Wieger’s contribution should be situated. Although a Jesuit, Wieger did not revive a missionary mode of interpretation; rather, he inserted himself into an already secularizing field. His work exemplifies how, by the turn of the twentieth century, even authors associated with religious orders increasingly adopted the tools and assumptions of modern sinology—philology, ethnographic observation, and historical reconstruction. Wieger thus illustrates the extent to which the study of Daoism had moved beyond confessional frameworks: his missionary identity did not determine his method, and his scholarship aligned far more closely with the emerging academic paradigm than with traditional ecclesiastical hermeneutics.

In this sense, the trajectory of French Taoism studies is not a circular return to Jesuit perspectives but a process of secularization in which early missionary knowledge is gradually displaced, reworked, and ultimately surpassed by professional scholarship. Wieger’s presence at the threshold of the twentieth century marks a significant moment in this evolution—not because he represents a resurgence of Jesuit influence, but because his work demonstrates how deeply the secular and academic reconfiguration of the field had already taken hold.

8. Conclusions

The two-century trajectory of French engagement with the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the broader traditions associated with “the Tao” reveals a progressive and profound transition from Taoism—a term shaped by missionary categories, Enlightenment moral dichotomies, and early Orientalist assumptions—to Daoism, understood as a historically grounded, textually coherent philosophical and religious tradition. In this sense, the history of French sinology is also a history of conceptual refinement: a gradual shedding of inherited interpretive frames and a movement toward philologically rigorous, contextually sensitive, and methodologically self-aware scholarship.

In the eighteenth century, Jesuit missionaries established the first European representations of Chinese thought. Their works—rich in ethnographic detail but deeply shaped by Christian apologetics—constructed a hierarchy in which Confucianism embodied rational ethics, whereas Taoist practices were relegated to the realms of superstition, technical arts, or ritual excess. These portrayals formed the intellectual raw material upon which Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire built their own narratives. For them, Taoism was not a philosophical tradition to be understood on its own terms; rather, it served as a rhetorical foil for celebrating Confucian rationality and for reinforcing an idealized vision of moral governance consonant with European secular values. The term Taoism thus emerged as an externally constructed category, shaped less by documentary engagement with the Laozi or the Zhuangzi than by the needs of European philosophical discourse.

The nineteenth century marked a turning point. As the study of Asian languages began to be institutionalized in France—most notably through the work of Rémusat, Julien, and their students—the focus of sinology shifted decisively from speculative analogy and moralized interpretation to philology, textual criticism, and historical contextualization. Julien’s innovations were especially transformative. His insistence on grammatical precision, his formulation of the “règles de position”, and his monumental labor in casting more than eight hundred Chinese movable types at the Imprimerie Royale enabled, for the first time, the accurate reproduction and analysis of Taoist texts within a European scholarly setting. Julien’s Le Livre de la voie et de la vertu (1842), the first complete French translation of the Daodejing, was methodologically grounded not in Christian theology, comparative mysticism, or Enlightenment moral philosophy but in Chinese commentarial traditions. This shift marked the beginning of a new paradigm: Taoism was no longer simply a European construct; Taoism could now be studied as a historically layered, textually transmitted tradition.

By the late nineteenth century, this philological foundation enabled a more nuanced conceptual differentiation within the study of Chinese thought. Léon’s (1892) Le taoïsme provided the first systematic terminological distinction between “Taoïsme” and “Taosséisme”, replacing the older missionary dichotomy of Confucian “reason” versus Taoist “superstition”. Rosny’s analytical separation—rooted in linguistic, historical, and ethnographic evidence—reflected the growing specialization of French sinology.

The early twentieth century further advanced this process of scholarly consolidation. Although a Jesuit missionary, Léon Wieger exemplified the extent to which Taoist research had become secularized and academically professionalized. His extensive field observations in Hebei, his reconstructions of Taoist cosmology, and his philological engagement with commentarial traditions moved French scholarship decisively beyond Enlightenment stereotypes. Wieger’s work demonstrated that Taoist ideas could be studied as intellectual systems with their own historical logics, exegetical traditions, and ritual expressions. In this sense, the history of French Taoist studies reached a moment of self-reflection: the European category Taoism no longer dictated the terms of interpretation; instead, Taoist texts, practices, and cosmologies increasingly framed the terms of scholarly inquiry.

These developments illustrate a long arc of intellectual transformation. From missionary taxonomies to Enlightenment moral hierarchies, from philological reconstruction to ethnographic contextualization, French scholarship progressively replaced earlier external projections with internally grounded understandings of Taoist thought. What began as Taoism—a hybrid, often misunderstood label—evolved into Daoism: a field anchored in textual criticism, historical research, and philosophical analysis. The shift is not merely terminological. It reflects a deeper epistemological reorientation: the recognition that Chinese intellectual and religious traditions must be approached through their own languages, categories, and interpretive histories rather than through the conceptual structures of European theology or philosophy. In this sense, the story of Taoism becoming Daoism is also the story of the maturation of sinology itself.