Arab Paris: Arab lives and Arab identities in France 1801-1831

Abstract

© 2006 Dr. Ian Bruce Coller'Deux nations s'etaient confondues ... ' In 1821 Joseph Agoub wrote these words to a patron in an attempt to explain the “confusions” of a Franco-Arab life which he had lived for two decades in Marseille. Joseph, along with many hundreds of other Egyptians and Syrians, came to France in 1801 accompanying the French evacuation of Egypt. Two decades later, this heterogeneous population had formed a relatively cohesive community in Marseille, and many had moved on to Paris, the heart of France and French life. This thesis investigates the reasons for this unexplored emigration, analysing its roots in the impact of the French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801. It follows the struggles for a common identity within a community divided by religious, regional and economic differences, as well as the complex negotiations with the wider society and the state. The thesis argues that the experience of Franco-Arab community in Marseille became, over three decades in Paris, a struggle to articulate an Arab identity within a cosmopolitan network of social, cultural and intellectual exchange. In the 1820s, this struggle reconnected with the Arab world in surprising ways, most notably through the establishment of the Ecole Egyptienne in Paris. This school brought Franco-Arab intellectuals such as Joseph Agoub and Joanny Pharaon into close connection with Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, a central figure in the nineteenth-century modernization of Egyptian institutions and Arabic thought. Their encounter made possible new ways of imagining an Arab identity beyond the limits of religious, national or social categories, long in advance of the Arabist movements later in the century. But this encounter also took place in a rapidly shrinking space of cosmopolitanism as new limits of national identity were articulated in France, which excluded “foreigners” from the national consensus. The hardening of identities was particularly severe in relation to those from outside the limits of Europe, whose identities were increasingly represented according to a more exclusivist racial segregation of “Man”. After 1830, these racial identities became the basis for legitimating the continued military occupation of Algiers, and extending French aggression in North Africa and elsewhere in the Arab world. This radical division between “French” and “Arab” made impossible the kind of Franco-Arab identity for which two generations had struggled, and left French Arabs with a stark choice: to join the “indigenes” and lose their status as French citizens, or to use their knowledge and experience in the service of French imperialism. The “Arab Paris” which Agoub had imagined was no longer possible, and passed unrecorded by history. This thesis seeks to re-imagine that lost dimension of French history in the early nineteenth century: a much earlier “Arab Paris” than the one we know today