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Arabs in France in the Early 19th Century
Dr Ian Coller
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- Matt Smith
Hello. This is me, Matt Smith, welcoming you to this La Trobe University podcast. My guest today is Dr Ian Coller, a historian from La Trobe University and he’ll be speaking about Europe and the Muslim world since the 18th century, in particular a small group of Arabs that moved to France from Egypt during the withdrawal of Napoleon’s troops. It was the subject of his PhD and also the subject of his book, Arab France.
- Ian Coller
Arab France is two things really I think. One I think is something real, the experience of a group of people who I would argue define themselves as Arabs, despite coming from quite complex different backgrounds, Egyptians, Syrians, Copts, Muslims, other Christians, Catholics and so on, but I would argue that they formed an identity based on their commonality of Arabic language and Arab background and culture in France in the early 19th century. And so that was something new, that most historians hadn’t recognised previously, but it’s also a way of looking at history, and that’s why I have argued for looking at it in this way, for putting this title rather provocatively in a sense, Arab France, is to think about French history from the perspective of these people. And so to think about what it meant to experience these very complex moments of history from the period immediately after the Revolution, through the Napoleonic period, and Restoration France and a revolution in France in 1830, which was also accompanied by the beginnings of French intervention in the Arab world, with the invasion of Algeria, which happened just a few months before the July revolution in 1830. So it’s also a representative, in a sense, of my way of looking at history, which is a rather eccentric way of looking at history, not from the centre, but rather from the perspective of people who’ve been left out of it.
- Matt Smith
We’ll pick through the story a bit as you see it and as you tell it. What relationship was there between 19th century France and the Middle East at that time?
- Ian Coller
It’s a complex relationship, and certainly one that has not been fully explored, I think, particularly in relation to the late 18th century, and to the French Revolution, which is a question that I'm exploring in more detail in my current work. But it’s the legacy of the French Revolution and many of the complex relationships that form at the end of the 18th century between France and the Arab world, that really play themselves out in the 19th century. The 19th century has really been dominated from 1930 onwards by a colonial relationship, so France invades Algeria in 1830 and then in 1882, extends its domination to Tunisia, and in 1913, to Morocco, and then after the First World War, into Lebanon and Syria, so quite an extraordinary presence in the Arab world. But it’s also true that post-colonial migration has left an enormous impact on France, from its relationship with the Arab world. But I have been looking at this period between the end of the French Revolution, so in the 1790s right through to 1830, and re-thinking this moment in which France did not have a colonial relationship with the Arab world, in which things were much more open, but this new kind of power relationship was emerging.
- Matt Smith
So the story started I suppose when Napoleon went to Egypt and the interactions that he had there.
- Ian Coller
That story has been told many times. It’s certainly an exotic and exciting story, kind of extraordinary the idea that 50,000 French soldiers, sailors, disembark on the shore of Alexandria, and within a few weeks, have taken not just Alexandria but Cairo, extended their domination over most of Egypt, go right up into Syria, having lost the French fleet to the British at the battle of Aboukir, Napoleon concocts this extraordinary plan of trying to march right through the Middle East, all the way to Istanbul, and then re-enter Europe by land in a kind of pincer movement, trapping the other powers, which is not what happens, and in fact that plan fails miserably. He is losing so many of his soldiers to plague that he retreats back to Cairo and then gives up the whole game and returns to France, hearing the rumours that there is unrest and a coup is about to take place, but what they’re missing is the sword, what they’re missing is the strong man who will stand behind the plodders of the coup, and Napoleon’s brother is one of those plotters and so Napoleon Bonaparte himself takes a ship, abandons his army, goes back to France, and the rest is history.
- Matt Smith
So they’re beaten in Egypt by the British, they abandon the Rosetta Stone and the other antiquities that they’d found on their little jaunt there, go back to France, but a little group of Arab people go back with them. Why did those people go back with Napoleon?
- Ian Coller
Well, that’s the really fascinating thing. I think many of the tellings of the story have ended when Napoleon left Egypt but actually the occupation continued for another two years, first of all under General Kléber, and then under General Menou, who had actually converted to Islam in order to marry a local Egyptian woman, and changed his name to Abdullah Menou, but as part of the negotiations with the British and the Ottomans, for the French evacuation of Egypt, one of the clauses was that any local inhabitant who chose to travel with the French back to France, would be allowed to do so and their families and their properties would not be touched. Several thousand people chose to do that, under the leadership of a Coptic general, General Ya-qub. He was actually the first non-French general in the French army. He was made a general because he had led his own Coptic Egyptian people as a legion within the French army, but what he was really looking for and what the group of dignitaries who accompanied him, who were from all backgrounds – there were Muslims, there were Copts, there were Catholic Christians – what they were really looking for was an independence for Egypt. They argued that Egypt would continue to be the bone of contention between these two super-powers, Britain and France, because it was so strategically located. And we know that’s true today because of the Suez Canal, it became an absolutely crucial part of modern geopolitics, and it still is today, with the revolutions of 2011, but tragically General Ya-qub died on the crossing over to Marseilles and so many of his Coptic followers, who were Egyptian peasants who couldn’t imagine settling in France without their leader, abandoned the ships and went back to Egypt, but a smaller group of several hundred continued on to Marseilles, still hoping to argue for this project of independence.
- Matt Smith
So they went back with an agenda in mind. They didn’t go back to become part of France to contribute. They went over there to push the Egyptian agenda. Is that right?
- Ian Coller
They left as political exiles but they arrived as refugees. And they were forty days in quarantine in Marseilles, and they wrote letters to various authorities in the French government and you can see in those letters that they were beginning to see that the France in which they’d arrived was rather different from the France that they’d imagined. The France they’d imagined was the France of the Revolution, the great supporter of liberty and freedom and equality – the France they’d arrived in was a country that was veering towards dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte. These ideas of equality, freedom, liberty – they were not the dominant ideas any more, so they began to adapt and try to find a place, and I think the story of the next thirty years that I traced, was very much about them trying to find a place. And I think they did so, relatively successfully.
- Matt Smith
What sort of reception did they get by the general French when they tried to integrate themselves into the society?
- Ian Coller
At first I think, in Marseilles in particular, there was a kind of uneasy cohabitation. Many of the wealthier, more educated members of the population found it easier to find a place, you know, if they could buy a property, if they could set themselves up as merchants, but many of the young men in particular, found, as did many young French men at the time, that the only way forward was to join the army, and they joined the army but they were formed in a specifically Arab battalion, called the Mamluks. It’s those soldiers that you see in the great Napoleonic military paintings, when you see the turbans of the Mamluks – Napoleon had his own real Mamluk from Egypt, Roustam Raza, he was his personal bodyguard, but many of these other young men who were not actually Mamluks from Egypt – Mamluks were the slave warriors of Egypt – they were just ordinary lower middle class or working class people from the Egyptian cities like Cairo, but they were enrolled as Mamluks in Napoleon’s army, and many of them fought very bravely in many of the battles that came afterwards, but others, after a couple of years in the army, were demobilised and returned to Marseilles, and that began to create a different kind of dynamic, where you had more of a group of people, a certain amount of money, but they were more like a Egyptian village forming on the edge of the town.
- Matt Smith
So did they ever fully integrate, or were they always considered apart? Did they retain their culture and religion?
- Ian Coller
I think that in certain ways, under the Napoleonic Empire, they found a place, but that place was very fragile and with the change of regime in 1814, 1815, this was a terrible period, purging particularly in the southern provinces of France, so in Marseille, with the news of defeat at Waterloo arriving in the town, the local Bonapartist troops became very nervous, and they withdrew very rapidly from the town, leaving it completely unguarded, and local people gathered in a mob and they marched around the town, looking for these people who’d supported the person they called the usurper, in Napoleon Bonaparte. And they identified the Egyptians as Bonapartists and there was an attack on Egyptians, and also on people of colour, at least a dozen people were murdered. We don’t really know exactly how many because we only have the official names. The accounts of the time talk about the streets being littered with corpses, so this violence really struck at the heart of this Egyptian community and I think that it had a paradoxical effect – in some ways it taught them that they couldn’t afford to make themselves too conspicuous. On the other hand I think it drove people together, and those groups of more elite merchants, landowners and so on, began to realise that they had to take responsibility for the other parts of their group.
- Matt Smith
Their success kind of depended on Napoleon’s success really – they were there by the grace of Napoleon. Without him there, did they decide to go back to Egypt?
- Ian Coller
No. In fact that was what a lot of historians imagined. But what instead happened was that they stopped dressing like Egyptians, they tried their best to find less visible ways of remaining. Under the restoration, some people chose to take the option which emerged, of taking a year’s pension and return to Egypt and Syria, but what I discovered in the archives was that many of those people then returned to France subsequently, and had themselves re-admitted, not only into France, but onto the pension lists, on the argument of having converted to Christianity, and therefore being persecuted in their former country. So, it was a complex story and one in which we saw the beginnings of this large flow of migrants. This was still only hundreds of people, but it was the beginnings I think, of a movement that would settle itself in France. They established their own church, they were given Arabic lessons through the local high school, and so a kind of core of Arab presence in Marseilles was established at that time, and while it had no real comparison to the kinds of mass migration that we saw in the mid part of the 20th century, it nonetheless established something of the base.
- Matt Smith
What sort of archives were you digging through, when you say ‘archives’? Were you in a dusty warehouse somewhere full of manuscripts?
- Ian Coller
Looking at archives is one of the most exciting parts of the historian’s job. I started in Marseilles, in the Municipal Archives and in the Municipal Library and then I moved on to Paris where the National Archives is one of the most extraordinary collections of archives. The modern process of archiving was invented during the French Revolution, and so there are incredible collections of archives there. But it wasn’t really until I went to the archives of the army that I discovered these riches, and the archives of the army in Paris are housed in the Chateau de Vincennes, so it’s a massive medieval castle on the eastern edge of Paris and I was tramping in and out of that castle over several months, as autumn turned to winter, and the mud turned to slush and sleet. What I found there was twelve boxes of documents recording the correspondence of these people. Because they were granted pensions by the French government, there was an incredible correspondence of people asking for their pension to be increased, asking to be allowed to move from one place to the next. That was the body of information that I was able to build a picture of these people, who had largely been forgotten from history.
- Matt Smith
Is there a specific picture, a person that you can tell me about, that you found?
- Ian Coller
There are many, there are many fascinating stories, but I think one that really struck me, just because it brought together a number of different strands in the work that I was doing. It was the record for a young man who was called Jean-Baptiste Mohammed, which already seems like something of a paradox, given that he has a Muslim surname and a very distinctively Christian first name, and he was also recorded as Jean-Louis Jeromin. It turned out that he had had several identities. He had decided at certain moments to forget his Egyptian identity and because he was quite dark-skinned, he claimed to be from France’s Caribbean colonies – what is today Haiti and Martinique and Guadalope, but later then, claimed his position back on the pension registers, under the name of Mohammed. But what was really fascinating – he talked in correspondence about his degree of homesickness, and this was a period in which care of mental illness and psychiatric trauma, was not developed at all, but he had been told by his doctor that he needed to return to his home country because of this complete loss of his sense of identity.
I think one of the most fascinating things was when I realised that, in a very famous Arabic text by Rifa'a el-Tahtawi, who is an extremely important figure in the Arab Renaissance of the 19th century, which is called the al Nahda, the re-awakening of Arab thought in the 19th century, and Tahtawi was extremely important. He was the imam of a student mission that was sent by the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, to France in 1826. But in that account, he described arriving in Marseilles, and meeting these people, who had come to France after the French occupation, and he described meeting a young man who had been Muslim, but had lost his connection with Islam. He believed from the look of this young Egyptian, that he was actually in some way related to his family – he said he has the marks of the Sharifs, the important kind of religious families of his region of Upper Egypt. So it was quite an extraordinary thing, because that encounter had a very important impact on Tahtawi himself, and at the same time clearly had an impact on this young man, because it seems to be not long after that that he chose to return to Egypt, but in Egypt he couldn’t find his place there either, and he returned to France. It seems that he went back and forth on several occasions. And I think it’s a really striking story, because you see how one relatively forgotten, unimportant individual can leave a mark on history that we don’t see in the history books, their own migrant story, and those struggles that they went through to try to find out who they were and what their place would be, have left their mark on history.
- Matt Smith
That’s Dr Ian Coller, and his book is Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe 1798-1831, and it was published by the University of California Press in 2010. And that’s all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.
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