Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations

In Writing for Justice, Elèna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Séjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Séjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play’s production—and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic—are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre–Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elèna Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent. This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters. Cover 1 Title Page 7 Contents 13 Introduction 15 Part I | A Creole American Writer in Paris 25 1 | From New Orleans to France: Séjour's Early Life and "Le Mulâtre” 27 2 | Diégarias, a Mixed-Identity Tragedy 34 3 | Poet, Playwright, and Double Endings in 1859 38 II | In the Age of Emancipations: The Mortara Case and A Writer's Conscience 53 4 | La Tireuse de cartes: The Mortara Case and Artistic Passing 55 5 | A Catholic Playwright and His Plea to the Pope 60 6 | Plot and Confl icts on Stage in La Tireuse de cartes 67 7 | Mulatta Figures in French and American Literature, 1834–1853 74 8 | The Gender Issue in the Play 79 9 | Torn between Belongings 82 10 | Revenge vs. Forgiveness in Shakespeare and Séjour 89 11 | Censorship, History, and the Drama’s Denouement 95 12 | Contemporary Performances and Reviews in France and Italy 102 13 | An Age of Transatlantic Emancipations 122 14 | Rise and Fall of an Expatriate Playwright—"This Shakespeare of the Boulevard" 151 15 | A Writer’s Indignant Conscience 165 III | When It Snows History 195 16 | Family Recollections: A Personal Note 197 Appendix 207 Acknowledgments 217 Notes 223 Bibliography 303 Index 337 Transnational battles for freedom and a personal work of remembrance