Orientalism in Early Modern France Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime
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Orientalism in Early Modern France Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime Ina Baghdiantz McCabe Oxford • New York Disclaimer: This eBook does not include the ancillary media that was packaged with the original printed version of the book. First published in 2008 by Berg Editorial offi ces: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Ina Baghdiantz McCabe 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data McCabe, Ina Baghdiantz. Orientalism in early modern France : Eurasian trade, exoticism, and the Ancien Régime / Ina Baghdiantz McCabe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–1–84520–374–0 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1–84520–374–7 (cloth) 1. France—Civilization—Asian infl uences. 2. France—Relations— Asia. 3. Asia—Relations—France. 4. France—Foreign relations—1589– 1789. I. Title. DC33.3.M33 2008 303.48'2440509032—dc22 2008001197 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 374 0 (Cloth) Typeset by Apex Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn www.bergpublishers.com Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 PART I: ONE NATION, ONE WORLD UNDER FRENCH RULE 1 The First Orientalist, Guillaume Postel 15 2 The Ambassadors 37 3 France in the World 69 4 Orientalism As Science: The Production of Knowledge under Louis XIV 101 5 The Turks and the ‘Other’ Within: The Huguenots 137 PART II: CONSUMING THE EXOTIC 6 Coffee and Orientalism in France 163 7 A “Barbarous Taste”: The Transmission of Coffee Drinking 183 8 Domesticating the Exotic: Imports and Imitation 205 9 The Politics of Pleasure: French Imitations of Oriental Sartorial Splendor and the Royal Carrousels 231 10 Orientalism, Despotism, and Luxury 257 Epilogue 291 Notes 299 Primary Sources 361 Selected Secondary Sources 381 Index 399 – iii – Dedication To Anna and Bill Acknowledgments I was privileged to receive a grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard to support the work for this book. My fi rst thanks goes to the Radcliffe Institute and to its dean, Drew Gilpin Faust. The fi rst meeting held at Radcliffe that year was on September 12, 2001. We arrived to sit in a room full of sad and silent peo- ple. Dean Faust, as new to the institute as we were, acknowledged that this was a time like no other; she told us that we would be a special group and forge special bonds. No one knew what was going to happen next on that day. Monica H. Green, new to Boston, was worried about her children, both of whom had Arabic last names; she had just dropped them off in a school where they knew no one. Afsaneh Najmabadi and I, perfect strangers until that moment, did not exchange a handshake but rather a tearful embrace. A fellow who was a New Yorker, a writer who lived on Canal Street, never came to the institute. With infi nite gratitude I write that the year went on and it was one of the best years of my life. I planned and started three books, not one, and fi nished an old project planned since 1998. Yet sadly, as we all knew would happen that morning, views of Islam became topical, and the book took on a new urgency in hopes to show that dialogue and exchanges had long existed between cultures. One person in the room did something much more extraordinary than any of us there. As I write this, it had just been announced the day before that Drew Gilpin Faust would be the next president of Harvard University. Few words could have been spoken on that day that would not have sounded shallow, but Drew kept us all together and focused us on work in the midst of emotional chaos. My thanks go to my colleagues at Radcliffe and at Harvard who helped me shape my ideas by commenting on this book project at its inception or who asked important questions that transformed it: Lizbeth Cohen, Monica Green, Wilt Idema, Cemal Kefa- dar, Alice Kessler-Harris, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Irene Silverblatt, and Judith Vicniac. Many other people, whether privately or publicly, have commented on this book and have read it at least in part; I claim all errors as mine and thank Suraiya Faroqhi, Leila Fawaz, Vartan Gregorian, Alisha Rankin, Edward Said, Robert W. Thom- son, Dirk Van der Cruysse, and Abby Zanger. My gratitude goes to my friend and colleague Jeanne Marie Penvenne for her unfailing support during an especially diffi cult year as I was completing corrections to my manuscript. My thanks also go to Lucette Valensi and Madeleine Dobie for sending me bibliographical information. Special thanks goes to François Moureau for inviting me to present the book to a seminar at the Sorbonne, Paris, where I was once a student myself. Many students – v – vi • Acknowledgments have contributed to this book: Emma Wright from Harvard, Rachel Bingham from the Fletcher School, and most of all my research assistant Julie Foster. Tufts gradu- ate students Jodi Larson and Lindsay Schakenbach helped to proofread the fi nal manuscript. I owe much to my editors at Berg: Ian Critchley, Julia Hall, Julene Knox, and most of all Kathleen May, who commissioned this book. Others who have been instrumental with many aspects of the book are Julia Rosen, Emily Metcalf, Ellie Wilson, and Ken Hassman. Annette Lazzara at the history department facilitated all the administrative aspects of the travel to France that this book required for several years. This book could not have been written without my nearly twenty years in France. For ten years I lived in Rue Laplace, a few feet from where Guillaume Postel, France’s fi rst Orientalist, had studied at the College Sainte Barbe, now a noisy high school. From my window I could see where Antoine Galland had been buried. The initial idea for this book dates back to the late 1970s, when it would have been near impossible to write; since then so many other books have made this one possible. I would like to thank a fellow historian who has been formative in my life, my friend and classmate Philippe Rivé, whose love for the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries made me abandon working on the twentieth; ironically he now focuses on World Wars I and II. Other friends or family that have helped me in one way or another include my be- loved stepmother Anoush Baghdiantz, Sylvie Merian at the Morgan library, Rubina Saidkhanian and René Jacobs, and in the very last phase of the book Jan Fidjeland. I thank my professors at the Sorbonne Pierre Chaunu, Jean Ganiage, Jacques Heers, and Michel Mollat; although they have taken no active part in this book, my educa- tion in Paris is at its very foundation. The book is dedicated to the two people that are my life, my husband Bill McCabe and my daughter Anna. February 13, 2007 Introduction Furs, silks and fi ne cottons, stimulants—tea, coffee, sugar, rum, gin, tobacco and spices of all kinds—scrimshaw and curios for cabinets, travel books and atlases, topazes, feath- ers, orientalizing and Americanizing changes in clothing and ornament: these things did not simply “improve the quality of life” in the metropole, they altered it, and altered the people who wore, ate, owned, contemplated, and changed their moods with them. “You are what you eat,” and Europe was cannibalizing the places and peoples that eventually made up its empires.1 Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science One moment marks the inception of French imperial presence in Asia. In great se- crecy on April 12, 1798, the French Directory ordered the creation of the “Army of the Orient,” naming Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) its commander in chief. On May 19 the French forces left Toulon, comprising 400 vessels, 50,000 men, over 1,000 pieces of artillery, 567 vehicles, 700 horses, and a slew of French scientists and artists, who were not apprised of their secret destination. The aims of the Egyptian invasion were not only to defeat the English and to establish a French empire in the Mediterranean, but also to conduct a scientifi c survey of Egypt. Edward Saïd’s fa- mous book Orientalism begins with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. He argued thirty years ago that empire and orientalist science went hand in hand. The mission of the Armée d’Orient’s orientalists and scientists was to study Egypt to advance French knowledge of the world. Most of the orientalists who accompanied the French expe- dition were the students of one man, Sylvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), a man closely studied by Edward Saïd in Orientalism.2 In October 1798, as French cannons were shelling the Al Ahzar mosque, Joseph Marcel risked the fl ames to rescue some invaluable Quranic texts.3 After the end of the expedition, he was appointed director of the Imprimerie nationale in Paris where he as- sisted with the publishing of the multivolume Description of Egypt. Silvestre de Sacy and his many students were of great service to France’s imperial project and were re- warded with peerages and government posts. This well-known Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, and its resulting scientifi c survey, were the products of very long-held French imperial hopes. The earlier history of French Orientalism is less well known.4 This book is as much about the orientalizing of France and the French accumulation and consumption of oriental goods as it is about Orientalism in France.