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.
