FRENCH MEDITERRANEANS FRANCE OVERSEAS: STUDIES IN EMPIRE AND DECOLONIZATION Series editors: A. J. B. Johnston, James D. Le Sueur, and Tyler Stovall French Mediterraneans Transnational and Imperial Histories Edited and with an introduction by Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS Lincoln and London © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Lorcin, Patricia M. E. | Shepard, Todd, 1969– Title: French Mediterraneans: transnational and imperial histories / Edited and with an introduction by Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Series: France overseas: studies in empire and decolonization | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015023758 ISBN 9780803249936 (cloth: alkaline paper) ISBN 9780803288751 (epub) ISBN 9780803288768 (mobi) ISBN 9780803288775 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Mediterranean Region— Relations— France. | France— Relations—Mediterranean Region. | Transnationalism—History. | Imperialism— History. | French— Mediterranean Region— History. | Mediterranean Region— Ethnic relations—History. Classification:LCC DE85.5.F8 F74 2016 | DDC 303.48/224401822— dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023758 Set in Charis by L. Auten. Designed by N. Putens. CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Introduction 1 PATRICIA M. E. LORCIN AND TODD SHEPARD PART I. RETHINKING MEDITERRANEAN MAPS (MAPS TO RETHINK THE MEDITERRANEAN) 1. Révolutions de Constantinople: France and the Ottoman World in the Age of Revolutions 21 ALI YAYCIOĞLU 2. Barbary and Revolution: France and North Africa, 1789– 1798 52 IAN COLLER 3. “There Is, in the Heart of Asia, . an Entirely French Population”: France, Mount Lebanon, and the Workings of Affective Empire in the Mediterranean, 1830– 1920 76 ANDREW ARSAN 4. Natural Disaster, Globalization, and Decolonization: The Case of the 1960 Agadir Earthquake 101 SPENCER SEGALLA PART II. SHIFTING FRAMEWORKS OF MIGRATION (MIGRATIONS ACROSS THE MEDITERRANEAN) 5. The French Nation of Constantinople in the Eighteenth Century as Reflected in the Saints Peter and Paul Parish Records, 1740–1800 131 EDHEM ELDEM 6. An Ottoman in Paris: A Tale of Mediterranean Coinage 168 MARC AYMES 7. From Household to Schoolroom: Women, Transnational Networks, and Education in North Africa and Beyond 200 JULIA CLANCY- SMITH 8. Europeans before Europe? The Mediterranean Prehistory of European Integration and Exclusion 232 MARY DEWHURST LEWIS PART III. MARGINS REMADE (BY THE MEDITERRANEAN) 9. Dreyfus in the Sahara: Jews, Trans-Saharan Commerce, and Southern Algeria under French Colonial Rule 265 SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN 10. Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghrebi Jew 293 SUSAN GILSON MILLER 11. The Syphilitic Arab? A Search for Civilization in Disease Etiology, Native Prostitution, and French Colonial Medicine 320 ELLEN AMSTER 12. From Auschwitz to Algeria: The Mediterranean Limits of the French Anti–Concentration Camp Movement, 1952– 1959 347 EMMA KUBY Bibliography 373 List of Contributors 409 Index 413 ILLUSTRATIONS 5.1. Staying French: Patterns of endogamy among the Rambaud and Alléon families 160 5.2. Mixing blood I: French families grafting upon a local dynasty 162 5.3. Mixing blood II: The Chénier and Amic families’ Levantine heritage 164 5.4. Mixing blood III: The Dellarocca family’s multiple French alliances 166 6.1. Three drafts of stamps to be used for “authenticated documents” 176 6.2. Detailed view of stamp used for “authenticated documents” 176 6.3. Letter from J. Anastassiades to the consul general of Russia, 1884 177 6.4. Detailed view of letter from J. Anastassiades to the consul general of Russia, 1884 177 6.5. Mold for an Ottoman debenture bond 185 6.6. Ottoman debenture bond, 1865 186 8.1. The Ceuta- Morocco border, February 2006 233 8.2. Tattered passport showing origin in department of Algiers 243 11.1. Lacapère’s schematic of the evolution of “Arab syphilis” 329 11.2. Children with dental abnormalities from hereditary “Arab syphilis” 330 11.3. Infant born with birth defect from hereditary “Arab syphilis” 330 11.4. Large X- ray machine used for “radiothérapie” in the Lemtiyyine clinic 332 11.5. The malnourished, inadequately clothed Bousbir prostitute 336 TABLES 5.1. Origin and gender of individuals in all parish records 135 5.2. Occupations in death, marriage, and baptism records 138 5.3. Occupations in death and baptism records among major groups 139 5.4. Origin and gender in death records with and without “itinerant” individuals 141 5.5. Endogamy and exogamy among the main communities according to marriage and baptism records 142 5.6. Origin of the spouses of French individuals according to baptism and marriage records 143 5.7. Occupation of French subjects residing in Constantinople in 1723 144 5.8. Occupation of French subjects residing in Constantinople in 1769 145 FRENCH MEDITERRANEANS Introduction PATRICIA M. E. LORCIN AND TODD SHEPARD The Mediterranean is associated with many images: the seat of Western civilization, the domain of the crusaders, a site of Islamic learning and culture, the playground of corsairs and slavers, a locus of exoticism and sexual fantasy, a space of exchanges, migrations, and invented or rein- vented identities, and— of relevance to this volume—an imperial sea. Recent scholarship on the early modern history of the Mediterranean proposes that the concept of this sea as a unified space is essentially a Western one, devised by the imperial powers that patrolled its seas and controlled its ports.1 The peoples of its southern shores (in particular in the Islamic states), such work suggests, did not share this concep- tion of the sea: rather, for them the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. By the nineteenth century, however, the idea that the Mediterranean was a unified space had either been absorbed by, or imposed on, the populations living along its southern shores. This volume reveals the significant French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth- century making of this singular Mediterranean. Mediterranean perspectives, in turn, reposition current arguments that modern French history must be understood as transnational and imperial. To these ends, French 1 Mediterraneans offers a critical study of space and movement anchored in distinct methodological lenses and interdisciplinary approaches. Since the early 1990s, efforts to “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” have been crucial to the most important works in Anglophone scholarship on modern France.2 More recently, trans- national scholarship has turned to other frames besides “empire” as well as non-colonial networks to explore “French histories.” We have learned much about how French people and French states were shaped in other contexts, and by non- French people. This volume aims to open perspectives that shed light on what has been obscured by blind spots apparent in such work. We seek to do so while maintaining the crucial insights they offer into the circulation and play of power (notably, its racialized and imperial forms). We also remain committed to the need that such approaches highlight to think beyond the limits of national histories and across or outside national boundaries, compartmentalized cultures, and the presumed preeminence of state actors. Scholars trained in French history, including the editors, have benefited enormously from the colonial and transnational turns. The approach we propose in this volume is different. A majority of contributors to French Mediterraneans were not trained as historians of France, the French empire, or other European polities, but rather as Ottomanists, as historians of Jews and Judaism, of the Maghreb, or of the Arab Levant. We have brought their work into conversation with new efforts among historians of France and its empire to do more than just take seriously colonial, non-European, or foreign actors and spaces in order also to take account of sources and historiographical questions from beyond “France.” Historians of formerly colonized spaces have highlighted the risk that “new imperial” historians may sweep aside histories that place non- Europeans at the center or that concentrate on concerns peripheral to colonial relationships.3 So too, Caribbeanists, Africanists, Asianists, Latin Americanists, or historians of the Middle East have expressed surprise and concerns that many “metropolitan” historians— students of the United States, of the United Kingdom, of France— who now proclaim transnational agendas ignore the conceptual (as well as much of the empirical) work that scholars 2 PATRICIA LORCIN& TODD SHEPARD of these so- called peripheries have already produced.4 That is, “new imperial” and transnational historians tend too often, in the name of looking beyond the nation- state, simply to export questions important to their national historiography beyond the usual borders. Our mapping of “French Mediterraneans” works to rethink what questions matter in conversation with the multiple historiographical discussions that have labored this novel frame, with “French” questions part of the discussion, rather than hegemonic. We have sidelined the still important question of how non- French or colonized peoples and developments “refashioned” France or the French in order to foreground other questions and new approaches. We