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.
