Imagining the Ottomans: Appropriations of the Ottoman Empire In 18th-Century France
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2023
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
The beginning of the Enlightenment saw the de-emphasis of the divine Christian ‘other’ as the explanation for mankind’s governing structures, and the need for the French to redefine the 18th-century world in human terms. Coinciding with this religious shift, moreover, the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz opened the Ottoman Empire to the West for trade and political cooperation. Heightened contact between Europe and its neighbor prompted the Ottoman ‘other’ to become a crucial point of comparison for the French ‘self’ in this period of transition. Thus, this thesis tracks the mounting importance of Ottoman fashion in 18th-century France and how clothing, particularly that of the harem, evolved from an elite intellectual fashion to a status symbol with its integration into French culture. Gazing into the pages of the 1711 album, Recueil de cent estampes représentant différentes nations du Levant, аristocratic European women associated Vanmour’s ‘realistic’ harem not only with luxury but also with freedom from the male gaze. This idea of liberation popularized portraits a-la-turque as a subtle form of social commentary. However, due to this aristocratic style, by the mid-18th century, turquerie paintings became an elite symbol of belonging. Moreover, the 1762 and 1763 publications of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters granted the turquerie trend intellectual and moral value. By the time Antoine de Favray painted Portrait of the Countess of Vergennes in Turkish Attire in 1768, therefore, the portrait a-la-turque did much more than feign its Ottoman sitter’s belonging to the world of her husband, the Comte de Vergennes. In this, the case study of Annette Duvivier, Countess of Vergennes, demonstrated that turquerie no longer invoked the Ottoman Empire, instead it had become an integral component of the French ‘self.