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 Policing Orientalism At almost the same moment that Georges Aïdé arrived in Paris, trailing behind him the controversies of the community in Marseille, another of his fellow notables from the Council of Refugees also arrived in the capital, albeit at an address some distance further along the rue Saint-Honoré. ‘Abd el-Al, the former aga, or chief, of police under the occupation in Cairo, clearly saw this as a propitious moment for extending his own networks of sociability into the capital of the Empire. ‘Abd el-Al brought with him a young Copt, Ellious Bocthor, as his assistant and translator. But Bocthor would experience great difficulties in finding a place in the capital. Bocthor was looking for more than subsistence and sociability within the Parisian Arab milieu. He was seeking the opportunity promised by the ideals of the Revolution that had brought him to France, ideals of universalism and opportunity , which were bound to be disappointed in the Napoleonic police state. But the more curious aspect of this story was the interest that the police took in this Arab Orientalist, which contributed to the problems that forced him to leave Paris and return to Marseille. Bocthor’s trajectory tested the limits of cosmopolitanism in Napoleonic France, and the space that it created for Arab self-expression. The boundaries of Orientalism, on this occasion, were literally policed by the intervention of the state and its agents. There are wider questions to be asked here about Napoleonic cultural politics. The nature of intellectual practice and its relation to the state had changed with the transformation of political structures. Certainly, Bocthor had to learn a new way of positioning himself within a cultural politics of an Orientalism that was itself in conflict over the response to modernizing intellectual practice. But most of all Bocthor had to adjust himself to the structures of the Napoleonic imperial state. It is very much the argument of this chapter that  the bounds of cosmopolitanism were not simply enforced through a set of internal regularities proper to Orientalist representations, but by a more complex field of ideas and practices in the wider context of Napoleonic Europe. In August , the duc de Feltre, the French minister of war, wrote to the duc de Rovigo, minister of police, to inform him of the arrival in Paris of the “Coptic refugee from Egypt” Ellious Bocthor, accompanying the aga ‘Abd el-Al as an interpreter : [He] has informed me that he wishes to take up residence here, in order to perfect his knowledge of French, to translate several Arabic works held at the Imperial Library into our language, and to put together a dictionary of Common Arabic— something France does not yet possess, and which answers the need both of literature and of public utility.1 The minister of war had provisionally approved Bocthor’s residency in Paris. “The comments I have received concerning this refugee are very favorable,” he wrote, requesting the minister of police to “prescribe such arrangements as Your Excellence considers appropriate.”2 However, Rovigo (about whom we will have more to say later in this book) responded with an order to place “this foreigner” under surveillance, dispatching a note to that effect to the prefect of police in the Fourth Arrondissement.3 In the Bulletin of Secret Police on  August, it was duly noted that “the minister has ordered that this foreigner be observed with circumspection .”4 It is impossible to tell from Bocthor’s carefully worded observations a few months later exactly what role this police notoriety played in his decision to return to Marseille, but his heavy disappointment was only too evident. Bocthor hoped to present his petition to the director of public education, in the hope of finding employment at the Imperial Library, like his friend Mikha’il Sabbagh: But the author of this letter, who was then in Paris, given that his health (which was in a poor state, as it is still today) could only be made worse by remaining in the capital where the climate is so different from that of his country, and having observed furthermore that his presence upset a number of people in his profession, was forced to give up his project and return to Marseille.5 So Bocthor returned to Marseille, after spending only a few unhappy months in Paris. It may be true that his poor health made him wary of a winter in the capital without employment, but that seems to have been little...

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