The Orient was deeply fashionable in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century. By that time, the East had long been a source of fascination in both France and England, but from the sixteenth century onwards, it had also become a subject of serious study for both commercial and religious reasons. The Collège de France, which was established by François Ier with the aspiration to cover any disciplines not taught within the University, had founded a chair in Arabic, alongside its original chairs in Ancient Greek and Hebrew. Travel accounts, which had been multiplying since the second half of the seventeenth century, also constituted excellent sources of information on the Orient, and fed the imagination of readers and writers in the eighteenth century, while also prompting philosophical and religious reflections.
The reality of the Orient was first discovered predominantly through travel narratives. Among the best-known works were: Six Voyages en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes [Six Voyages in Turkey, in Persia and in India] (1676), by the merchant and adventurer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-89); Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant [Relation of a Voyage made to the Levant] (1717) by scholar and botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708); and, in particular, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient [Voyages of Chevalier Chardin to Persia and Other Places in the Orient] by Jean Chardin (1643-1713).
Chevalier Chardin’s text played a particularly influential role in stimulating interest in Eastern culture in eighteenth-century France. First published in London in 1686, Chardin’s original text was augmented within a new Amsterdam edition in 1711, before being reissued multiple times. Writers of the early eighteenth century thus inherited knowledge that was already several decades old, but this date gap appears to have had little impact for several reasons. Essentially, travel narratives tended to present descriptive elements in a timeless manner so that the Orient was perceived as being outside time, and thus beyond specific progress, such as in the sciences and the arts which, conversely, was the key tangible element to characterise Europe since the end of the Middle Ages.
To this wealth of knowledge offered by travel narratives, which were originally intended to be practical manuals for traders, one must also add works of a historical nature, which further analyse the political history of the Eastern countries, their constitution, and the principles according to which they function. Histoire de l’état présent de l’Empire ottoman, contenant les maxims politiques des Turcs, les principaux points de la religion mahométane [History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, containing the Political Maxims of the Turks and the Main Points of the Mohammedan Religion] (1668) by Englishman Paul Rycaut (1629-1700) saw many reissues and translations, and is a classic text within this category. La Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l’Orient [The Eastern Library, or Universal Dictionary Containing Generally Everything Pertaining to the Knowledge of the Peoples of the Orient] (1697) by the Orientalist Barthélemy Herbelot de Molainville (1625-95), Professor at the Collège de France, is also a source of specialist, insider information and his work compiles all of the knowledge of the Orient that had been acquired over the previous century.
The picturesque elements found in these works fed the novelistic imagination, as is evident in the Lettres persanes [Persian Letters] (1721) by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu. Here, there is a reference to “boxes” into which women are put to cross a river (Letter 3), a feature which travel narratives had described with a deep sense of wonder and curiosity. Above all, such sources provided material for political reflection, and Montesquieu relied on these works in order to characterise despotic regimes. Those novelistic elements employed in the Lettres persanes [Persian Letters], in which Usbek figures as a despot amongst his many wives in the seraglio, are later taken up and systematized within his later work, De l’Esprit des lois [Spirit of the Laws] (1748), where despotism becomes a political category in its own right and not simply a misappropriation of bad monarchical power. But Montesquieu’s political theory certainly reveals a stylisation of this arbitrary power in which “one single person, without law and without rule, carries everything by his will and his whims” (De l’Esprit des lois, II:1). This is a phenomenon that Montesquieu believes he recognises in Turkey or Persia. From this point of view, Montesquieu’s work constitutes an essential link in the crystallisation of what has been termed the “concept of a fantasy” (Grosrichard, 1979). Montesquieu is in fact primarily concerned with the despotic tendencies he sees at work in the French monarchy since the reign of Louis XIV. The description of despotism as “pour ainsi dire, naturalisé” [in a certain manner, naturalised] in the East (De L’Esprit des Lois, V:14), allows Montesquieu to project his concerns as a parliamentarian, by constructing a horrific, largely fantasized image of oriental regimes. Drawing on the same sources, Voltaire offers a radically opposing interpretation within his universal history, which he wrote in the 1740s, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations [Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations] (1756). Although written after the publication of De l’Esprit des lois, Voltaire’s work also incorporates many controversial elements, which counter the received vision of these oriental regimes. Paradoxically, this converse and much less negative view of the Orient is based on the same passages as Montesquieu. Voltaire extracts very different elements from the material provided by Chardin, which merely highlights the extent to which the latter’s account of the Orient is incredibly rich in detail.
From a religious perspective, Islam gradually became better known as Oriental studies developed in France and England from the sixteenth century onwards. However, many prejudices and legends concerning the Mohammedan religion continued to circulate. Understanding of this religion was slow to develop in the eighteenth century. In the years 1710-20, only very old translations of the Koran were available. These old translations into vernacular languages were not based on the Arabic originals, but on the Latin versions of the Koran and on the supplementary texts which accompanied it. They derived from the first Western translation completed in the twelfth century by Englishman Robert de Ketton and other scholars, under the stewardship of the Abbé de Cluny’s Pierre le Vénérable, and the aim of the translation was to refute the doctrine of Mohammed. Likewise, the Vies de Mahomet [Lives of Mohammed], such as La Vie de Mahomet où l’on découvre amplement la verité de l’imposture [The Life of Mohammed where the Truth of the Imposture is amply discovered], composed by Humphrey Prideaux in 1699, tend to be deeply critical of the Prophet’s character. The first translation of the Koran directly into French was completed by André Du Ryer in 1647, L’Alcoran de Mahomet traduit d’arabe en français [The Alcoran of Mohammed translated from Arabic into French]. This work presents a text that has been stripped of the biased commentaries which had accompanied the derivative editions of Ketton, even though Du Ryer includes his own prefatory texts condemning Islam. These preliminary precautions did not deceive the French authorities, however, and they banned the work, although this did not compromise its distribution. This text, which was much less partial than all previous ones, represented a significant advance in terms of French knowledge of Islam.
Other works made it possible to have access to more objective sources on Islam, particularly De Religione Mahommedica by the Dutch Orientalist Adriaan Reeland (1676-1718), published in 1705, with an augmented reissue in 1717. For the Protestant Reeland, it was a question of refuting the accusations of Catholics who assimilated Protestants to Muslims, and in doing so, the author also corrected falsehoods that had been conveyed about Islam, as he asserts in a very substantial preface. In this “Éclaircissements sur la religion mahométane, par rapport à quelques opinions qu’on a attribuées faussement à Mahomed ou à ses sectateurs” [“Clarifications on the Mohammedan religion, in relation to some opinions that have been falsely attributed to Mohammed or his followers”], Reeland corrects misunderstandings born from the poor understanding of Arabic, as he endeavours to rectify the prejudiced image that the West had of Islam. Reeland’s work was a huge success and was translated into several European languages, including into English, Of the Mahometan Religion (1712), and into French, De la religion des mahométans (1721). But the translation of the Koran which really inspired new thinking about Islam by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and notably by Voltaire, is the one provided by Englishman George Sale in 1734, The Korân. This translation, based on the Arabic originals and accompanied by a “Preliminary Discourse”, shed new light on the figure of Mohammed. The Vie de Mahomed [Life of Mahommed] (Amsterdam Humbert, 1730), written by the Comte de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) at the dawn of the 1720s, and published posthumously, was likewise written according to that same impetus for a neutral, or dispassionate, re-examination and was also very favourable to the Prophet. By contrast, Vie de Mahomet [Life of Mahommed], published by Jean Gagnier in the same year, continued to exaggerate the more fantastic aspects of Mahommed’s life, even though the text vaunts the fact that it relies on actual Muslim and non-Christian sources.
The philosophical use of this new material was quite uneven, especially since it came quite late in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Muslim had long been the enemy, the absolute other, over which the Christian religion must triumph. While Montesquieu uses this Muslim Orient for critical purposes in his Lettres persanes [Persian Letters], he is not one of the authors who participate in revitalising this critical gaze. In the Lettres persanes, Montesquieu’s aim is first and foremost to use Islam to denounce the Catholic religion. Within this, he presents Islam sometimes as tolerant, at other times as a collection of absurd superstitions. Montesquieu does not therefore seek to get rid of all the prejudices which surround the Islamic religion nor does he provide a more “enlightened” perspective on Islam in his later work, De l’Esprit des lois. As for Voltaire, his play Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète [Fanaticism, or Mahommed the Prophet] (1741) continues to convey the black legend of Mahommed, since the principal character boasts of instrumentalising religion for the purposes of political domination. On the other hand, in chapters 6 and 7 of the Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations [Essay on Mores and the Spirit of the Nations], chapters devoted to Arabia and which he resumed writing in the 1750s, Voltaire re-evaluates the figure of Mahommed. In these, Voltaire voluntarily ignores the most critical biographical elements, including the most aberrant, to the point where he offers a very positive vision of Islam, and presents it as a religion worthy of admiration. This reassessment is not without ulterior motives, given that the superiority and the truth on which Westerners pride themselves, by comparison with Muslim heretics, is certainly much more a prejudice than a reality.
Finally, we must consider the fictional imaginative writings that circulated within the first half of the eighteenth century. The work that popularised the Orient above all others was the publication by the Orientalist Antoine Galland (1646-1715), Les Contes des Mille et Une Nuits [One Thousand and One Night’s Tales], of which all twelve volumes emerged between 1704 and 1717. The work is not solely founded on the “translation” of Arabic manuscripts brought back by Galland from his travels in the Middle East between 1670 and 1688. Galland also recounts stories that he has heard and noted, and he even invents a number of his tales, in such a way that his work is a composite collection of materials from a wide variety of sources. The translation he offers is above all an adaptation, which conforms in particular to the expected conventions, proprieties and tastes of his French worldly audience, and which notably unifies the multiple sources and materials through the particular style he employs. The story is both the vehicle of an imagination populated by marvellous figures in an often luxurious setting, but also a source of geographic, historical or anthropological knowledge. In the years that followed, there emerged many imitations of Galland’s collection of tales, which was also a great commercial success. Some collections are published by specialist Orientalists, such as François Pétis de La Croix (1653-1713), holder of the Chair of Arabic at the Collège de France. These new collections of tales also play on the double fictional and serious threads initiated by Antoine Galland, as witness two works by Pétis de La Croix, Histoire de la sultane de Perse et des vizirs [History of the Persian Sultana and the Viziers] (1707) and Les Mille et un Jours [One Thousand and One Days] (1710-1712). Other authors who never left France, and were solely informed by their readings, include Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683-1766), who published the Mille et un Quarts-d’heure [One Thousand and One Quarter Hours] in 1732, or the very erudite Abbé Bignon (1662-1743), librarian to the king, who benefitted from the manuscripts in his care for the composition of his Aventures d’Abdalla [Adventures of Abdalla] (1712-14).
Another particularly licentious vein develops from the erotic and sexual fantasies aroused by the polygamous Orient, in which women are at the mercy of a despot who locks them into his seraglio. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (Crébillon fils, 1707-77), was potentially inspired by satirical tales by the English exile Antoine Hamilton (1645-1719), which circulated in manuscript form (Perrin, 2015). Crébillon fils fuses the Hindu tradition of metempsychosis with a libertine framework, in which he refers as much to the seraglios of the Orient as to the boudoirs of the Regency period, in his erotic political satire, Le Sopha (1742), which in fact reads as a critical account of the society of his time. Many other texts are inspired by this fictitious Orient, and especially by the framework narrative of the One Thousand and One Nights, between a sultan and a storyteller (male or female). This results in texts of varying quality and interest, which are more or less erotic or satirical, and which described, or were addressed to, contemporaries. Amongst others, the Le Sultan Misapouf et la princesse Grisemine [The Sultan Misapouf and the Princess Grisemine] (1746) by Claude-Henri Fuée de Voisenon (1708-75); or again Denis Diderot’s more political and philosophical Les Bijoux indiscrets [The Indiscreet Jewels] (1748); and L’Oiseau blanc: conte bleu [The White Bird: A Blue Tale], also by Diderot. From the very beginning of his writing career, Voltaire is also inspired by this oriental vein as apparent within several of his philosophical tales, including Le Crocheteur borgne [The One-Eyed Porter] (composed at the Court of Sceaux in 1714, published in 1774), Le Monde comme il va [The Way of the World] (1739, published in 1748) and Zadig ou la destinée, histoire orientale [Zadig or Destiny, an Oriental Tale] (1747).
Finally, in the vein of the great Mamamouchi of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme [The Bourgeois Gentleman] (1670), the Fair Theatres also made considerable use of this Oriental fashion to provide a new framework for the adventures of Harlequin. Examples include the plays Arlequin roi de Sérendib [Harlequin King of Serendib] (1713) and Arlequin Mahomet [Arlequin Mohammed] (1714), both by Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747). Within theatrical tragedy, Voltaire also used the Oriental framework to continue to question religions, as in Zaïre (1732), where the eponymous heroine, who is Christian without knowing it, was brought up in the Muslim faith and wishes to marry the Muslim leader Orosmane. Zaïre muses: “S’il était né chrétien, que serait-il de plus?” [“What could he more, had he been born a Christian?”] (IV:1).
This article was translated from the original French by Síofra Pierse.
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Citation: Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille. "The Muslim Orient in Eighteenth Century France". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 January 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19641, accessed 17 January 2025.]
