Iran and French Orientalism : Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France

New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France’s perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran’s history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the ‘Oriental’ poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier’s strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter Judith Gautier’s full-blown rewriting of a Persian epic. Writing about Iran could also serve to articulate new visions of world history and religion, as was the case in the intellectual debates that took place between Michelet, Renan, and Al-Afghani. Alternatively joyous, as in Félicien David’s opera Lalla Roukh , and ominous, as in Massenet’s Le Mage , Iran elicited a multiplicity of treatments. This is most obvious in the travelogues of Flandin, Gobineau, Loti, Jane Dieulafoy, and Marthe Bibesco, which describe the same cities and cultural practices in altogether different ways. Under these writers’ pens, Iran emerges as both an Oriental other and an alter ego, its culture elevated above that of all other Muslim nations. At times this led French writers to critique notions of European superiority. But at others, they appropriated Iran as proto-European through racialist narratives that reinforced Orientalist stereotypes. Drawing on theories of Orientalism and cultural difference, this book navigates both sides of this fascinating and complex literary history. It is the first major study on the subject. "Iran and Persian culture hold a distinct place in the imagination of nineteenth-century France; from the poetry of Victor Hugo and Armand Renaud to the travel writing of Jane Dieulafoy. This is the first monograph on the French reception of Iranian culture, history, and literature in the period spanning from Romanticism to the turn of the twentieth century. Covering both canonical and forgotten authors and comprising four genres: lyric poetry; history and historical fiction; travel-writing; and the performing arts, the book brings a new approach to the analysis of nineteenth-century French Orientalism: one that focuses on an individual civilisation rather than a generic 'Orient', looks beyond France's colonial empire, and considers the impact of genre. This results in a more nuanced picture, in which the dehumanising 'othering' famously described by Edward Said in Orientalism exists alongside examples of admiration, familiarisation, and identification. Nineteenth-century French writers tested the Occident/Orient dichotomy, emphasising it or eroding it based on the image of Iran that they sought to promote. These narratives ranged from the Aryan myth to an enthusiasm for Sufi poetry. The book also analyses the author's sources, which ranged from Persian literature, Islamic theology and Iranian cultural customs to Iranian architecture. The case of Iran thus gives us new transnational insights into nineteenth-century France's ambivalent definitions of cultural difference and their exploration in literature and the arts."-- Provided by publisher