-
Conclusion
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Conclusion Today, when the inhabitants of Marseille take a bus along the boulevard Sakakini, it is unlikely that they have any sense of the history that lies behind the thoroughfare ’s name. The visitor who strikes across the bridge from Notre Dame in Paris toward the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is unlikely to know that this is a Melkite church where services are regularly conducted in Arabic, like those Isa Carus once performed in the church of Saint-Roch. The banlieusards who take the RER D into Paris from Melun pass the barracks where generations of Arabs served in the French military, but it is doubtful that these commuters are thinking of the Mamelouks Abdallah and Chahine. There is no plaque to record the bloody massacre of Egyptian men, women, and children in the cours Gouffé, near the grand circle of the Place Castellane in Marseille. Nor is there any tribute to Ellious Bocthor and Joseph Agoub, each of whom played an important role in the evolution of Arabiclanguage teaching in Paris—not even in the imposing boat-shaped edifice of the Institut du Monde Arabe. Wandering through the Louvre, one might see the face of Rufa’il Zakhur, or Dom Raphäel as he was known, and many other now nameless Egyptians and Syrians who posed as models for Napoleonic painters. It is the rare viewer who can peel back the layers of exoticism to discover the lives that lay underneath. Outside the Louvre, the pyramid reveals nothing of the Arab histories that once crossed crowded streets where it now stands, mute and glittering. On October , to strains of Mozart’s Mysteries of Isis, a giant slab of rose-colored granite inscribed with hieroglyphics was slowly levered into position atop a heavy socle in the Place de la Concorde, on the right bank of the Seine. King Louis-Philippe waved from the balcony of the Ministry of the Navy as the head engineer, Apollinaire Lebas, gave the order to complete the erection of the monument. Below, a crowd of , spectators filled the vast square, cheering as the huge wooden apparatus creaked into action. This act, as other historians have observed, finally filled a gaping absence at the center of France’s self-representation. No regime since the Revolution had been able to solve the problem of what to place at the point where the guillotine had brought the hereditary monarchy to an end. This dilemma was not resolved by the temporary statue of Liberty, which had peeled and crumbled under the Directory, nor by the shifting pageant of Napoleon’s popular fêtes impériales, nor by a monument expiatoire, which was endlessly discussed under the Restoration but never executed. If the emplacement of the obelisk raised, for contemporary observers, questions of how an Egyptian monument could answer this still-unresolved problem of national history, a century of empire would give a new meaning to this act of cultural appropriation. In Egypt, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi’s protest to Muhammad ‘Ali against the abrogation of the obelisk marked a decisive moment in Egypt’s rediscovery of its ancient heritage: Tahtawi was appointed as the first protector of antiquities in Egypt. This book has attempted a reading of three decades of French history from the perspective of a population whose existence, I would suggest, was also effaced in the great national act of forgetting that the emplacement of the obelisk served to solemnize. The Arab France that this book has mapped was delocalized and deterritorialized—a space of mobility, exchange, and negotiation; of changing meanings, boundaries, and identities. In retracing the journeys and struggles of a population whose presence within this history has disappeared from view, this work has posed key questions about mobility, community, and identity, and the relationship between these three dimensions of a shared existence. I have concluded that only through a recognition of mobility as a constitutive practice of community , rather than as a force eroding traditional social ties, does it become possible to recognize the extent and complexity of this community, which has been lost to “national” history. Rather than seeking to establish community through the evidence of a fixed population living a settled existence in clustered fashion over a particular period of time, it has been my aim to look to what, at first, might seem the counterevidence of a population scattered across France; repeated displacements ; weeks spent on road, river, and even on foot; movement across and between different urban spaces...