Travel and Theater in the French 17th century:
Lessons for Today's World

Michèle Longino
French Studies
Department of Romance Studies

In times of crisis, we grasp at what we know and can point to, what we can wrap our minds around. And here, history - the facts and lessons we have gleaned from the past, literature - discrete stories, anecdotes even ­ can help us work toward a more comprehensive view. In the great scheme then, the 17th century seems neither far away not irrelevant. Nor does the experience of one western country in this instance seem less pertinent than that of another.

The study of French travel journals penned in and around the Mediterranean three centuries ago affords a window onto relations between Christians and Muslims, as the Christians moved out of (without abandoning) a religiously motivated Crusader mentality to develop a more secular mercantile and colonialist practice fixed on exploiting to advantage the Ottoman-controlled Muslim part of the world for the material gain of Europe, better known at that time as "Christendom."

Surely there is another narrative to be found here: that of the Muslims and their experience of this development. This story is not as well known in "Christendom." But "infidels" were pitted against "infidels," if we are to lend an ear to both sides of the story. Piracy was a regular practice for the French, Italians and other western Mediterranean countries just as it was for the Barbary republics and the world governed by Constantinople; and as many colonies of enslaved Muslims were sprawled around Marseilles (not to mention the Pope's slaves concentrated mainly on the island of Malta) as there were to be found Christian slave colonies around Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Both the Christians and the Muslims relied on their captives to man their galleys and to perform menial labor. The despotism of the Ottoman Sultan interestingly resembled the absolutism of Louis XIV. French diplomats and even artists sent off and published in France blueprints for undoing the Ottomans.

If certain practices, such as the recruitment of the Janissaries, appeared problematic to the French, it was equally troubling to the Ottomans to find their markets regularly flooded with counterfeit coins brought in by their sometime allies. What this sort of tit-for-tat discourse points to is the simple fact that there are at least two and more often than not many sides to any story.

The narrative that has prevailed in the West is its own version of the facts ­ this for reasons of linguistic limitations, but also out of a complacent provincialism, and a manicheistic and even opportunistic will to view the world in simplistic terms of "us" versus "them." This view is articulated even in such high-minded and willfully enduring expression as French classical drama, - tales dating from this earlier time, and staged regularly even today, plots organized around a cultural mindset pitting the West against the East, Christians against Muslims, and portraying the Western characters alone as noble and virtuous, demonizing the Muslims and peoples falling outside the "West" as morally inferior and undeserving of serious consideration, worthy only of caricature.

Even today, we are as convinced as were the first seventeenth-century theater audiences of the righteous valor of Rodrigue against the Moors, and we do not seek further understanding of the Moors' case against the Castillians (Corneille, Le Cid, 1637); and we find amusing that dervishes and carpets and even the Koran should figure prominently as comic props without pausing to consider that some might take offense at our humor (Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1670). If these are the stories we tell ourselves in the West and stage regularly, as if to affirm continuously our supposed moral superiority, should it not occur to us that Muslims have their own versions of these same encounters?

The common consensus among historians is that the Ottomans did not compose narratives, but more often registers and rosters, and relied on cultures such as the Persians' for more poetic interpretations of experience. But if we don't have the easy measure of texts similar to our own, let us look critically and dispassionately at the rhetoric at work in the world of plays we have constructed, in the accounts of early modern French travelers to the Levant, and examine what they tell us, not about the "Other" we have constructed, but, even more tellingly, about ourselves and the shaping of our own story.

If I speak of the French here, it is hardly because they have been the most blatant offenders ­ in fact, as is clear in the thoughtful editorials that have appeared recently in the French press, they have demonstrated a keen eye for the complexity of the problem now before us all. My forthcoming book, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge UP, Nov. 2001) analyzes travel journals by western visitors to the Levant and plays from the French Classical period together.

Of course, since September 11th, I have wished I could recast parts of it, and point more lucidly to the world picture now before us. But the events of September were beyond my imagination. Nevertheless, there may seeds of useful truth to be found in such a study. It gestures toward another history that had been ignored in the capitalistic pursuit of wealth and profit, but that was there biding its time to bear witness to its own version of the facts.

It is easy to focus on a "good guy" ­ "bad guy" scenario, just as in these old plays; but to single out one individual as wanted in a court of law or on a battlefield does not take into account the world population that has been systematically occluded from our own history, and that has its own story to tell. Nor does such a simplistic view do justice to the considerable texts and documents available to us in our archives as a means to wisdom and as guides to wise behavior.

This is not a new story, but one we know only partially, and that partiality could be our undoing. Let us, for once, learn from history. And let us take a closer look at what moves and amuses us. It is time to move beyond an out-dated and ultimately destructive mindset, if we are to continue to evolve, to live. It is time to stop, to listen, to learn, to open our minds, to develop a genuine appreciation of difference, and to share more equitably all the wealth that has been concentrated in "Christendom." It is time to head back to the archives, and to reassess these plays. It is time to pay attention to the other side of the story, even if we can only get to it by looking at our own. If this is a time to pray, it is, as crucially, a time to learn.