Introduction: Framing Muslims in the Making of France, 1300–1800

When Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire was published in the 1980s, it drew connections across millennia—from the caves of Lascaux through Clovis and Charlemagne—to establish how France came to be imagined, formed, and solidified as a territorial, cultural, and sovereign entity.¹ Muslims were everywhere and nowhere in that work. Their implicit presence surged from the opening pages—with the legacy of the Crusades as formative of French cultural identity, the Battle of Poitiers as crucial in halting the advance of Islam and establishing French frontiers, and the Crusader king canonized Saint Louis as the true founder of the French monarchy. Yet when the final three volumes turned to charting France's diversity, Muslims disappeared from view. According to Nora, politics and religion divided France, but landscapes, departments, regions, and generations framed those divisions within a de facto unity. Muslims had no place in this “shared space and time.” They were missing from the work's oppositions—Left and Right, Catholic and secular, Franks and Gauls, French and foreigner—and even from the section on religious minorities, which considered only Jansenists, Calvinists, and Jews. This ostensibly postnationalist recognition of France's diversity (les France) worked paradoxically to emphasize France's distinctiveness and separation from the rest of the world and, as Patrick Boucheron has argued, “fed a critique of cultural diversity wherein hostility to the supposedly destructive effects of immigration became more and more clearly defined.”²

Much scholarship since then has challenged the collection's near‐total occlusion of French empire and colonies. But Muslims still often remain absent from accounts of the five hundred years between 1300 and 1800. Even works like Postcolonial Realms of Memory that investigate links to an imperial past severed by historians after decolonization have remained focused on the “French Imperial Nation‐State” emerging under the Third Republic, with its apogee in the interwar period.³ The Revolution of 1789 and the invasion of Egypt appear as a boundary rather than a bridge; the colonial empire of the Old Regime and its precursors hardly surface. This intense but historically slight compensatory memory work offers little to compete with the magisterial sweep of French history conceived by Nora's authors, and it unwittingly reinforces the association of Islam and Muslims with the colonized periphery and their exclusion from a broader vision of the nation. Key sites of colonial memory discussed in the volume, such as Marseille, the Mediterranean, the bagne (here meaning colonial prison), slavery, and abolition, thus find themselves shorn of the longer history to which they belong and which configures France and its empire in different ways.⁴

This forum seeks to remedy that disconnection and to challenge how Muslims have been “framed out of” the making of France. Not only were Muslims, in fact, present in and alongside what came to be France, but their real or imagined presence was made to perform different kinds of work in the construction, defense, and extension of royal and early republican power. In many cases these cultural uses were detached from individual lives as enslaved workers in households, captive laborers on galleys, soldiers in Ottoman armies, aspiring allies in Eurasia, or traders and travelers in late eighteenth‐century Europe. In this sense, the second meaning of framing is equally apposite: Muslims were useful figures for projecting both negative and positive aspects of power—from the prestige of eradicating heresy and saving souls to the evils of “Oriental despotism,” from revolutionary universalism to panics around epidemic disease and invasion. This meaning of framing has been more common in studies of twenty‐first‐century manipulations of the “Muslim threat.” However, we see here that “framing Muslims” has a much longer history in Western culture and operated in richer and more diverse ways than simply through negative stereotypes and exclusion.⁵

This forum began as a conference roundtable and emerges from a wider scholarship that has demolished the “clash of civilizations” canard from two ends of a five‐hundred‐year timeline.⁶ At one end, historians of the early Middle Ages have debunked myths about binary religious warfare in premodern Iberia, the Levant, and France itself to reveal complex patterns of alliance, land grabbing, and consolidation of protostates.⁷ On the other end, historians of French empire have shown the equally varied uses of Islam by colonial regimes and institutions from the army to the church, as well as the fictions that maintained French hegemony in the era of decolonization and after.⁸ Building on these approaches, we turn to the period between the Crusades and the modern colonial era. During the roughly five centuries between the fall of Acre in 1291 and the invasion of Egypt in 1798, the relationship between France and Islam was not one of direct conflict and colonization. The contributions to this forum reject confrontational narratives that postulate continuous hostility between monolithic civilizational entities like “Islam,” “Europe,” or “Christianity,” narratives still peddled by some politicians and even some historians.⁹ They do not, however, seek to refashion such binary accounts into idealized visions of multicultural harmony in the manner of some works on Islamic Iberia or Ottoman‐European exchange.¹⁰ As important as it is to recognize practical interactions and cultural mobility across religious divides, these articles acknowledge in nuanced ways the operations of power and violence threaded through convivencia—the act of coexistence.¹¹

All the contributions here deal with situations of force, both real and symbolic, emerging within frameworks of coexistence and exchange. They also recognize what Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent have conceptualized as “an invisible integration” of Muslims into a Europe from which they have been presumed absent while highlighting cases of historical figures—both Muslims and ethnic minorities in Islamic empires—whose experiences and depictions have often been “hiding in plain sight.”¹² Michel‐Rolph Trouillot has described how silences enter the historical record: in the original process of recording, in the choices of which documents to preserve, and in the privileging and ordering of certain materials to tell larger stories.¹³ There are many ways Muslims may have gone missing from French archives, whether in the state's nonrecognition of the category, in the lack of preservation of documents at a local level, or in the exoticizing of existing evidence as exceptional rather than meaningfully connected to local communities and translocal networks. The contributions here depart from points of particular archival activity, where relations of power—enslavement, diplomacy, religious prestige, policing, war—inscribed traces of Muslims who might otherwise have remained in the archival shadows, despite the bombastic way their image was sometimes visually deployed.

This forum demonstrates that Islam and Muslims are neither remnants of an ancient past nor postcolonial latecomers to French history. It does so in part by shifting our geographic focus along with our temporal one, insisting that Marseille in particular and the Mediterranean more generally must belong to any framing of France between 1300 and 1800. That is a relatively new position among medievalists. In her article in this forum, Elizabeth Casteen insists on the Mediterranean as integral to the making of France during the late Middle Ages, thus joining a group of Anglophone scholars seeking to bridge a north‐south disciplinary split that had left the Inner Sea and its associated Islamicate networks to Iberianists and bound French specialists to England and the European continent.¹⁴ In a similar vein, Gillian Weiss's and Ian Coller's articles push back against the reframing of France as preeminently an Atlantic power from the late seventeenth century, showing that links to the Mediterranean remained vital throughout this period and beyond: the 1798 invasion of Egypt was a decisive turn to Afro‐Eurasia that would henceforth define France's imperial trajectory.

None of the contributions here summon Fernand Braudel. While we implicitly accept his vision of the Mediterranean as a “zone” stretching far inland along rivers, via trade routes, and through diplomatic networks, our conceptions are less unitary and deterministic. Nor are they binary in the sense of the “Pirenne thesis” that saw the spread of Islam as fracturing Europe's integration with Rome's mare nostrum.¹⁵ Instead, the Mediterraneans considered here are plural, riven by changing forms of warfare, slavery, and religious hostility yet connected by the very diplomacy, ransom negotiation, and conversion arising from these conflicts.¹⁶ Braudel saw the seventeenth‐century intervention of northern powers as bringing to a close the “Mediterranean world of Philip II,” but we point to Mediterranean linkages that changed in form and grew broader, stretching across Europe, North Africa, and the Levant and even into Central Asia.¹⁷

For Weiss, the late seventeenth‐century Mediterranean was a space of commercial exchange and naval conflict, as well as a theater for enacting royal power and enslaving “infidels.” It also played a role in justifying the domestic assault on Protestantism while intersecting and likely shaping France's entrance into the Atlantic slave trade. For Junko Thérèse Takeda, the Mediterranean was a vector for failed imperial ventures in Islamic Asia. Similar schemes took concrete shape in North Africa, beginning with the French invasion of Egypt that is central to Coller's study of the first French attempt to police Muslims on French soil. These examples raise the thorny problem of who exactly was a Muslim and in whose eyes Muslim identity took shape. Takeda looks at religious and ethnic minorities living on the edges of Islam, where conversion could be a path to political power. In the case of the Georgian prince and the Armenian patriarch whom she profiles, the prospect of forging Catholic alliances or attaching themselves to the French state's imperial projects seemed a way to serve two masters and maintain intermediate identities.

Casteen, Weiss, and Coller point up the complex ways French authorities and French visual culture sought to identify Muslims and non‐Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Did Islam leave indelible bodily scars, or could the law of Muhammad—like a turban—be put on and cast off? Which subjects of the Ottoman sultan imperiled France? What made North Africans friends or foes? Under what conditions was religious difference associated with dark complexion? Could a Muslim become a citizen of the French Republic? Where the emergent state of Louis XIV was concerned with possessing a certain quota of enslaved Muslims on its Mediterranean galleys for symbolic and strategic purposes, the postrevolutionary Directory exploited older anxieties about the threats posed by Muslims to put in place new and wider forms of policing. In all these cases, the population of Muslims “seen” by the state only partly overlapped with the Muslims actually living on French soil.

Thus an “invisible” presence was accompanied by a much more visible one, a conspicuous deployment of Islam for symbolic purposes. Religious conversion generated charismatic power in early modern France in ways that far exceeded the merely missionary. The baptism of ordinary Muslims often featured elites who drew social prestige by acting as godparents. The effects of conversion were less clear, however, for the converts themselves. Casteen highlights conflicting perspectives from fifteenth‐century Marseille on the extent to which baptism conferred freedom and/or washed away the stain of servitude. Takeda shows the limitations of Catholic conversion as a path to French protection for ethnic minorities inside Islamic empires. Weiss proposes that while conversion conferred slight privileges on esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks), the baptism of Muslims—free and unfree—offered legitimacy to France's Catholic monarch under fire for colluding with the Ottoman Empire and persecuting Protestants. Coller suggests that even though the French Revolution seemed to set aside religious difference in favor of ideological alignment, the potential “conversion” of Muslims to the revolutionary cause remained important in the struggle to expand or end the revolution.

All the projects represented here engage the points at which those larger symbolic repertoires intersect with the less discernible trajectories of Muslims themselves. In this regard, the tools provided by Edward Said's Orientalism remain relevant in recognizing the longue durée survival of certain discursive forms that work to perpetuate hegemonic power. At the same time, these modes never remain monolithic across swaths of time, as Said's polemic sometimes suggested they did. Even in specific historical contexts, they were used in different and sometimes quite contradictory ways. They do not reflect any simple relationship of domination between “Occident” and “Orient,” or “Europe” and “Islam”—no such Manichaean relationship ever existed, and the terms themselves were not stable in their meaning or content. The best scholarship has carefully parsed the evolving modes of cultural representation of Islam while recognizing the transforming context of Islam in Europe, whether in Spain, the Balkans, or Mediterranean ports or at the gates of Vienna.¹⁸

The articles in our forum recognize that the repertoire of tropes available in early modern France was more expansive and complex than a simple mechanism of “self” and “other.” Crusading visions of Christian virtue, for example, could be complicated in brutal ways when Muslim captives were women. Conceptions of Islamic societies as despotic could offer a weapon to Louis XIV's antiabsolutist critics, but fearsome images of Muslim oppressors sat side by side with abject visions of defeated “Turks.” Fervent exhortations of the benefits of conversion could be undermined by blank indifference when strategic benefits failed to align with diplomatic fantasies. In the face of conflict, revolutionary claims that Muslims would embrace universal freedom rapidly lapsed back into older identifications of Muslims with tyranny, violence, and epidemic disease.

Ultimately, however, this forum seeks to go beyond a discursive analysis focused on French ways of conceiving Islam to consider their interplay with the socially grounded trajectories of individuals and groups from the Islamic world who found themselves caught, body or soul, at the conjunction of these contradictions. This kind of history uses social and cultural as well as literary and art‐historical tools to analyze the predicament of Muslims in premodern and revolutionary France. It is interested in spaces that favor those connections—not only centers like Paris or Versailles but also the Mediterranean coast, the port cities, and other borderlands and peripheries, stretching to Naples, Hungary, Egypt, and Persia. It offers new framings of France itself, illuminating previously unexamined structures and phenomena.

As both Casteen and Weiss show in their contributions to this forum, the presence in medieval and early modern France of enslaved Muslims was not simply a side product of ongoing religious conflict but an expression of social power, whether within the patriarchal household or at the top of the emerging royal state. These Muslims were not outsiders but enforced participants performing both concrete labor and symbolic work. Casteen analyzes the case of a Provençal caulker claiming possession of an Amazigh (Berber) woman to show how shared ideas about slavery, sexual dishonor, and religious alterity helped define the bounds of communal belonging. At the same time, Casteen examines a number of literary texts to illuminate how the moral logic of the Crusades continued to be promulgated in tropes linking religious enemies to more intimate questions of sexual violence. Weiss argues that designers of royal almanacs paired images of subjugated Muslims and Protestants in an attempt to spread a message of universal Catholic dominion after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and to repair Louis XIV's status as “Most Christian King,” which had been undercut by France's “impious alliance” with the Ottoman Empire. The resonance of those images was rooted in the real but often forgotten practices of enslavement that contributed both to the backbreaking work needed to manufacture and row warships and to the spectacular enforcement of Catholic religious orthodoxy in the late seventeenth century. Takeda investigates how non‐Muslim elites in Islamic Eurasia sought to exploit French interests in the Muslim world to carve out a place for themselves but fell victim to the vulnerabilities of the French Crown, demonstrating the cracks in the facade of French global power. In Coller's article, French elites themselves seem to have been only too willing to consume their own rhetoric about Muslim participation in the Revolution, a self‐deception that underpinned both the decision to invade Egypt and the reaction against Muslims in response to the Ottoman declaration of war in 1799. But Muslims also learned to navigate the structures of power in new ways, by the route of citizenship or through negotiating privileged relationships with the regime, setting the scene for the contradictory republican and colonial pathways of the nineteenth century.

There are several important topics that this forum treats unevenly. Casteen's is the only contribution to take on gender and sexual violence directly. It is true that a preponderance of the people enslaved in the late medieval Midi were female, whereas those carried off from battlefields and enslaved on galleys in later periods were overwhelmingly male. Yet that difference and those dynamics are themselves intensely gendered and worthy of further exploration, particularly given that French framings of Islam have so often centered on women's bodies—hidden in harems or concealed by veils—while imagining Muslim men as hypermasculine and sexually aggressive.¹⁹ As a whole, furthermore, the forum only implicitly addresses the implications of racialized thinking for the lived experience and the representation of Muslims in France before 1800. From the cases marshaled here, different constituencies had different ideas about religion as immutable and complexion as an indicator of alterity. Looking at this evidence raises further questions. To what extent were the “scripts of blackness” that Noémie Ndiaye has identified in French theater, opera, and ballet enacted in the social worlds of the enslaved North African, kidnapped Armenian, or surveilled Algerian under study?²⁰ Does an earlier era's hysteria about imaginary Muslims infiltrating metropolitan French territory teach us about expressions of racism today? Certainly, the entanglements between Muslims and other religious minorities—Eastern Christians, Protestants, or Jews—touched on by Takeda, Weiss, and Coller have deep contemporary resonance.

The forum thus tries to open up and begin to fill in the blank space of Islam in French history that often excludes Muslims from meaningful participation in French culture. Today the seven million or so French citizens “de confession musulmane” are likely the largest single religious minority group in Europe.²¹ Yet their situation in France remains precarious, with their belonging and the “compatibility” of Islam with “Republican values” constantly questioned. French decolonization carried out an amputation not just of territory but of centuries‐old cultural and historical connections to Islam, transforming Muslims from colonial subjects to foreign, racialized immigrants expected to “assimilate” to French norms by renouncing ethnic and religious particularity.²² Key to that exclusion is the sense of a culturally continuous France reaching back deep into the past, a France whose diversity is framed as white, European, and Judeo‐Christian. Many of the clichés about Muslims thrown up by earlier periods and addressed in this forum still carry force today. The real experiences of Muslims in France, and the long‐standing French interventions in the Islamic world, offer quite different stories, on which it may be possible to fashion new conceptions of France's pluricultural and multifaith history.

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