L’Invention littéraire de la Méditerranée dans la France du XIXe siècle ed. by Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin (review)

The topics covered in this collection roam far wider than the title might suggest: from a section on travelogues (Chateaubriand and Lamartine) to one on relations between power and knowledge (Michelet, the Saint-Simonien Michel Chevalier, or the anthropology of Paul Adam), via ‘fictions et représentations’ in the Coppet group, in Jean Potocki and popular songs, or in Romantic travel writing’s approach to frontiers (revisiting Chateaubriand and Lamartine, adding Gautier, Nerval, Flaubert, and Michelet). Two paired issues surface in all the articles: community and frontiers; universality and diversity. Community in Chateaubriand, for instance, after his tour of the Mediterranean in 1806–07; but a focus on the frontier between the Christian shores (freedom) and the regions under Ottoman Islam (despotism) in Les Martyrs and Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage. Discussing frontiers, Franck Laurent widens the issue to examine writers like Lamartine, Gautier, Nerval, or Flaubert, stressing the contrasted approaches adopted vis-à-vis Italy, Greece, the Balkans, or Spain. Madame de Staël’s impact on the elaboration of the underlying North–South divide is well summarized by Christine Pouzoulet, who looks in more detail at Italy, foregrounding de Staël’s evolution via her post-1805 construction of the notion of a specifically meridional melancholia and the role of imagination in the regeneration of modern Italy. For Sarga Moussa, too, a comparative approach dominates Lamartine’s thinking, but he shows how the dream of the abolition of frontiers is coloured by colonialist musings on the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Territoriality dominates in Édouard Galby-Marinetti’s reading of the Mediterranean in the context of the Crimean War, while it is seen by Émilie Klene as transcended in Jean Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, an anthropological vision of the Mediterranean as ‘tension permanente entre le pluriel et l’unique’ (p. 122). Cultural anthropology is central, also, in Sarah Al-Matary’s reading of Paul Adam’s novels and their defence of a génie méditerranéen underpinning the assimilationist doctrine promoted under the Third Republic. Particularism (and conflict) vies with universality again in Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin’s analysis of the ‘Mediterranean’ paradoxes faced by a historian like Michelet and his defence of ‘un idéal universaliste dont les successifs dévoiements historiques n’entament pas la validité régulatrice et spirituelle’ (p. 249). For Philippe Régnier, that ideal was ably backed by the endeavours of the Saint-Simoniens, through the East–West reconciliation they deemed achievable via concrete networks (of railways, banking or, most symbolically, the Suez Canal). One of the most far-reaching and damaging features of France–Mediterranean relations in the nineteenth century—colonial expansion after 1830 — is approached, somewhat unconventionally, via popular song (Élisabeth Pillet), seen as evolving from a facile orientalism to stereotypical post-1880 projections. Fragments of a complex construct, much of the material presented here is given more comprehensive and more amply illustrated treatment (in particular the interplay between the experiential and the fictional) in another 2012 publication, C. W. Thompson’s French Romantic Travel Writing (Oxford University Press; see French Studies, 67 (2013), 260).