France and the Ottoman Empire - Conclusion

As I have attempted to show, although the exotic was an important facet of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in France, its role in forming a French identity through an us/them discourse must be questioned. The treatment of the exotic was not a specifically French phenomenon, and the degree to which the French interpretation would have differed from a British or German interpretation is unclear. What results is more often than not a return to an oriental/occidental dichotomy, in which France played a large but relative role. Instead, we must look elsewhere to the immediate concerns of the French populace for a relational identity, like Jews, Huguenots and the British. However, most scholars who treat the exotic have moved away from a purely intellectual and textual analysis towards a greater degree of contextualization. They recognize that this discourse took place within a particular political and social context, and for that they are to be commended. One more point needs to be made, and that is that the history of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and France in the eighteenth-century has yet to be written. It is time for a comprehensive monograph that treats political, economic and cultural factors together, rather than as separate sources of interest.

  Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

France and the Ottoman Empire - Exoticism in the 17th Century

There are three methods that scholars use to treat the genre of the exotic in European literature. One method used by Ottoman historians before the 1980’s attempted to justify the importance of Ottoman history by proving how the Ottoman Empire affected European history. Such “post mortem apologies” have fallen out of fashion because the scholarly community has come to recognize the history of the Ottoman Empire is an important category of historical analysis. Another method relies strictly on the formal position of exotic Turks in French literature through a literary analysis. This method looks at their characters as role players within a particular work, and seeks to elucidate their function through close textual analysis. This method also rejects as equally important the political, social, and cultural critique contained within the work of literature, something that the third method takes up with zeal. Closer to Stephen Greenblatt’s “New Historicism,” this final method places literature in a particular context to show how contemporary form a dialogue with literature through the author’s purpose. This method provides the framework for this paper to understand exotic literature and the formation of a distinct French identity in opposition to this literature.

The division between France and the Orient was peripheral to the main concerns of the French in the construction of their own identity, because it was not nearly as immediate as concerns over Protestantism and the threat from Great Britain. However, increasingly frequent diplomatic and merchant contact with the Ottoman Empire led to frequent treatment of the Ottoman and the exotic in French written and staged literature from the 1630’s through the French Revolution. The obsession with the Ottomans infused into French culture an attitude that objectified the Turk as representative of “eastern” stereotypes through a mixture of envy and terror. By setting a binary opposition between Occident and Orient, French intellectuals provided a model by which French could define what they were and were not. French national identity was shaped in part by this early exotic discourse that sought to define what was French and occidental compared to what was Ottoman and oriental. However, as diplomatic and commercial contacts with the Ottomans increased throughout the eighteenth century, the treatment of the Ottoman in exotic literature became less frequent due to the discovery of more exotic populations, like the Peruvians or Tahitians by Bougainville and Cook. As the fear of the Ottoman military subsided, their representations became less frequent. Enlightenment literature turned to newer exotic lands, not-yet colonized or “civilized” by Europeans to make their arguments about civilization and human nature. At the end of the Enlightenment, the Turk came back under the French public eye after Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and the rediscovery of the east, but the discourse was different. Now, informed by a century of Enlightenment philosophy and several years of French Revolutionary discourse about spreading civilization, the image of the Turk became inseparable from the European drive for colonial domination.

Without minimizing the importance of exotic discourse to identity formation, it is also important to keep in mind the French had a multitude of other identities against which to form themselves. David Bell’s point is well taken, that the relative proximity of Great Britain, the geo-political struggle that pitted the two at odds for longer than a century, the heated debates over religion and national superiority were probably the most important binary oppositions. Exotic discourse played a secondary role to anti-British sentiment due to the immediate nature of the British threat and the distance at which the Turks seemed for most ordinary Frenchmen outside of the Mediterranean Littoral. This lack of proximity prevented the Turk from entering into more politically charged debates in the eighteenth century, including those concerning religious toleration. It is important to keep in mind that the image of the Turk was not simply constructed from the French imagination, but informed by physical contact, however infrequent it might have been. While their representation in literature was distant and abstract, in the world of fashion and consumption the Turk left a lasting legacy through their brief visits to the Parisian high societies. What this suggests about French society, then, is that oriental style was a top-down phenomenon, beginning with the court and the courtly society, infused into theatrical representation as in Molière or Racine, and then permeated throughout French society with the theater being the operative mode of cultural reproduction.

Throughout the early modern era, the French came to see themselves as members of a common community, that of a national community. The eighteenth century marked a decisive era in the fomenting of a nationalist discourse. David Bell’s The Cult of the Nation in France highlights the binary opposition between Protestant Great Britain and Catholic France, and how French propagandists exploited the position of the British as the “other” against whom the French would form their identity. It is worth noting, however, that the nation as an end game is a contested discourse within academic circles, whose most fervent critic, Stephen Englund, referring to it as “The Ghost of Nation Past.” Furthermore, it is difficult to determine the scope and extent of national sentiment in France outside of the literate community, certainly in an age where the Abbé Grégoire could still count 1,001 different patois, or approximately one century before the historian Eugen Weber positions the most successful nation building program in French history. If we allow for a degree of nationalist rhetoric, then it is fruitful to examine the degree to which the Ottoman Empire figures into the construction of a French national identity. While there is certainly some truth highlighting the geopolitical struggle between France and Great Britain as integral to the formation of nationalist sentiments, it does not go far enough to account for the opposition between oriental and occidental.

Binary oppositions between the Orient and the Occident are not new to the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, as far back as Plato there is recognition of the possibility that the Persian’s belong to an eastern culture, while Greek culture is fundamentally different. The opposition was made between the Roman Empire of the west and the barbarian hordes of the east. The rise of Islam in the east and the crusading mentality in the west gave an added religious rhetoric to this opposition. Indeed, Norman Daniel and Debra Higgs Strickland maintain that Christian attitudes towards Islam were largely solidified in a religious rhetoric by the high Middle Ages. Italian humanists stripped religion from the equation by focusing on the Turks as barbarians. Although the renaissance humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealt with the Turk on an intellectual level, it was in some senses informed by an immediate fear of their proximity. Michèle Longino remarks that the Turk was evaluated with a mixture of admiration and terror: admiration for Suleiman, fear of Barbarossa. As the immediate fear of the Ottoman threat from the east subsided, the French were able to settle into a “neighborly” relationship based upon a cultural “inquisitiveness.”

Before continuing with Longino’s study of seventeenth century exotic, one must stop to examine the nature of the concept. Edward Said’s now classic Orientalism (1977) defines the term to mean the exchange between academic and imaginative ways of dividing Orient and Occident as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing...in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Orientalism as a series of connected discourses posited the superiority of the Occident to the Orient, ultimately allowing for physical European colonial domination over the subject areas. Said maintained that the late eighteenth century saw an “Oriental Renaissance” at which point European scholars suddenly became aware of the vast Orient “from China to the Mediterranean,” that relied upon older European texts and was infused with new European ventures into the east. Ultimately, for Said, Orientalism was “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”).”  

The most important critique to his framework is the connection he draws between the Orientalist discourse and the colonial mentality. Many scholars claim that, especially for the eighteenth century treatment of the exotic, colonial or imperial mentality is not yet evident and any attempt to locate it properly within the bounds of exotic discourse is risking teleology. Furthermore, the subject of eighteenth century colonial domination was a peripheral discourse, taken up by less important authors and intellectuals and not nearly as much by those who properly treat exoticism. Finally, scholars like Tzvetan Todorov reject any attempt to link the history of ideas to the actions they may have inspired, in a sense building a theoretical fence between intellectual and political history. John Mckenzie takes up the same critique, but modifies it by suggesting that Orientalism after Said is too closely tied to a political agenda, and that far from participating in a project of cultural and intellectual domination, Orientalists are engaged in a project of significance limited to the academic world. These critiques fall short of modifying Said’s thesis that locates colonial domination within a discursive subjugation.

While Said’s Orientalism rests on the assumption that European “discovery” of the Orient motivated its development, Michèle Longino and Fatma Göçek each show how the debates over the east came as a result of physical contacts between the two. While Göçek claims that the Ottoman embassies in Paris produced only ephemeral interest among French elites, Longino instead argues that contact between the Ottomans and the French resulted in a codifying of attitudes towards the east. The seminal works of Corneille, Racine and Molière were precursors of Orientalism, and their reproduction in the theater provided the French with a literal staging of the “other” that, through repetition and its role in education helped the French construct their identity. Longino begins by identifying the exotic as inherently interesting to a seventeenth century French subject. Evidence of this lies in the popularity of news reports from Constantinople written by such French travelers as Antoine Galland and Donneau de Visé. French attitude towards the Ottomans was not hostile, rather, envious at what the French perceived as their own shortcomings in the area of pomp and power. Longino identifies the French as positioning themselves against reports from the Ottoman Empire as to the nature of the Turk. What came of this attitude was not a sense of inferiority, but an affirmation of supremacy that supported an emerging sense of “French cultural solidarity and, eventually, national superiority” through the creation of both a foreign people and a French people in the popular imagination. Justifying her use of the theater, Longino states that it was “the shared mental space in which the French forge for themselves, out of their contact with the Other, a collective identity, and develop a notion of themselves as members of an ‘imagined community.’”

In some works Longino treats, such as Molière’s Le bourgeois gentillhomme (1670), reference to the Turks are explicit. In others, such as Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) treat the Turk through historical metaphor. It is impossible to understand French classical theater without reference to the politically charged atmosphere in which these works appeared. While Le Cid deals with the hero Don Rodrigue and his triumphal victory over the Moors, French audiences would have understood the Moors to represent the Muslim power that ruled over the majority of the eastern and southern Mediterranean. This distinction between a Frenchman and a Turk is informed by set references to religious and secular distinctions from classical and renaissance literature. It is in these politically relevant distinctions between self and other that Longino locates the early construction of Orientalism. Unlike Said, however, Longino emphasizes not only the role of the French in shaping this discourse, but also the theatricality of the Ottomans themselves. This is recognition that the exotic was not simply imagined and constructed, but lived and experienced. For example, Corneille’s Le Médée (1634) is informed by early French ventures into colonial projects, while Le Cid deals with the threat of Moors to domestic politics. Longino skips approximately thirty-five years to deal with a slew of plays by Corneille, Racine and Molière released between 1670 and 1672, or the high point of exotic obsession in French classical theatre. Significantly, these followed closely the Ottoman diplomatic envoy of 1669,the Ottoman invasion of Austria in 1670, and the war over Crete between France and the Porte, events that were implicitly represented on the stage. Through the staging of Frenchness and otherness in the context of geopolitical rivalry, Longino maintains that the French were preparing themselves for a colonial mentality through the suggestion that they could control other cultures just as easily as they could control them on the stage.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Identity and the Exotic Part 2 - Economy and Diplomacy

After the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, the young Louis XIV decided to break with tradition and rule the French realm without a prime minister. The years after 1661 saw the growth of monarchical absolutism around the person of the King; first Louis XIV, then Louis XV and Louis XVI. Beginning with Louis XIV, France embarked on a series of ambitious wars, with the twin goals of territorial expansion and European or colonial hegemony. The one hundred-and twenty-eight years between Louis XIV’s personal reign and the French Revolution also witnessed a striking “nationalist” sentiment come into existence through a near constant comparison with some “other” during these wars. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 also gave France a century of debate over religious toleration within the realm, centered mostly upon Protestants, Jansenists and Jews. The discourse over religious toleration was one strand of thought associated with the Enlightenment. By 1788, the fiscal strains of foreign policy ventures, the creation of a nationalist discourse and the intellectual “desacralization” of the monarchy were strongly responsible for the collapse of the old regime into revolution and dictatorship, leading among other things, to Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt a colonial mentality.

The history of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-seventeenth century is characterized by resurgence to power, followed by a succession of military defeats and internal reform. The second siege of Vienna (1683) ended in a full retreat, followed throughout the eighteenth century by mounting military defeats at the hands of the Russian and Austrian empires. Louis XIV himself as the “most holy king” and favored son of Catholicism was plotting an invasion of Constantinople to win it back for Christianity. Minority groups within the empire also began to exert pressure, as local leaders began to wrest autonomy from the sultan in Istanbul, and Balkan peoples began to agitate for their own self-determination. In this context, administrative decentralization away from the authority of the Körprülü viziers and the rising power of janissary elements weakened the ability of the sultan to conduct his own affairs. After the defeat at the hands of Austria and Venice cemented by the treaty of Passarowitz (1719), Sultan Ahmed III and his grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha agreed on the need for reform. The reform campaign resulted in increased diplomatic contacts between Istanbul and the west, including obvious missions to gather military and technological information from willing western hosts. Culturally, this renewed turn towards the west resulted in the increasing importation of western “lifestyles,” the Tulip Era (1718-1730) being only the most visible example of European influence.

Official French interaction with the Ottoman Empire came through the related spheres of economy and diplomacy. The interaction between the two states in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is largely influenced by the legacy of the entente between Francis I and Suleiman I in the sixteenth century. The entente established a history of cordial relations interrupted by periodic conflict in which, until the French Revolution, a thriving political, economic and cultural exchange took place. According to Edhem Eldem, French trade to Istanbul was lively, and grew until 1793,when the British blockade of Marseilles permanently disrupted trade. Trade in Istanbul became increasingly internationalized, and although still dominated by French merchants, became linked to a pan-European market economy. The activities of French merchants and the ambassadors who offered protection were integral to the French domination of mercantile activity. The Expansion of French trade with the Levant is concomitant with expansion of Dutch and British trade in the Atlantic. This helps to explain relative ease with which French were able to monopolize trade. Victory was ephemeral, though, as the British would come steaming back in the nineteenth century. The so-called Levantine trade was also a part of the developing French mercantilist policy, and the liberalization of this trade in the late eighteenth century signaled a shift away from this policy.

Most of Edhem Eldem’s book concentrates upon the link between the Marseilles merchant elite and the local diplomats in Istanbul. The majority of the commodities traded from France to the Ottoman Empire were textiles produced in Languedoc, with the occasional shipment of colonial sugar or coffee. It seems Eldem does not want to claim any particular French political mission to dominate Levantine trade. He suggests that the changing role of diplomats in protecting their communities, coupled with the increasing manipulation of Ottoman import markets by France (and Great Britain) laid the groundwork for nineteenth and twentieth century commercial and political domination of the former Ottoman realms. Most interesting is not the balance of trade or the commodities involved, but the manner in which the French state and the French expatriate community in exile were able to use politics and coercion to gain a predominant place in Istanbul’s trading society in early eighteenth century. Expatriate communities formed themselves around the French ambassador in Istanbul, who offered protection based upon the principles of diplomatic extraterritoriality. The French community was self-sufficient, with administrators, priests, bakers, doctors, etc. Their presence was a product of the favoritism shown France by the Ottoman Empire.

France and the Ottoman Empire had enjoyed a special diplomatic relationship since the time of Francis I and Suleiman I, characterized by mutual trading privileges and a loose cooperation against the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire. French ambassadors had long been stationed in Istanbul to carry out the king’s diplomacy with respect to geopolitics, trade, and extraterritorial protection of the French expatriate community. Although relations were somewhat chilly because of the poor behavior of Jean de la Haye, French ambassador to Istanbul from 1638-1659, the French were nevertheless granted the equivalent of “most favored nation” status throughout the eighteenth-century. The Ottomans, on the other hand, had never had a permanent embassy in France. A series of temporary diplomatic envoys, the first in 1533 and last in 1669, carried out official business between the two states. Aside from the official diplomatic channels that passed from Istanbul through Marseilles to Paris/Versailles, the only other immediate interaction between the French people and the Islamic world is through the Corsair raiders of the Barbary Coast, whose affairs disrupted both trade at sea and society on the coast.

The Ottoman embassy of 1720-21 must be seen in the context of Ottoman military defeat and their desire for a political and military partner in the rapidly modernizing west. France proved ideal both because of her military strength and for her longstanding relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Immediately after the Passarowitz, an Ottoman scholar published a tract suggesting that it was necessary to observe European technology in order to make much needed improvements to the Ottoman army. Ahmed III and Ibrahim Pasha decided upon an embassy to France for the purposes of observation, study, and espionage, but under the guise of informing Louis XV of Ottoman plans to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. A “man of the pen,” Mehmed Efendi was chosen for this diplomatic voyage. While the duration of the embassy was short, the impact was both important and longstanding in the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed Efendi met with the king, the minister of foreign affairs and many leading notables. He was exposed the lifestyle of the French elite, and brought back new ideas to the Ottoman Empire. Among the results of his observations come the introduction of military reform, new palace construction, introduction of new consumer goods and luxury items as well as the eventual introduction of the printing press with help from European minorities in the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps most important of all, Mehmed Efendi introduced new patterns of consumption and behavior among Ottoman elites and a taste for French goods and practices. Although there had always been a considerable population of French subjects in Istanbul and other port cities (mostly merchants, ambassadors, clerics and the artisinal population that supported them), it was never large enough to effect such widespread change as an Ottoman elite, himself familiar with this new culture, could so effectively do.  This new taste for all things French also led to the opening of new markets for French luxury items. Finally, this spawned increasingly frequent diplomatic forays into Western Europe. The Ottoman Empire took part in what is referred to as the “diplomatic revolution” in the eighteenth-century, in which states and governments increasingly normalized relations with one another through a permanent diplomatic presence highlighted by embassies and official protocol. Mehmed Efendi’s son was to serve as an ambassador to France in the 1750’s before returning home, eventually to become the Grand Vizier for a very short tenure. This highlights the recognition that it was increasingly important for the Ottoman Empire to maintain a presence in the west to protect merchant activity, maintain a political alliance, and observe western technological advances.

While Fatma Göçek stresses that the introduction of western elements into Ottoman society was of permanent importance, she maintains that the introduction of Ottoman elements into French society was only of ephemeral importance. She highlights both the embassy of 1720-21 and the Suleiman Aga embassy of 1669. The 1669 embassy was influential for introducing dress “à la turque” to the court of Louis XIV. Louis, quite taken with the exotic Turks, convinced Molière to include a Turkish scene in Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Indeed, “the preromantic vogue of Orientalism and the cult of Chinoiserie permeated the art, literature, and philosophy of the age. Gardens were altered in the Oriental fashion; Chinese pottery, furniture, lacquer painting were reproduced...To have a monkey or a green parrot was a sign of luxurious refinement.” While Ottoman influence upon the arts and styles of French elite may appear to be ephemeral, their importance lies not in the temporary nature of their popularity, but the permanent influence of their representation. What Göçek fails to grasp is that by objectifying Ottoman culture and separating the stylistic elements of its design from their traditional styles, the French were creating an aesthetic, if not political other against whom their nationalist sentiments would turn.

The other source from which the French received information about the Ottoman Empire was the travelogue. French explorers like Galland, Tavernier and Chardin, among others, were the one physical link between French society and Ottoman society along with the foreign embassies in Constantinople and the merchant communities that traveled between France and the Levant. Their reports, whether accurate or not, gave the French information about the Ottoman Empire that informed attitudes towards the Orient. It was its own literary genre, between fiction and objective reportage. The information that came from the Levant was not always accurate, and the interpretation of that information was certainly the domain of the readers who could construct their own mental images from it. In describing society, culture, and art, travel writers structured their actions around timelessness and a sense of routinization that led Europeans to believe Turks were immemorial. They also referred to local inhabitants as the ubiquitous “they,” blurring any real cultural difference that exists. The transition from the “they” of the travelogues and the us/them dichotomy that positioned Orientals as the “other” is not difficult to imagine.

Travelogues were also a manner by which the author compared his/her home society with the exotic east, naturally focusing on the most foreign or most strange to their sensibilities. For this reason, the harem received extensive treatment in travelogues despite the fact that most male travelers could not penetrate the inner circle of the harem. The most important western chronicler of the harem in the early modern period was Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who, as a woman, was allowed into this sanctuary. While the genre of the travelogue contributed an immense amount of information into western intellectual discourse, they had the capacity to obscure as much as they enlightened.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

History News, Notes and Arguments Now Using Disqus Comments

Regular readers of this blog will know I've been experimenting with a number of comment forms for my posts, and I think I've finally settled on Disqus. Facebook Comments haven't been as easy or as social as I would have liked, and for some reason, the Google+ comments box I liked completely disappeared during an edit of my page's CSS. How it happened, I don't know, and a weekend of trying to get it back hasn't helped. So, I'm settling on Disqus for a number of reasons. One, it offers a flexible sign-in...I've allowed comments from "guests" who aren't registered with Disqus or who don't want to post with one of their social profiles. Two, it's a really sleek design, although a little slow to load. It's my hope that visitors are reading the entire post, so by the time the comments box loads, you'll be in the middle of the article and hopefully thinking of something you can say! Three, it actually offers a "sponsored content" model that works for small publishers like myself. See the "Around the Web" Links at the bottom? Yep. those are sponsored stories that are hopefully interesting and appealing to you. Maybe it'll bring in some additional (well, just some) revenue to help us out at Dude, Sustainable! Leave a comment in the box and let me know what you think! Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Identity and the Exotic - The Turk in Eighteenth Century French Literature - Thesis

In 1940, Professor Clarence Rouillard published a book entitled The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature (1520-1660) in which he claims that the cordial relationship between Francis I and Suleiman I inaugurated more than a century’s worth of exchanges that profoundly influenced French culture. This understanding between the two powers allowed for increasing economic, political and cultural interaction that resulted in the proliferation of Turkish elements within the French realm. In particular, increasing contacts in the areas of diplomacy, economy and travel, led to an extensive treatment of the Turk in French literature. Rouillard groups the treatment into two opposite tendencies. The first treatment mixes fear of invasion with a general scorn for the eastern barbarian, wholly lacking in civilized mannerisms and content to live in a corrupt and despotic society. The second treatment expresses admiration for Ottoman justice, tolerance, military power and certainly the exotic elements of style and artifice. This approach was often used as the basis for a critique of French society and culture. Although written almost seventy years ago, scholars are still largely beholden to the two-image approach when evaluating the Turk in early-modern French discourse.

French literary treatments of the Turk in exotic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are numerous, and locating them in their contemporary political and social context demonstrates the degree to which a literary genre that relied heavily upon stereotype and hearsay played an immense role in the evolution of French self-identity. In particular, two important facets of this discourse left a legacy that influenced French society well into the twentieth century. On the one hand, treating the exotic was often a moralizing critique of either Ottoman or French society that was integral in shaping French conceptions civilization and culture. For example, citing the institution of the harem could be both a critique of an oriental despotism that oppressed women (in comparison to the civilized or humane treatment of women in France), or a critique of similar misogyny evident in French political and cultural attitudes. Similar comparisons are evident in the realms of politics and administration. On the other hand, a related discourse solidified the Turk as an “other” against whom the French could compare and construct their own cultural identity. This French identity has been both elaborated upon and critiqued in the past few decades, the most relevant of which is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1977) in which Said claims that French identity built in comparison with an oriental “other” was responsible for shaping a colonial mentality that allowed for French subjugation of oriental peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Without disputing the importance of the exotic as a literary genre, this paper attempts to relativize the role of exotic literature in identity building through three related methods. The first attempts to locate this literature in the context of political, cultural and economic exchange that shows how exotic attitudes were not simply an intellectual construct, but informed by contact and proximity. However, the contacts between the two were peripheral to the main political and social concerns of an eighteenth-century populace and thus were peripheral to the main concerns of the French intellectual community. The second method minimizes the role of the Turk in the exotic literature of the eighteenth-century by showing how the diminished power and prestige of the Ottoman Empire shifted the focus of Levantine literature away from a strictly Turkish approach. Furthermore, voyages of discovery led to an increasing knowledge and fascination with other parts of the world that provided the Enlightenment with more appropriate subjects to treat in their commentaries on society and civilization. Locating exotic discourse in the formation of French identity also assumes that this was a strictly French phenomenon; it obscures the fact that it was, by the Age of the Enlightenment, a pan-European discourse in which the French certainly participated, but not exclusively. Lastly, while this discourse was indeed important to the construction of French national identity, it was not nearly as important as the comparisons with other “others,” Great Britain being the most notable. Great Britain was a political, military and cultural threat with extreme immediacy. Consequently, the British were treated as the “other” not simply in the High Enlightenment, but much more extensively in the “low-life literature” with a wider circulation in Paris and the provinces, this paper shows how cultural interplay informed exotic literature, but that it did not necessarily lead directly to the colonial mentality that allowed for cultural subjugation in the centuries to come.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Habermas and Revolution - An Argument

The translation of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der buurgerlichen Gesellschaft into the English language The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society in 1989 could not have come at a more fortuitous time for scholars of the French Revolution and the last years of the Ancien Regime. Although a French language translation had existed since 1978, the English language translation no doubt facilitated the application of the Habermasian model to this particular epoch by Anglo-American scholars, precisely at the time when the bicentennial of the Revolution of 1789 was in the process of stimulating new and innovative scholarship into the political culture of the Ancien Regime and the Revolution.  Although most scholarship has been devoted to revising or attacking the model put forth by Habermas, most scholars seem to agree that the use of this model as a point of demarcation has been an intellectually fruitful endeavor and has led scholars to question previously accepted assumptions about the role of political culture in before and during the French Revolution. The intensity of the scholarship, however, lasted for little more than five years, between 1988 and 1993, or roughly between the publication of Joan Landes’ Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution and the French Historical Studies forum dedicated to the question of the public sphere in the waning years of the Ancien Regime.

The irony in the adoption of the Habermasian model by the proponents of a politico-cultural interpretation of the French Revolution is that it comes at a time when the same Marxist language that characterizes The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere had largely been rejected in its application to the French Revolution. Nevertheless, in revising Habermas’ assertion that the political public sphere developed almost overnight with the calling of the Estates General in 1788 and 1789, these historians have provided convincing evidence that a modified form of the political public sphere existed at least since the 1750’s, if not earlier. From this base, many revisionists have gone on to propose their own model that characterizes the late Ancien Regime as a society defined as a hybrid political/literary public sphere, in which public opinion (in a modified sense) was an important actor in the political life of the Ancien Regime. The purpose of my paper will be synthesize a new model of Habermas’ political public sphere in the late Ancien Regime by drawing upon the works of revisionist scholars in the area of political culture. The most important institutions that contributed to the formation of the political public sphere were the salons, the printing press, and the judicial culture of the Ancien Regime.

Before delving into the revisions of Habermas’ theory, it is important to analyze the model he sets forth of the evolution of the political public sphere as it pertains to France. For the sake of brevity in this particular essay (not in the final essay) I will only very briefly summarize his position. In late Ancien Regime France, there existed an oppositional public sphere that was different from the representative public sphere. This sphere was a proto-political literary public sphere, defined by censorship, oppression, and limited access. It was not until the calling of the Estates General in 1788 that, almost overnight, there developed a political public sphere that was characterized by a temporary life due to the peculiarities of the revolutionary contingency. Thus, 1788 and 1789 was a watershed that proved to be the fundamental demarcation between the literary public sphere and the political public sphere.

Thus, the model provided by Habermas proved to be a fruitful point of demarcation for many scholars whose aim was to revise Habermas’ model in order to better explain their conceptions of the political culture of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution. These scholars (who, for the sake of brevity once more, I will list in the bibliography and not in this essay), through taking issue with the assertion that that political public sphere developed overnight, have stressed the continuity of the political culture from the Ancien Regime to the French Revolution. Thus, the impression we get is that the literary public sphere described by Habermas was also nominally influenced by the discussion of politics, economics and society. The public sphere, however, was much more confined to the private, domestic realm than it was a sphere of its own. By its association with privacy and domesticity, this public sphere largely escaped the watchful eye of the absolutist monarchy, which was itself more interested in its own privacy and secrecy than it was with that of others’. There also emerged during this period a form of “public opinion” which largely escapes the attention of Habermas; this “public opinion” was less of an actor in the political public sphere as it was an abstract concept formulated by elites to legitimize their rule. Finally, the question of women’s participation in this pre-revolutionary public sphere also shows that sociability and inclusiveness were integral features of this political public sphere. Three main thrusts of scholarship, which will be discussed in my essay, have come together to provide a much clearer picture of a modified form of the political public sphere that existed on the eve of the French Revolution.

The first thrust is an examination of the printed press in the half-century before the French Revolution. Roger Chartier, Jeremy Popkin and others have argues that the proliferation of printed material before the French Revolution represented a continuity, and that this continuity was defined not in purely literary terms, but in political terms, albeit private political terms. The works of Robert Darnton and Jean Sgard also contribute to this history, although they align themselves against a political public sphere predating the French Revolution. The second thrust is the history of the salon before, during and after the French Revolution. The focus of their arguments center around the role of women in the salon culture, and although opposed on many issues, both Dena Goodman and Joan Lades provide compelling evidence that the salon was instrumental in the political public sphere before the French Revolution. Finally, David Bell and Sara Maza have explored the way in which the French judiciary of the late eighteenth-century provided a crucial and largely uninhibited platform for the discussion and resolution of issues related to government, economy and society. Together, these three aspects of Ancien Regime culture provided the basis of an political public sphere that existed in a modified form from the one described above.

It is unclear at this moment whether I will have space to discuss all three of these aspects in the larger paper. If it becomes apparent that I cannot, I will focus on the proliferation of printed material and reading practices (i.e. Popin, Darnton, Chartier and more) at the expense of the other two arguments.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Marianne vs. Sacred Heart - Sites of Shared Space

With the fall of the Paris Commune and the rise of the Third Republic, we return to three instances of shared space: the building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the aborted suggestion to couple the Basilica and a Liberty statue, and the opposition of Marianne and the Virgin Mary in Third Republic town squares.  It is my intention to evaluate whether the sources under review have adequately prepared us to understand why the issue of symbolism and shared space in the Third Republic was such a contentious issue.

The building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was motivated by the desire to expiate the sins of the secular Revolution and France as a whole.  Raymond Jonas, David Harvey and Claude Langlois agree on this point.  Jonas notes the proliferation of Sacred Heart dioceses during the “terrible year” the national vow of Fournier, Legentil and Rohault de Fleury, and the near unanimous consent of the National Assembly as evidence that the Basilica was a popular project.  The perceived connection between the Commune and the secular French Revolution gave it added urgency.  Reconciliation and reconstruction from the ravages of eighty years of revolutionary dialectic took center stage.  Expiation was the evident intent, and the interior mosaic decoration of the Basilica would mirror this intent.

Why was Montmartre chosen as the site to host this monument?  Jonas fails to appreciate the fullest implications the Montmartre site had upon the popular conscious.  He stresses expiation, the martyrdom of Christians and conservatives, and the battle between revolution and counterrevolution as motivations for its construction.  He ignores the attempt to manipulate the memory of those events through the spatial reorganization of the center of the Paris Commune, attributing its selection instead to historical, religious, and geographic factors.  In the end, the site selection came down to these questions, determined through political debate and enacted in the name of public utility.  It seemed more of a project of reconciliation and not expiation.  In the mosaics, Jonas sees a Catholic compromise, rendering a penitent France as Mary Magdalene, who was a former femme de nuit, much like the conservative’s mocking depiction of Marianne.

The spatial reordering does not escape David Harvey and Claude Langlois.  David Harvey makes a more direct link between the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the Montmartre site.  Harvey recognizes not only the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary battles, but also the secular and religious battles and class conflict between the bourgeois and the workers.  The new monument had to dominate the space of Paris and dominate the memory of everyone who would see it.  The Montmartre site was, according to Harvey, selected as the site where the ashes of the destroyed Commune would best fertilize the expiatory monument.  Some of the quotes he provides are compelling as well, showing that there was indeed a current that wanted expiation and thus eventual eradication of the revolutionary legacy.  The Basilica of the Sacred Heart was no ordinary monument; it was a symbolic “fuck you” to the worst excesses of the revolutionary tradition.

Where Harvey and Jonas represent the extremities of the Monmartre debate, Claude Langlois strikes the middle ground.  He agrees with Jonas that the politics leading up to the choosing of the Montmartre site did not demonstrate the desire to intrude upon the revolutionary space in an attempt at revenge, but there is a fundamental difference between the history of the monument and the memory of the monument.  Memory is indifferent to official history, and it became commonplace to associate the Basilica with the defeat of the workers.  Moreover, as one in a continuing give and take between secularism and clericalism it would lead Gambetta to designate clericalism as the enemy in 1877.  The Basilica of the Sacred Heart represents a decisive turning point in the history of the French Revolution; from here on out, the most contentious battles would be fought between secular and clerical grassroots organizations, with the public school system occupying the most prominent role.

Langlois’ account seems most believable.  Despite the intentions of the politicians and clerics who chose Montmartre as the site for the Basilica, the sharing of space between revolution and counterrevolution through forceful imposition could not be seen as anything else but an affront on the revolutionary tradition.  It is tempting to regard the Basilica as having supplanted revolutionary space, but in reality, the Basilica still sits upon a hill of immense importance to the communards and amid a neighborhood that was still identified with the revolution, and one must conclude that space is still actively being shared.  The complete and total occupation of space and symbol such as was attempted by counterrevolutionaries in Sheryl Kroen’s narrative was no longer possible; from the Third Republic onwards, revolution and counterrevolution would wage their battle through shared space.

The next instance of share space involves a gigantic Statue of Liberty.  On August 3, 1880, the Paris city council proposed placing a statue directly in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on public land.  Why was this proposal never carried out?   I would like to look at the problem through the prism of the works reviewed here.  Recall that shared space between Marianne and other counterrevolutionary symbols has a longer history.  She was often adorned with the fleur-de-lys, and in Mona Ozouf’s narrative she was even converted from former statues of the Virgin Mary.  Thus, shared space is not a new phenomenon, so was it inconceivable that an imposing Marianne could share space with the Basilica?

Given that revolution and counterrevolution had to share space in the Third Republic, I believe the natures of the Sacred Heart and Marianne were too antithetical to share space.  The Basilica worked not as a symbol for all Catholics in France, rather liberal Catholics were highly suspicious of the cult of the Sacred Heart for its perceived extremism.  Marianne was not a symbol for everybody. She represented a long line of militant republicanism, and a gigantic statue in the middle of a contentious area in Paris in front of an equally contentious memorial whose construction had been approved six years earlier under an ultra-conservative republican regime would have only highlighted the tensions that simmered stronger than ever in French society.  Thus, even shared space in a highly heterogeneous republic had its limits.

Finally we turn to shared space between Marianne and the Virgin Mary in town squares. They contested space with increasing frequency as the Third Republic progressed, especially in smaller town squares where Marianne would often stand directly in front of the Virgin.  Why was this possible, and the Marianne/Sacred Heart shared space not possible?  The answer lies in Ozouf’s and Agulhon’s narratives, which highlighted the visual and semantic similarities of the two images, as well as the longer history of the contentious relationship between the two.  French citizens would have been familiar with these figures in opposition to one another, because the real dichotomy existed here.  The ability to share space may have been an affront on the part of secular republicans versus clerical counterrevolutionaries, but the ability to share public space ironically led to the cementing of the conflict between the two.  In light of this supposition, I believe Jonas’ statement pitting the Sacred Heart and Marianne against one another, despite its possibly metaphorical intentions, is misplaced.

Concluding Discussion

If nothing else, these works have shown conclusively the importance of symbolism not simply to the revolutionary dialectic, but to politics at large.  The Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary waged symbolic war against Marianne, each side trying to win the hearts and minds of French people.  The dialectic between these forces is more complicated than the tension between revolution and counterrevolution.  The battles between republicans and monarchists between legitimists and Orléanists, between secular and clerical partisans, and between the government and the church, as well as the conflicts among classes complicate the political situation.  Can we then speak of a unitary counterrevolutionary dialectic?

There are more complexities than are mentioned here; nevertheless, dialectics between revolution and counterrevolution are indeed a useful category for analyzing nineteenth century France.  The complexity of the issue is what makes Sheryl Kroen’s and Mona Ozouf’s works so much more compelling, because the fight between revolution and counterrevolution is to accept the multiple sources of discontent.  Kroen shows unequivocally that there was a fundamental difference between royalist counterrevolution and Catholic missionary counterrevolution.  She also gives agency to the political actors from below, who receive relatively little in Ozouf’s work, denying the unitary conception of revolutionary festivals as staged political events from above.  Ozouf’s model is highly unitary and top down, which puts her at odds with Lynn Hunt who takes a much briefer, ground level perspective of the revolution in Politics, Culture and Class.  Agulhon and Jonas rely far too heavily upon a unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, remaining relatively aloof to the profound differences in the counterrevolutionary coalition.

Kroen is also, in her critique of Agulhon, a critique that could be projected to the other works as well.  Although he pays tribute to the unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution and the symbolic systems they created, the struggle does not form a central component of his argument.  Only in very rare cases does Agulhon directly juxtapose those symbols, mostly to show the visual and semantic similarities between Marianne and Mary.  Jonas suggests that there was an opposition, but provides no evidence that they physically or symbolically confronted one another.  Finally, Ozouf concerns herself with the different implications of space and time, but her analysis focuses more upon the transition from one system to another than the physical oppositions this engendered.

Finally, we must recognize that Jonas was correct in suggesting that the Sacred Heart did indeed go into battle with Marianne in a metaphorical sense, but this is insufficient.  Symbols are by nature visible phenomena, a fact that of which Jonas is cognizant.  To show the concrete effects that symbols had upon the collective consciousness and the collective memory of the French people, he must show conclusively that, as in the case of the revolutionary festivals, the restoration and the building Basilica of the Sacred Heart, these symbols were involved in a physical battle for space.  This may seem a Structuralist or Habermasian argument to pursue, but Kroen, Ozouf, Agulhon, Harvey and Langlois all stress the centrality of spatial occupation in which symbols became effective in shaping collective memory and consciousness.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Marianne vs. The Sacred Heart - Historiographical Review

To understand why symbolism was so important to both sides of the revolutionary dialectic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one must start with Mona Ozouf’s masterful study, Festivals of the French Revolution.  These festivals, an exercise in well-planned spontaneity, attempted to capture both the passions of the pre-Revolutionary festivals and the utopian and logical principles of the Enlightenment to celebrate any number of things related to the French Revolution.  From top to bottom, the revolutionary festival (and here Ozouf is inclined to see their thematic similarities from 1789-1799) was to be the reflection of the ideal principles of the revolution by forming a celebratory mirror as well as an attempt to create the new secular religion that worshiped the nation.

But festivals were more than just a celebration of the revolution.  They were above all an attempt to conquer public space and time through a complete reinvention of traditional columns of life in France.  While some historians prefer reinvention, Ozouf uses the word “purge” to describe the revolutionary festivals’ ability to banish from public eye such emblems and practices of older institutions such as the statues and confined spaces of the monarchical regime, the traditional calendar, and the symbols, rituals and holidays of the Catholic Church.  Ozouf is describing here the first and possibly the most powerful attempt of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries to control the collective memory of the inhabitants of France through an inventive if not forced policy of elimination of vestiges of the old regime.

Symbolism occupies a unique position in Ozouf’s narrative.  Festivals reinvented the rituals and traditions through a variety of mechanisms, including inventions and concepts founded upon the principles of Enlightenment rationality, songs, slogans, and certainly the civic oath.  However, the reinterpretation of traditional symbols, moreover symbols that would be immediately recognizable to the ordinary citizen, was central to these civic celebrations.  Thus the Liberty Tree and the Maypole were based upon older peasant symbols, the tri-coleur was the compromise between Parisian and Royalist colors, and the Gallic Cock a play on the weathercocks of the seigneurs.  Ozouf suggests two prototypes for the symbol of Liberty: the antique goddess and the Virgin Mary.  Her representations are varied, but nonetheless would be familiar to any Catholic.  She cites the example of a statue of the Virgin being transformed in a festival to a Liberty statue; the Virgin Mary literally became the female goddess Liberty representing the French Republic.  In light of Third Republic tendencies to place the Virgin and Marianne in opposition to one another, this compromise seems singularly fascinating.

Having established Ozouf’s supposition that symbols can dominate space and manipulate memory by replacing that of the older regime, the moment seems opportune to examine Maurice Agulhon’s oeuvre, Marianne into Battle, 1789-1880.  Agulhon’s study traces the evolution of the allegory of Liberty from its inception to its triumph as Marianne after the first insecure years of the Third Republic in both its concrete and idealized forms.  Agulhon wishes to look at these representations, the locations of Liberty and what they mean for the political and intellectual history of the time; there is no overarching thesis here, because representations were so variable.

Agulhon begins by highlighting the insecure nature of the early Liberty; drawn from antiquity and represented most often with a Phrygian cap and a pike to stress the antique origins of the goddess of Liberty, she actually received substantially variable treatment depending upon the artist or the commissioner and their own variable views on the new republic (pg. 1-16).  Liberty was always accompanied with different revolutionary symbols for the purposes of illustrating the variable political statement they were willing to make.  These adornments included the aforementioned Phrygian cap and pike, but also the fleur-de-lys, the red cockade, the tri-coleur, a lion head or a club.  During the Revolution, Liberty was but one in a series of republican personifications.  Her strongest competitor, the representation of the people of France in the form of Hercules, represented the embodiment of the strength of the French people (pg. 13-15).  The allegory of Liberty as a goddess would return in greater numbers during political crises and the subsequent revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1870 for the political and emotional power she could have upon the people.

Why was Liberty a woman?  Lynn Hunt provides an overview in Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution that is drawn mainly from Agulhon’s various writings.  Liberty represented the virtues of the Republic, “transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship.”  The image of a goddess to represent virtues and principles of government is an old tradition.  The image of a woman in a red bonnet or Phrygian cap provided a clear contrast with the crown.  Liberty was semantically close to the Virgin Mary.  The image of a woman provided distance between the pure virtues of republicanism and the excesses of those charged to carry out the revolution.  Hunt continues this last argument in the Family Romance of the French Revolution when she stresses women’s disenfranchisement from politics; women could be the upholders of virtue (ironic given her description of the Bad Mother) without being political actors.  In the end, Hunt concludes that the choice of the female allegory is “overdetermined.”

Hunt misreads the importance of parallel religious iconography and counterrevolution to Agulhon’s narrative.  The female Liberty did not take hold as the official symbol of the Republic until 1792, when in August and September the Revolution had to mobilize against its enemies abroad and against dangerous elements of counterrevolution at home.  This came at the time of increasing insurrections in Paris and the provinces and military defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Verdun.  Abbé Grégoire submitted a report that recommended the female Liberty should be depicted on the official seal as a way of reversing the influence of Catholicism through republican education (pg. 16).  Subsequent depictions of Liberty in the nineteenth century, especially during the July Monarchy, borrowed heavily from images of the Virgin Mary (p.58).  Agulhon provides this explanation:

The Catholic Church had left the imprint of its rituals and settings on the general culture.  These had almost always been appropriated by the Counter-Revolution and thus the Church involuntarily encouraged the Revolution to forge equivalent psychological weapons for itself.  The words goddess, rite, cult flowed easily from the pen and entered Revolutionary language in the form of approximative metaphors even before they were taken over by the counter-religion which eventually developed (99).

The importance of counterrevolutionary pressures upon the development and proliferation of Marianne in the nineteenth century are evident.  Although Napoleon arguably completed some of Liberty’s triumphs, he was also concerned with cementing his own legitimacy and enforcing the protection of the Catholic Church.  Liberty paid the price.  Sheryl Kroen demonstrates how the Restoration Monarchy was greatly concerned with enforcing oubli through the systematic destruction of revolutionary and imperial symbolism, and the July Monarchy would only tolerate Liberty in regions thought to be too legitimist (certainly not in Paris).  After the brief Second Republic, Napoleon III took to suppressing republican imagery, and forced Marianne underground.  Marianne, having recently been re-given her name (evidence suggests that Marianne was used as early as 1792, but it did not enter the popular consciousness until the second half of the nineteenth century) as a derisory term by counterrevolutionaries in Languedoc, emerged as inseparable from the Republic in public consciousness.  The experience as an underground symbol of opposition and the explosion of Mariannes during the Paris Commune paved the way for her proliferation during the Third Republic.

What is striking about Agulhon’s narrative is the importance placed upon symbolism and space both by proponents of Marianne and her opponents.  In one sense, the frantic building of statues, the dissemination of paintings and prints, and the frequency of live allegories testify the importance of spatial domination in official politics.  On the other hand, the vigor with which post-republican regimes took to purging public spaces of Marianne images is shocking.  Sheryl Kroen explores how important spatial hegemony is to the dynamism of politics.

In her book Politics and Theater, Kroen’s aims are threefold.  First, she attempts to restore agency and dynamism to the political culture of the Restoration regime, which had been sorely lacking; second, she stresses the importance of the theatrical nature of politics under the restoration, with particular emphasis on the metaphor of the play Tartuffe; third, she shows how expiation and the forced policy of oubli was the most important political theme of the period, but it was far from homogenous.  Kroen is able to expose a major fault line between the Monarchy and the Catholic Church, problematizing the singularity of the revolutionary dialectic.

The restored Monarchy and supporters of the Catholic Church were the two strongest agents in the counterrevolutionary reaction, but they did not operate in tandem.  The Bourbons struck an offensive tone with respect to purging the nation of the revolutionary legacy, but Kroen highlights their crisis of legitimacy in the wake of twenty-five years of turmoil as obstacles to their consolidation of power.  Kroen stresses the tensions between the overzealous Catholic Church and the Monarchy, whose program was equally directed at bringing clerics under their control.  The clergy wanted to remember (expiation); the monarchy to forget (oubli).  Kroen’s analysis highlights the discord between counterrevolutionary factions; indeed, the counterrevolution was not a unitary doctrine drawn from multiple sources of political thought as described by Massimo Boffa in the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.  It was not a “counterrevolution,” it was a “counter-revolution,” or systematic repudiation of the principles of 1789 through the contrary policies of expiation and oubli.  It was carried out by righteous destruction of the revolutionary legacy.

The counter-revolution was righteous because expiation was carried out with such vigor by supporters of the “new Catholicism,” which was strongly evangelical at the grassroots and supportive of the monarchy as the position of leadership for all Christians of the nation:

Expiation required remembering the sins of the past in detail because without remembering there could be no repentance and, therefore, no salvation.  What this translated into in practice was a religious revival in which missionaries traveled around France doing everything they could to remind the population of the revolutionary interlude...raised the specter of the Enlightenment...reopened old controversies: between constitutional and refractory priests and their congregations, between acquirers of biens nationaux...between supporters of the Revolution...and royalists...erecting mission crosses where a cross had been violently attacked during the Revolution...reconsecrating the landscape to Christ and their King.

While Kroen’s subject in the first part of her book is the unmaking of the revolutionary legacy through expiation and oubli, the second part of her book focuses on the agency of the dispossessed in preserving that legacy.  Although denied participation in the political process, French citizens reacted through clandestine politics on the one hand, and public visual and ritual display and resistance on the other.  Her thesis is much the same as that of Maurice Agulhon on the subject of Marianne in the Second Empire: when driven underground, the revolution consolidated and legitimizes.  The reaction against the worst abuses of the Catholic Church during the Restoration fomented popular anticlericalism and the politics of ritual resistance that lead to national revolution in July of 1830, as opposed to a strictly Parisian revolution.  Tartuffe was the greatest symbol of this ritual resistance, and has its parallels in the staging of politics as theater. Kroen does not deal explicitly with Liberty as allegory.

The strength of Kroen’s work is most definitely the care with which she constructs and nuances the revolutionary dialectic not strictly on the political level, but on the symbolic level.  Kroen’s work is the only work under review here in which we get a palpable sense of the opposition between revolutionary symbol and counterrevolutionary symbol, not just symbols as representative of the revolutionary dialectic.  Raymond Jonas’ work does not explore this phenomenon and is consequently not as compelling in the history of the revolutionary dialectic.

Whenever Marianne went into battle, the Sacred Heart met her.  That is the proposition used by Raymond Jonas to demonstrate the importance of the Sacred Heart as a symbol of defense against the godless Revolution.  Essentially, Jonas traces the lineage of the Cult of the Sacred Heart from its virtual inception (the Cult of the Sacred Heart existed before the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoq, but negligibly in numbers) where it became inextricably linked to the triumph of the French nation as favored by God, through its use as a protective emblem against the Marseille plague of 1720-1721 and to its inception as an emblem of counterrevolution in the Vendée.  Jonas’ account of the counterrevolution essentially follows the argument of Timothy Tackett in Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth Century France in seeing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as the most important issue leading to conflict against the French Revolution, while ignoring the social and economic factors such as urbanization, peasant-bourgeois relations, and systems of landowning that may have exacerbated its effect.  The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was more of a wedge issue or a referendum on the progress of the revolution not just among clerics, but one among the people that set social forces in motion either for or against the French Revolution.  Jonas gives far too little agency to the peasantry in making their own decisions, and far too much in the ability of the clergy to coerce parishioners.

Jonas shows how refractory priests used their opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the appropriation of church property to speak out in divine terms against revolutionary excesses, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Enlightenment rationality and anticlericalism, which were seen to be an affront on the social and cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church (62, 75).  Whereas revolutionaries spoke of the ignorance and fanaticism of Catholic values, the Catholic Church countered by singling out liberty, equality and Voltaire as the most dangerous of evils and supported the supposition that the Revolution was divine retribution for a France that had sinned.  Redemption and salvation required expiation (67-75).  At the urging of refractory priests, pilgrimages to sites like Lourdes increased dramatically, demonstrating the popular anxiety over the fate of France in the face of popular and often violent anti-clericalism (76-83).

The Sacred Heart was adopted as a protective emblem against revolutionary evil partly as a result of its perceived successes in the Marseille epidemic, and partly as a result of rumors surrounding the royal family and their own private devotion to the Sacred Heart (Marie Antoinette possessed an emblem, and it was rumored Louis XVI consecrated France to the Sacred Heart) (86-100).  The unity of the Catholic Church and the Monarchy in their devotion to the Sacred Heart compelled Vendéens to use it as a symbolic emblem in their revolt against the revolutionary government.  The Vendée war looked as much like a war of religion as it did a war about politics to Jonas (100-111).  The Machecoul Massacres brought secular revolutionary symbols back to the Vendée, and presumably, along with the confrontation against the pro-revolutionary National Guard, this is where Jonas sees the first meeting of Marianne and the Sacred Heart in battle (113-115).

Jonas agrees with Sheryl Kroen concerning the Restoration.  The cult of the Sacred Heart was transformed into a symbol of Christian missionary activity that placed a heavy stress upon expiation.  The themes of revolutionary discord, reconciliation through Christian renewal, restored moral order of the church and a public consecration to the Sacred Heart appeared among its partisans.  The new Bourbon regime was too moderate to consider public consecration to a symbol that carried so much counterrevolutionary baggage.  Its detractors protested by creating a Cult of the Sacred Heart of Marat (Jonas Chapter V).

Jonas skips ahead forty years in history and returns to the theme of the Sacred Heart before its hour of national triumph.  Catholic memory of 1870 and 1871 took place within the confines of the Sacred Heart as a vehicle to imagine divine judgment and condemnation for France’s sinful past (148).  The defeat at the hand of the Prussians supported the degeneration theory.  The Paris Commune’s killing of clerics and references to Jacobinism confirmed the connection between the two revolutions.  The fallout from the struggle to defend the Vatican against a secular revolution further antagonized Catholics against the secular revolution.  The responses are well-known; Vendéens moved to defend the Vatican adorned with Sacred Heart emblems, others marched into a suicide charge against the Prussians north of Paris, while Alexander Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury vowed to build a monument to the Sacred Heart that was to make amends for the rupture brought by the French Revolution (150-176).

The fall of the Paris Commune paved the way for national expiation in the form of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Butte de Montmartre.  Jonas credits the success of the Sacred Heart motif to its proponents through their mass marketing techniques.  Before the Basilica of the Sacred Heart invaded Parisian space, the emblem of the Sacred Heart had invaded French space in the form of thousands of pin-sized emblems.  The importance of visibility of the Sacred Heart ultimately culminated in placing the Basilica where it could be visible to anyone in Paris.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.