History News, Notes and Arguments: Identity and the Exotic - The Turk in Eighteenth Century French Literature

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.