Orientalism in Early Modern France

Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe

Oxford • New York

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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 influences. 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
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 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 first thanks goes to the Radcliffe
Institute and to its dean, Drew Gilpin Faust. The first 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 infinite 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
finished 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
difficult 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 final
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 first 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 fine 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 scientific 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 flames 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 scientific 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. It ends with

–1–
2 • Orientalism in Early Modern France

Anquetil Duperron, the man Saïd considered to be the first orientalist.5 The book ends
where Edward Saïd’s book began, with the imperial age, the invasion of Egypt.
The history of French orientalism starts after the very first French diplomatic rela-
tions with the Ottomans, established by a letter that traveled hidden in a boot in 1526
under Francis I. The Egyptian invasion itself had an older history, a textual one. As
early as 1672, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) traveled to meet Louis XIV
(1638–1715) and present him with his pamphlet titled Thoughts on Public Safety,
which argued for an invasion of Egypt. Leibniz contended that the states of Europe
should not fight each other, but conquer the Muslim world. In Leibniz’s plan of
global conquest, Egypt was the first stage in the domination of the Muslim world.
According to his plan, the rule of Egypt should fall to France and make France the
mistress of the Mediterranean; Egypt was the cornerstone of a French empire and
crucial for the control of a route to India. Leibniz had depicted Egypt variously as the
“eye of countries,” the “mother of grain,” the “seat of commerce.”6 Attacking the Ot-
tomans would have spared the German provinces from French aggression. A century
later, in 1769, Louis XV (1710–1774) was approached by the Duc de Choiseul, who
argued against continuing the costly French colonial efforts in North America and
recommended the conquest of Egypt in its stead. As a consequence of de Choiseul’s
policies, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, even as a revolution took
place in the American colonies and then later in France, the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs was inundated with reports and accounts from Egypt by French travelers,
merchants, and consular agents.
A few years later, in 1777, Baron de Tott was sent by the Foreign Office on a se-
cret mission to explore the advantages of securing Egypt as a French colony. He was
accompanied by several specialists, including Sonnini de Manincourt, a naturalist
who wrote his own travel account.7 Such examples make the relationship between
imperialism and travel and Orientalism clear, as Saïd has long argued. However,
until the late seventeenth century such direct links between policy and travel ac-
counts were not as common, nor always as overt. The birth of French Orientalism was
a long and complex process that was not always directly commissioned, financed, or
even instigated by the French court. Did this mean that early Orientalism was not im-
perial? A scrutiny of Orientalism’s early days answers this question in Chapters 1, 2,
and 3 by exploring how it was sponsored and what transformations of knowledge it
produced in France. This is a book about France. Early Orientalisms had an immense
impact on French culture and on French institutions, not on the “Orient.”8 It is argued
here that if the Orient was an object of study, it was France that was the subject of
transformations. France shaped itself while engaging with the rest of the world.
Upon Louis XIV’s long-awaited birth on September 5, 1638, the famous astrolo-
ger Campanella predicted that Louis XIV would grow to be the hero anticipated by
the mystic Abbot Joachim of Fiore, the solar hero who would at last eliminate the
Muslim anti-Christ from the face of the earth.9 This is often a predictable cliché in
discussing Islam and France. Yet, this was predicted of a monarch who succeeded
 Introduction • 3

a line of kings allied to the mightiest of Muslim rulers, the Sultan. Since Francis I,
the French were the main European allies of the powerful Ottomans, enemies of the
Hapsburgs who loomed large on the borders of Europe. The concept of Gallia Orien-
talis, Louis’s dream of empire in Asia, was based on the belief that it was his duty to
reconquer Charlemagne’s empire and to extend it, and he fought the Hapsburgs for
the title of emperor.10 Louis also wanted to convert everyone in the world, including
the king of Siam, to Catholicism. There was a large difference between this predict-
able, deep-rooted, and rather repetitious imperial discourse, and actual policy. This
makes it all the more important to study Orientalism within its historical context, as
the gap between discourse and reality was often a vast one. While discussing cru-
sades, as his predecessors had done for over six centuries, everything was done to
maintain France’s friendship with the Ottomans for the merchants of Marseilles.
Most of France’s trade depended on the Levant markets. It is stressed here that
the Normans ran the Atlantic trade and the Provençeaux ran the Levant trade, quite
independently from the court. France’s Eurasian trade grew exponentially during
Louis’s reign. The merchants of Marseilles were instrumental. Antoine Galland and
many other orientalists were all attached to diplomatic missions funded by the mer-
chants of Marseilles, not by the court. The king’s discourse was just one among
many. The first three chapters examine France’s contacts with the world and some of
the writing it produced, while Chapter 4 concentrates on the creations of institutions
under Louis to gather, control, and classify the writing produced by French travelers.
It highlights the role of Orientalism in the birth of science and in the creation of the
French Academy of Sciences.
Antoine Galland in his Paroles remarquables, bon mots et maxims remarquables
des Orienteaux wrote: “[U]nder the name oriental I do not only mean the Arabs and
the Persians, but the Turks and the Tartars and nearly all of the peoples of Asia all
the way to China, be they Muslims, pagans or idol worshipers.”11 Additionally the
Americas were often conflated with Asia. The French term les Indes referred to both,
and despite the adjectives of orientales and occidentales, there was often a fusion of
Asia and the Americas in French views. A crucial shift took place over the century.
In the 1606 Nicot dictionary, orient only denoted where the sun rises. In 1694 in the
first dictionary of the Académie française it becomes geographically defined: Orient,
Se prend aussi pour les Estats, les Provinces de la grande Asie, comme l’Empire
du Mogol, le Royaume de Siam, de la Chine, &c. Les regions de l’orient. les Peu-
ples d’orient. les Princes d’orient. voyager en orient. cela vient d’orient. des perles
d’orient. une agate d’orient.12 Even the definition pointed to oriental goods, pearls,
and agates. Orientalism was closely tied to Eurasian trade, and this is how it is stud-
ied here, through merchants, travelers and diplomats. The fist five chapters argue in
different ways that France’s trade relations were closely tied to this very diverse and
often contradictory textual production.
Chapter 5 concentrates on the Huguenots and their importance as sailors, mer-
chants, and explorers. The role of the Huguenots is alluded to in Chapter 3 and is
4 • Orientalism in Early Modern France

studied more closely in Chapters 4 and 5 as their role in Louis’s navy and his over-
seas ambitions was crucial and has often been overlooked. Several very important
French merchants were Protestants and were among the chief purveyors of exotic
goods to court. The most striking case was Louis’s new and unsurpassed diamond
collection brought from India. Exotic goods solicited a discourse that was both social
and economic in nature as they transformed daily life and also had a concrete impact
on French society. From Asia came the many exotic luxury goods such as silk, cot-
ton, coffee, tea, china, gems, furniture, flowers, lacquer, and paper, all of which al-
tered daily life and transformed French society and culture. From Chapter 6 through
10, these material transformations, the discourse about them, and the epistemologi-
cal consequences of exotic goods are explored. Not only did these imports change
material life, but the travel accounts written by French merchants, missionaries, and
diplomats involved in the trade had a tremendous cultural and political impact on the
social structures of French society and how it viewed itself.
It is these views, about what was French and what was foreign, that metamor-
phosed the exotic goods of earlier centuries into what the French considered national
goods by the end of the eighteenth century. Exotic is used here as a category, as
meaning outside of things French; exotisme and its adjective was not part of the
French vocabulary until 1845, as it was largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon.
How a foreign, exotic good was naturalized is the object of Chapters 6, 7, and 8.
A striking example of this transformation is the creation of the café as public space
in imitation of the coffee houses in Cairo, Istanbul, and Isfahan. Today the café is
seen as a Parisian institution, and coffee is seen as a national drink by the French,
its oriental roots forgotten. This cycle of cultural integration was the fate of many
luxury goods imported from Asia. This is historicizing objects and commodities.
Bruno Latour wrote best about the dilemma that arises when studying the reception
of objects in society:

Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief systems of
ordinary people. They call the belief system “naturalyzation” (Bourdieu and Wacquant,
1992). Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the at-
traction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the
nature of things, fortunately social scientists know better and they show that the arrow
goes in fact in the other direction, from society to the objects … To become a social sci-
entist is to realize that the inner properties of objects do not count. That they are a mere
receptacle for human categories.13

In studying the exotic and its reception in France, one studies perceptions, not the
exotic. Through contact with the exotic an interest in categorizing of the domestic
arose; the clearest example is herbalism, later called botany, explored in Chapters 4
and 8, which partly rely on the work of historians of science such as Paula Findlen
and Londa Schiefinger.
 Introduction • 5

What was exotic or domestic was an intellectual construct that had little to do
with reality. Some domestic products were still perceived as exotic, and vice versa.
This is true intellectually as well. Slavery existed in France, but it was silenced and
seen as exotic to France and impossible on French soil. Another case in point is ori-
ental despotism, a notion present in Greek texts. There was a similar naturalizing in
the political cycle that moved from identifying despotism with the oriental “other” to
the despotism within in eighteenth-century France, noticed by many scholars work-
ing on literature. As importantly, Orientalism also shaped economic writing, much of
it concentrating on luxury, once seen as oriental and tied to despotism, as examined
in Chapter 10. Luxury was viewed as a marker of class within France, as it was else-
where, until the Revolution discourse tied it exclusively to the French monarchy
and aristocracy. In the discussions on luxury the Orient was a point of reference.
Beyond luxury, through comparison, a whole political system was being gauged.
China loomed large in the thought of the famous French physiocrats, while Persia
and the Persian kings as oriental despots infuse French political philosophy from
Jean Bodin (1529–1596) to Montesquieu to the Abbé Raynal. A dominant issue be-
fore the French revolution, as France’s economic deficit became clear, was the battle
between the physiocrats and a group of bankers around Necker (1732–1804) who
argued for more investment and for speculation in the French overseas commercial
trade companies. The last chapter, Chapter 10, picks up this discussion, begun in
Chapter 2 with Bodin’s views on oriental despotism.
Through Louis XIV’s personal efforts Paris became the fashion capital of the
world, a center for luxury goods. Paris outmoded Spanish dress in Europe. Louis
set the example of wearing shimmering brocades, colorful silks, enormous ostrich
plumes, diamonds, and high-heeled shoes. He set a flamboyant example that he re-
quired to be imitated by the courtesans at Versailles, who in turn were imitated by
others. There is little question that it was through cooks and coiffeurs that the court
of France exercised its cultural imperialism on Europe’s elites.14 Famously, Nor-
bert Elias has argued that the extravagant expenses of life at Versailles, including
the costumed balls where aristocrats dressed as Turks, Persians, and Moors, were a
matter of establishing political control. He argued that Louis used fashion and the
extravagant consumption it imposed as a tool of political submission. It is argued
here that, ironically, endorsing oriental sartorial splendor at court gave rise to the
creation of “Frenchness” through fashion, which became an umbrella definition that
broke through the class barriers. It can be argued that social mobility was the great-
est factor in increased consumption. Social mobility was a matter of policy, as merit
was rewarded beyond the aristocracy. Louis gave titles of nobility to many merchant
families. Display became a mark of rank. Chapter 8 examines the role of merchants
and artisans amending the Elias model, while Chapter 9 concentrates on fashion and
display at court as it pertains to Orientalism.
French fashion, as constructed by Louis, also profited the French silk industry.
Colbert reformed an inefficient silk industry that had existed since Francis I to turn
6 • Orientalism in Early Modern France

it into a major one.15 The silk manufacturers of Lyons produced for the new French
fashion, making the brightly colored striped and flowered silks imposed by Louis on
his court, and in turn on the rest of Europe’s elite. France went from an importer of
silk textiles to become an exporter. It exported over 30,000 pounds sterling worth of
French silk to England in 1674 alone.16 Nevertheless, recent scholarship has rightly
moved away from a totally court-centered view of consumption. Merchants and mar-
kets, and their mechanisms, are correctly seen as central in transforming demand.
Scientists and artisans also had a central role in taming the exotic and shaping it, as
Chapter 8 discusses. Yet, court policy, sumptuary laws, imports, mercantilism (and
its demand for imitation), and built-up domestic productions in expectation of bans
against imports were still central. When and how modern consumption was created
is the subject of much debate and disagreement among scholars, but the range was
within the early modern period; the sixteenth century at the earliest, the eighteenth
at the latest.17
Carolyn Weber’s new book on the woman who was called “Madame déficite,”
Marie Antoinette, was a tremendous boon. The book closes with a few moments
spent with the “foreign queen,” guilty of using exotic foreign goods. A decade or
two before the French Revolution, the mood had turned protectionist, xenophobic,
and nationalistic by all accounts. Foreign goods, foreigners, and foreign ways were
publicly reviled, and Chapter 10 argues for a longer history of this discourse. Marie
Antoinette and her abandonment of the French court dress and its silken sartorial
splendor was seen as causing the economic distress of France.18 It is argued here that
resistance to things foreign had a very long history in France’s political economy.
While the process of Westernization and resistance to it in the Middle East, espe-
cially in the nineteenth century, has long attracted the attention of scholars, there is
scant literature on the adoption of oriental goods, manners, fashions, techniques, and
modes of thinking by European society. The orientalization of France and the resis-
tance to it deserve study. This is just a beginning, as the material is vast. Here only a
few examples were chosen. The custom of drinking coffee was imported via Cairo,
the Ottoman empire’s chief marketplace. These manners were of course transformed
by European adoption, yielding a myriad of hybrid cultural customs that arose in that
age of archaic globalism. These new beverages are only the most striking and evident
examples of many goods that had an effect on French manners, daily life, economic
policy, trade, and industry. Their adoption and integration apparently speaks of a
cosmopolitan society open to change, yet there is a whole discourse of resistance to
the exotic to study. Looking at the adoption of new goods by the French helps diffuse
the binary model used in many works on Orientalism, and already amended by Homi
Bhahba’s views on “hybridization” and by Marie Louise Pratt’s “contact zones.”19
Latour’s work adds the very useful view of networks and hybrids, well suited for
studying the Early Modern period.
A few good books look at French Orientalism in the arts and in literature, cen-
tered on France looking at the “other” through theater or painting, but not on the
 Introduction • 7

transformations within French society instigated by these contacts.20 Closest to the

focus of this book are the works of Madeleine Dobie and Michèle Longino, although
they are concerned with the literary. Nothing has been written on the material trans-
formations that occurred in French daily habits by the adoption of some oriental
customs, with the notable exception of a small passage in Madeleine Dobie’s book
about orientalist literature containing a fascinating mention in passing about how
furniture and chairs transformed by Ottoman models might have changed body pos-
ture, as sofas and ottomans were adapted and adopted in France.21 In Furnishing
the Eighteenth Century, Dobie has continued to look at stylistic transformations in
furniture.22 Stylistic change and imitation is another way Orientalism has been well
studied. In this category the taste for chinoiserie has the largest literature devoted
to it. Most works are on the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with the exception of
Michèle Longino’s study of Orientalism in French theater in the seventeenth century.
It is an exceptional study, as it ties literary production and historical circumstances.23
Another very relevant work on the seventeenth century is Dominique Carnoy’s work
on the representation of Islam in France.24
Contrary to the impact of the Ottomans on Europe, the impact of France on the
Ottomans and their tastes has been well explored: Fatma Muge Göcek has studied
the effects that this encounter produced on Istanbul and on Ottoman customs and
views.25 Here it is argued that Paris was just as affected, if not more so, and trans-
formed by its contact with Asia and the Americas. Both were seen as the Orient,
and both were labeled les Indes, even as there was a clear division in the seven-
teenth century between les Indes orientales for Asia and les Indes occidentales for
the Americas; the confusion existed even in the eighteenth century. This is one of the
issues explored throughout the book. For France the effect of contact with les Indes
has been presented as textual and stylistic but not transformative. Perhaps because
of the European view that progress belonged to Christianity and to Europe alone
after the Age of Exploration, in the wake of Europe’s very successful expansion and
colonialism, there has been some reluctance to give the Orient, save for China, any
agency in transforming Early Modern Europe.26
Yet, there was a dialogue in the exchanges between Asia and Europe. Even as
Europe started dreaming of empire, it was integrating the world it lusted after into its
own domestic sphere. It did this through the accumulation that characterized early
capitalism: cabinets of curiosities, collections of objects, books, manuscripts, and
exotic plants and flowers. These goods brought not only epistemological innovation,
but orientalized Europeans and changed their consumption habits. The second part
of this book examines these material changes. New consumption habits created
demand, which in turn brought technological innovation to create imitations and
new industries within France. The collection of exotic plants and animals marked
the birth of zoology and herbalism, later called botany. France’s exchanges with
the Orient produced profound socioeconomic and intellectual changes. Of all the
new oriental goods, the one that had the largest impact and was chosen for study in
8 • Orientalism in Early Modern France

this book—coffee consumption—brought on innovations in social institutions and

medicine. But all of these new goods and information collected in travel books had
the largest impact on the birth of sciences in France, despite resistance from the Sor-
bonne, as explored in Chapters 1, 2, and 4.
How to plant a tulip or sip a cup of coffee became part of the vocabulary of daily
life in France. Contacts with other societies stimulated a whole discourse around new
goods. This study of the transformation of French material, intellectual, and cultural
life is influenced by recent scholarship on patterns of consumption.27 Eurasian trade
is explored for its cultural, material, and intellectual ramifications in Early Modern
France. With one look at the scant scholarship there is on the effects of Orientalism
or oriental goods on Venice, Antwerp, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, one realizes
that this silence is not unique to France.28
There is an inspiring precedent for analyzing the Ottoman empire’s impact on
European material life. Lisa Jardine’s Worldly Goods successfully challenges a
monolithic view of European life by integrating knowledge about the Ottoman em-
pire through the work of scholars such as Gülru Necipoglu.29 Previously held ideas
about the East and West have been dismantled in some important corrective efforts
for the sixteenth century: the works of Kim Hall for England, of Jerry Brotton for the
Portuguese, and the well-known contributions of Lisa Jardine bring a global view of
the Renaissance.30 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have also dissolved the alien exotic
“other” in the same breadth as they have dismantled clichés of the Renaissance man.31
Mary Campbell’s book Wonder and Science breaks disciplinary boundaries in every
sense, reminding us that the disciplines did not exist then. This book hopes to express
the same spirit of exchange and dialogue between cultures and disciplines.32
In contrast to Eurasian trade, the literature on production and trade, and on slavery
and plantation life at this later stage of European exchange with the New World is
too vast to cite in this introduction; it highlights European expansion and is readily
studied. Europe’s taste for exotic goods was not only at the root of Europe’s colonial
plantations, but of many new manufactures that imitated foreign luxury goods and
strived to produce them domestically. Many of these innovations and imitations were
in textiles and were at the root of a proto-industrial revolution. Many travelers were
sent to study, or less politely put, spy on manufacturing techniques in Persia, India,
and China and report home. The oldest effort of imitating oriental goods in France
began as a fascinating experiment that involved planting mulberry trees in the garden
of the Tuileries palace under Henri IV. Manufactures, gardens, shops, public spaces,
guilds and their organization, economic theories, and philosophical writings were all
deeply affected by the commercial exchanges that France had with Asia. Each aspect
would demand a book of its own.
The main sources used here are travel accounts combined with some archival
sources and with many secondary works on France. The many secondary sources
by historians of France that helped me along the way are acknowledged in the
notes. French travel accounts have attracted the attention of major literary scholars;
 Introduction • 9

François Moureau, Dirk Van der Cruysse, and Frank Lestringant are leaders among
a group of researchers that have unearthed and studied many forgotten texts at the
Centre de recherché sur la literature des voyages at Paris IV, Sorbonne. Based on
Boucher de la Richarderie’s Bibliothèque universelle des voyages, compiled in the
nineteenth century, Daniel Roche gives us the prodigious number of travel accounts
produced in Europe in the Early Modern period. The accounts that appear in the
repertory made by the Bibliothèque universelle are numbered at a total of 5,562. For
the sixteenth century, one counts only 456 travel accounts in European languages
and 1,566 in the seventeenth, then 3,540 for the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century.33 The numbers alone speak of the growing engagement of Europe
with the rest of the world. This was not a space where I could linger on an account,
nor create a complete list of them. I attempted to choose relevant travelers to look
at their networks. Famous travelers are often viewed alone, in a heroic tradition, but
they were part of a network of exchange that was all-important to the birth of science
in France. Chapter 4 concentrates on the birth of the French Academy of Sciences
and its links to travel and Orientalism. One cannot write about France alone, as nôtre
Europe, our Europe, is a concept found constantly under the pen of French travelers
to Asia.34 The network of exchange between travelers was European.
I have tried to keep the freedom of spirit to think simultaneously of some of the
multitude of concrete transformations that occurred in Early Modern Europe and of
the desires and hopes and dreams that were not always directly tied to any real results.
For French commerce in Asia the latter category is prodigiously large. This is a dis-
continuous history, one punctuated by accident and interruption, and as far as policy
and discourse goes, one finds at least two voices if not more. Nevertheless, if most
of the French court’s ventures in Asia were miserable failures, they had immense
cultural consequences domestically. Much of the court’s discourse about its role in
the world was about how it was destined to rule it, while policy did not follow this
agenda. This book considers discourse, stated policy, and action on the terrain cap-
tured at different moments. Beyond the court, there were many other voices writing
about the Orient: merchants, doctors, jewelers, and adventurers. The court did, how-
ever, consider them informants, once it got organized to do so. Was the information
collected used? If so, how? Did this collection serve imperial aims? Did it ever help
any imperial projects that took into account the observations sent in by travelers? Was
there any true utility in writing about Asia? Did the travelers themselves participate in
any imperial hopes? These may not be the right questions, but they are summoned by
the word Orientalism, now marked by Saïd’s definition of it since 1978.
Early Orientalism was shaped by a multitude of voices writing about les Indes,
and they are full of contradictions. They slowly built up the modern dichotomy so
well described by Latour as the divide between culture and nature, between science
and society. The quarrels between the ancients and moderns was apparently won by
the moderns. The travelers, many of them doctors, in this book are the moderns,
building a new worldview as observers. According to Bruno Latour, we have never
10 • Orientalism in Early Modern France

been modern: “Seen as networks … the modern world, like revolutions, permits
scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight acceleration in the
circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of society, minuscule increase in the num-
ber of actors, small modification of old beliefs.”35 The way Orientalism has been
studied is linked to modernity, to conquest, and to imperialism. Modernity linked
power and knowledge together in the monism invented by Hobbes, borrowed by
Foucault, and used by Edward Saïd and many others in his footsteps. This view itself
is a modern construct in which we all participate.
Bruno Latour sees that we are only beginning to critique modernity now as we are
hoping to escape from its consequences of global warming, ecological disasters, and
genetically modified foods that bring modernization under criticism. Before Hobbes
and Boyle wrote out the contract that defined the modern world, and eventually made
us view the sciences as distinct from the humanities, how was knowledge utilized?
How was knowledge linked to power? Was the knowledge gathered by French sci-
entists and travelers used by those in power? Did the court and its institutions use
scientific knowledge under Louis XIV when the French Academy of Science was
born? This book has no pretension to uncover how modernity was built in France,
but it hopes to uncover the role of travel and Orientalism in building that modernity
through transforming both France’s political and scientific institutions and its pat-
terns of consumption. This book argues in Chapters 1, 4, and 8 that Orientalism was
at the inception of the Collège de France, and of the Academy of Sciences. The world
before modernity and after it has been described as another world:

When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and impor-
tant, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, the vast saga of radical rupture,
fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune. The antimoderns, like the postmoderns
have accepted their adversaries’ playing field; another field—much broader much less
polemical—has opened up before us: the field of nonmodern worlds, it is the middle
kingdom as vast as China and as little known.36

Latour falls in the trap of modernity, seeing the nonmodern as a foreign country.
Many preceded him in looking for Europe’s past across the world, or better still for
paradise lost. This was the legacy of modern social science built up slowly after
Early Modern exploration: the primitive, the other without modern ideas or modern
tools to transform his world. Latour argues that until recently, modern Europeans
felt invincible, that only now in the face of a world invaded by “frozen embryos,
expert systems, digital machines, censor equipped robots, hybrid corn … when our
daily news papers display all these monsters on page after page and when none of
these chimera can be properly on the object side or the subject side.”37 Who would
divide science and social politics today? Universities still do. Yet, the binary order of
things established in the modern period is daily questioned by contemporary reality.
 Introduction • 11

With new hybrids, these new “monsters,” the modern dichotomy created between
natural laws and political representation can no longer withstand serious scrutiny.
In Early Modern Europe, in an era of primitive capitalist accumulation, travel-
ers and scientists were in close correspondence and formed cosmopolitan networks.
Speaking in terms of Europe and being cosmopolitan did not exclude national senti-
ment even as early as the sixteenth century, whether in collecting or writing patriotic
sentiment; and imperial hopes were clearly expressed.38 Religious aspirations were
also inherent to Orientalism. There was as yet no difference between religion and
science, and it was acceptable to observe as a modern and to have religious faith, as
Postel’s path demonstrates.39 A century later Pierre Gassendi wrote in order to rec-
oncile modern observation and skepticism with religion; Abelard had tried centuries
before him to marry reason to faith and was condemned. One life exemplifies all the
dimensions of the nonmodern orientalist quest very clearly. One of the most cosmo-
politan of Europeans, with an agenda for France and his king, was the inimitable and
mysterious Guillaume Postel, the king’s royal professor in mathematics and Arabic.
Through an overview of the complexity of Postel’s thought and remarkable destiny,
the book opens with what many consider to be the beginnings of Orientalism in
France.
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 Part I
One Nation, One World under French Rule