In October 1757, Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, a journeyman columnist and government propagandist writing for the Mercure de France, published some “Useful Advice” for the country’s philosophes, in the process coining the pseudo-ethnographic term Cacouac to describe the freethinking “tribe.” Allegedly derived from Greek (from kakos, “bad, mean”) and designed to recall the senseless quacking of ducks, the term implicitly accused the philosophes of being a race of “strange,” “malevolent,” and “corrupted” creatures, whose venom was derived from their perverted ideas.32 Encouraged by the success of his
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