The Limits of Utopia: Henri Duveyrier and the Exploration of the Sahara in the Nineteenth Century

This article describes the life and work of Henri Duveyrier (1840-1892), the distinguished French geographer and North African explorer. Duveyrier was committed to peaceful contact between Europe and Africa and was influenced by saint-simonian philosophy. After 1870 his utopian beliefs brought him into conflict with more aggressive French imperialists. Duveyrier's life reveals both the centrality of geographical knowledge to the development of European colonial theory, and the complex and shifting nature of the European colonial mind in the nineteenth century.