Hart and Irvine on Hartley (2023)

As Julia Caterina Hartley writes in the introduction to this book, studies on Iran in the French tradition are usually associated with the eighteenth century, and particularly with Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721). Hartley’s Iran and French Orientalism analyses the French interest in Iranian literature and culture from the period spanning Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) to the early years of the twentieth century, with Marthe Bibesco’s Les Huit paradis (1908). However, Hartley does more than investigate a later century: rather than studying representations of the all-encompassing “Orient” in nineteenth-century French literature and productions, she focuses on the cultural exchanges between the two countries of France and Iran. She explains that Persian literatures were being translated into French at this time thanks to an interest by scholars whom Edgar Quinet referred to collectively as making up the “Oriental Renaissance.” Hartley engages with Edward Said’s foundational book Orientalism (1978) but departs from Said in that her book presents the relationship between Occident and Orient as not simply hierarchical and oppositional. 

The chapters are organized by genre, exploring French works of poetry, history and historical fiction, travel-writing, and performing arts productions. Working within and across these genres, Hartley discusses five key narratives that emerge in nineteenth-century French representations of Iran. First, that Iran is an idealized, fantastic place of poetry. Second, that it is a “decadent, effeminate and despotic” Other (3). Third, that Iran is an ancestor of modern Europe, and is therefore situated alongside France in an Aryan/Islamic opposition. Fourth, that Iran exists as a modern nation with its own customs and traditions. Finally, that Iran is only an ingredient in the generalized Orient. By analyzing these five narratives through close readings of the corpus, Hartley draws nuanced and complex conclusions that both engage with and transcend genre, and that are attentive to the cultural conceptions of each work.

Chapter one, which focuses on French poetry, analyses works by Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Anna de Noailles, Armand Renaud, Henri Cazalis, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Some of these poets treat Iran as the magical destination of modern European escapism, which aligns them with the narrative of Iran as an imaginary ideal and of Iran as a component of the Oriental/Occidental opposition. While Iran as a concept grew in popularity in the French literary imagination, other poets, such as Noailles, used the ambiguous lyric “I” to blur the line between East and West. Still other poems imitate the themes, structures and rhyme schemes of traditional Iranian poetry to reflect on and extend France’s own poetic tradition. The poetry of Desbordes-Valmore, which draws from both literary cultures, contributes to an understanding of universalism in French orientalist writing. 

The second chapter, which focuses on histories and historical fiction, engages with works influenced by the Aryan myth, the racial and religious theories of three French historians, and the perspectives of historical novelists on pre-Islamic Iran. While Arthur de Gobineau and Ernest Renan are the most regularly featured nineteenth-century French thinkers in studies of racism and anti-Semitism, Jules Michelet’s lesser-known La Bible de l’Humanité (1864) subtly situates Iran in the same binary as Gobineau and Renan: because Iran has roots in what Michelet calls “the sons of light, the Aryans” (75), it stands alongside the West in contrast to “the peoples […] of the night” (75). In addition to these histories—a genre generally not written by women—lie the historical fictions of Judith Gautier and Jane Dieulafoy. Their novels, in opposition to the strict binaries presented by Gobineau, Renaud and Michelet, feature characters that consistently cross lines between cultures and genders. Hartley shows, for example, that Jane Dieulafoy is better able to condemn gender equality through the mouthpiece of the Persian queen Parysatis, than they do in their non-fiction (90). While Hartley’s readings of Dieulafoy’s novels L’Oracle and Rose d’Hatra show the author drawing characters who move beyond the gender binary, Hartley concludes that Dieulafoy ultimately uses Iranian history in service of “the present of the women of France, a present that was in urgent need of change” (101). 

Travel-writing, the subject of chapter three, is a genre that offers more freedom to its writers than poetry or history and Hartley confirms the highly subjective nature of this form of writing. Eugène Flandin, Gobineau, Dieulafoy, Pierre Loti, Claude Anet and Marthe Bibesco, all studied in this chapter, take up distinct positions in their perspectives on Iran. Hartley explores these travel-writers' perceptions of the characteristics of Persians, the treatment of Persian women, religious rituals, historical and modern landmarks, the role of Western imperialism and the place of literature in European conceptualizations of Iran. What further separates travel-writing from the other genres studied is the confrontation of the writers with their own Otherness: in visiting Iran, they become the strangers, and Europe becomes a defamiliarized culture. 

In chapter four, Hartley examines theatrical performances that present multi-layered visions of Iran, but which tend to replicate narratives of Iran as an idealized fantasy world or as a dangerous Other. Hartley proposes that because the performing arts are collaborative and expensive, and because they feature physical separation between audience and performers, creators were less willing to challenge clichés and risk turning audiences away. Stereotypical, crowd-pleasing narratives about Iran are thus found in Théophile Gautier’s and Paul Dukas’s ballets, in the three operas Lalla-Roukh, Le Mage and Thamara, in a puppet show about Omar Khayyām by Maurice Bouchor, and finally in the extravagant, outdoor staged production of Dieulafoy’s Parysatis. These theatrical performances consolidate popular stereotypes, according to Hartley, but also demonstrate an increased interest in France for accurate representations of Iran. 

Iran and French Orientalism makes a significant contribution to the field in that there has been no prior systematic study of the cultural relations of Iran and France in the nineteenth century. Many of the works analyzed in the book are little known, and Hartley’s close readings and careful analysis add considerably to our understanding of them, and of the varying perceptions of Iran in French literary culture. The book will be of interest to advanced students and academics with an interest in Iranian and/or French literature and culture, or in nuanced scholarship that develops Said’s ideas on orientalism. Hartley shows that analyses have been done of the cultural relationship between France and Iran in the seventeenth century (Mokhberi, 2019) and in the eighteenth century (Bonnerot, 1988). The lack of a study on the relationship between the two countries in the nineteenth century represents a gap that Hartley’s book fills exceptionally well.