Le Turc, l’Islam et la galanterie dans Zayde

Often analyzed through the history of literature as a roman espagnol, Zayde has attracted little if any attention in regard to the rise of historical novels in the second half of seventeenth-century France. It is nonetheless possible to link the depiction of the Turkish and Muslim world in this novel to the geopolitical concerns of the French monarchy at the time. The cultural frame of galanterie thus becomes an ideological tool that obfuscates any problematic differences between Muslim and Catholic worlds, far from the open conflict apparently narrated by the novel.