Arabs, Islam and Rights in the French Revolution

42 French History and Civilization Citizen Chawich: Arabs, Islam and Rights in the French Revolution Ian Coller On the evening of 19 June 1790, an “Arab” delivered a speech at the bar of the National Assembly for the first time in French history. He expressed, according to the procès verbale, “the sentiments of respect and admiration inspired in him by a Constitution destined to bring happiness to the entire universe.”1 Dom Denis Chawich spoke on behalf of the members of a deputation from the foreign communities in Paris who were seeking permission to participate in the first great festival of the Revolution, the grand “Festival of the Federation” to celebrate the imminent anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The actual words of his speech have been lost. The Moniteur recorded simply, “Un Turc prend la parole. La difficulté avec laquelle il prononce le français ne permet pas de retenir son discours.” (A Turk took the floor. The difficulty of his French pronunciation did not permit us to retain his speech.)2 However, the Mercure de France went further, reporting, “an Asiatic made his personal compliments half in French and half in Arabic, such that he could be understood only by experts.”3 However, the President of the Assembly, the Baron de Menou, declared grandiloquently in response, “It was Arabia that once gave philosophy lessons to Europe.. today France wishes to acquit that debt by giving lessons in Liberty.”4 He recommended that these foreigners should return to their patrie to inform their monarchs of the enlightened actions of Louis Ian Coller was formerly lecturer in History at Monash University and will be taking up the post of Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. 1Procès-verbal de l'Assemblée nationale (Paris, 1791) XXII: 22. 2 Réimpression de l'Ancien Moniteur: seule histoire authentique et inaltérée de la Révolution française depuis la réunion des Etats-Généraux jusqu'au Consulat, ed. M.-A. Ray, 31 vols. (Paris, 1863), IV: 675. 3 Mercure de France (1790), 310. 4 Procès-verbal de l'Assemblée nationale, XXII: 22. Ironically perhaps, the Baron de Menou would later convert to Islam while in Egypt, becoming Jacques-Abdallah Menou. Arabs, Islam and Rights in the French Revolution 43 XVI. But Menou was as mistaken in his interpretation of this embassy as he was about the revolutionary credentials of the French king: these were not innocent visitors goggling at the wonders of France, but radicals of various kinds from beyond France’s borders who were making a key demand of the revolution. Their participation in the Revolution would help to shape its course. This deputation is most familiarly associated with the figure of Anacharsis Cloots, the self-styled “Orator of the Human Race,” still at this time a relatively unknown foreign journalist named Jean-Baptiste Clootz, born in Prussia of Dutch extraction. Certainly, Cloots’ resounding speech, recorded in the revolutionary newspapers and reprinted en masse at his own expense, struck a powerful chord with the gathered assembly. In 1792 he would be awarded not only French citizenship but a place in the Assembly as a Deputy, although his fame finally brought him disaster at the hands of the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1794. But in many ways it was the deputation that launched Cloots from unknown to radical rising star, and its impact cannot be accounted for without understanding the potency of its universal claim. That claim emerged not simply from words, and not simply from theatre, but also from the political agency of the members of the delegation. Since the incomplete detective work of John Goldsworth Alger in the late nineteenth century, no historian has attempted in a serious way to trace the itineraries of the members of this delegation.5 Perhaps their very “foreignness” has made them seem irrelevant or suspect. Certainly the elements of apparent exoticism and the rumours spread by counter-revolutionary newspapers at the time have often scuttled serious enquiry with an uninformed or dismissive comment. In fact, these imputations of charlatanry or corruption that have dogged the deputation have centred largely around the conspicuous presence of the “Turk” Chawich. Even the highly sympathetic biographer of Zalkind Hourwitz, a key member of the delegation, has relayed these insinuations without seeking to determine their veracity.6 Such presentations have helped to make Cloots into a tragicomic symbol of the failure of Revolutionary idealism, whether as the apotheosis of buffoonery or the martyr of cosmopolitanism. But Cloots was neither of these things. Nor was he a lone voice crying in the wilderness. This paper will seek to demonstrate in a small way the nature of this important deputation through the other, far less well-known yet in certain ways more critical figure of Dom Denis Chawich, the Arab Jacobin. It is impossible to determine whether there was in fact any Arabic in Chawich’s speech. It may in fact have been the mixed “Lingua Franca” of the Levant, or, equally, an unfamiliar accent, and the noise of the excited assembly may have rendered a purer French incomprehensible. In fact, as I will suggest, the intelligibility of the speech was beside the point. But the bemused responses of the press betray also a difficulty in defining the position from which Chawich was speaking – was he a citizen, a foreigner, a “Turk” (a term used generally to denote Muslims), an “Asiatic” or an “Arabian”? Chawich himself signed the petition in French, following his name with a simple appellation – “Chawich, arabe” – but also in Arabic as “qass shawish” – foregrounding his title as priest, “qass.” These confusions over Chawich’s role are constitutive of his political agency in the delegation. Though signing himself “arabe”, he also identified himself in some sense 5 John Goldworth Alger, Paris in 1789-94: Farewell Letters of Victims of the Guillotine (London, 1902). 6 Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (Oxford, 1996), 104. 44 French History and Civilization as the representative of the Muslim world, as we will see. Indeed, the signatures on the petition demonstrate clearly that he was accompanied by other Arab representatives, including two Muslims, Hage Monakmeti from Tunis and Si Hamed from Tripoli. The identities of these individuals are difficult to establish: they neither spoke in the Assembly nor published in France. Chawich seems to have taken on the role of speaking on their behalf, identifying himself in some sense with Islam as a powerful vector of revolutionary universalism. The Making of an Arab Jacobin Al-Kahin Diyunysius Shawish, known in France as Dom Denis Chawich (or Chavis) was a Melkite Arab from Acre in Palestine, as he explained in the colophon to an Arabic manuscript he left in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The title Dom/al-Kahin emphasise his origins as a monk in the Congregation of Saint Basil, a Melkite Catholic order based in Saida in southern Lebanon. Chawich studied at the College of St Athanasius in Rome and was apparently brought to France in 1783 by the Baron de Breteuil, former French ambassador in Stockholm, Vienna and Naples, who was ultimately appointed Prime Minister by Louis XVI just two days before the storming of the Bastille. In his colophon, Chawich claimed to have “taught Arabic at the library of the Sultan, King of France.”7 Certainly he retained a curatorial role there and may have offered lessons as well. But his career in France was launched by a novel collection of tales from the “Arabian Nights” which he translated, we are told, into a mixture of French and Italian – most probably the “Lingua Franca” used in Mediterranean ports of the Ottoman Empire. However, as Muhsin Mahdi shows, Chawich’s activity was much more complex. He retranscribed Galland’s original folios, added new stories, translated some from French back into Arabic, and then passed the results off as valuable new manuscripts in order to make a living. His partner in publishing the “Continuation” of the Arabian Nights was the fantasy writer and mystic Jacques Cazotte, one of the infamous self-styled “illuminati.” Cazotte reported in his correspondence how he and Chawich had fallen out in the process of translation over Cazotte’s insistence upon retooling the tales for what he considered to be French literary taste: “Since my Arab knows nothing of our tastes, our customs or our morals, he sees fit to get into a rage against me.”8 In a telling turn of phrase, Cazotte joked that Chawich found him guilty of “lèse-Arabie” – an offence against the dignity of Arab culture. The editor of these letters remarked on Cazotte’s curious unwillingness to call Chawich by his name, constantly referring to him as “my Arab” or “the poor little monk” or even just “the man.”9 Cazotte’s letters are mostly devoted to the financial wranglings of the relationship, but they demonstrate several important things about Chawich in this first period of his residence in Paris: his struggle for some measure of financial independence, his association with other Arabic speakers in Paris, and his near-total break with Cazotte shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution. Cazotte states, “I have split entirely with my Arab, who has taken all the money and left me to pay for all the supplies … after delivering a number of unfavourable opinions about my way of thinking and acting to the 7 Muhsin Mahdī, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden, 1995). 8 Georges Décote, ed., Correspondance de Jacques Cazotte: édition critique (Paris, 1982), 100-1. 9 Ibid., 107. Arabs, Islam and Rights in the French Revolution 45 nègre called Chamay who has decided to take him on.” 10 In another letter, Cazotte revealed this to be only a racial slur based (presumably) on the darker skin of “Chamay,” since he explained elsewhere that they were both Arabs.

Load more