Couverture de : Balthazar : A Black Prince of Timor and Solor in China, America, and Europe in the 18th Century

Balthazar : A Black Prince of Timor and Solor in China, America, and Europe in the 18th Century



Trilingual catalog (French, Portuguese, English) in color of an exhibition presented at the Cité universitaire internationale de Paris in October 2015.
The exhibition is inspired by a research work on the same subject published by Frédéric Durand by the éditions des Indes Savantes.

Jean-Pascal-Balthazar Celse is known to historians from an address delivered to King Louis XV of France, published in Paris in 1768. In this booklet, a young dark-skin man claimed to have been abandoned in France in 1750 at the age of thirteen. In his thirties in 1768, he declared himself to be the "Prince of Timor and Solor" and also said he had visited both China and Quebec. Very little information was known about what happened to him after that.
These issues are explored in a book published in 2015 by Éditions des Indes Savantes titled: Balthazar: A Prince of Timor in China, America, and Europe in the Eighteenth Century.
Based on this study, the present exhibition endeavors to tell Balthazar's life story such which led him to play an unexpected role in the history of France. In reality, the Prince died in 1791. He had been in contact with numerous personalities from the world of politics, literature, and occult sciences. He clashed with the French East India Company, wrote to Voltaire, and was seen as one of the people who contributed to the fall of King Louis XVI and to the advent of the French Revolution in 1789.



Contributions