IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts 

Baghdiants McCabe, Prof. Ina, Tufts University, Department of History, Medford, Beyond the LETTRES PERSANES: Safavid Iran in the Political Discourse of the French Enlightenment

At the end of the seventeenth century French contacts with Safavid Iran were relatively new.  The rare and failed embassies between France and Iran have seemed unimportant.  Moreover, scholarship has emphasized French cultural influence on other societies, and not the transformation of French society and culture by contact with foreign societies.  Only very recently in his Radical Enlightenment has Jonathan Israel argued for the importance of contact with the Dutch.  In comparison, Iran was remote, but in her recent work Baghdiants McCabe argues that cross-cultural contacts with what the French called the  'Orient' helped shape and transform French society and culture.  One aspect of this transformation, the one examined here, was in French political discourse.  Several French travellers published descriptions of Safavid Iran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; among them the most famous were Jean Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.  The influence of their views of Safavid Iran was of tremendous importance on the political philosophies of Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau.  Travel descriptions of Safavid Iran left a philosophical legacy of comparative thinking and disguised political criticism, which helped forge a discourse against absolutism.

The first part of the paper briefly examines French views and definitions of the Orient, and of Safavid Iran.  This is followed by a discussion of relevant works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire and their use of these views.  Self-definition while discoursing about the 'other' was one of the concepts in Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism.  This is clearly a practice in many French works about Persia and the Persians.  The chief character in Montesquieu's famous Persian Letters (Lettres Persanes) is an Isfahani named Uzbek who wrote letters home to his wives and eunuchs.  His letters are the vehicle of a thorough social criticism of French society.  The description of the Persian and Ottoman harems by Chardin served as a source for the Lettres Persanes, which was first published in 1721, went through thirty editions and would become a best seller.  Several stories and plays employ the ruse of an oriental observer in order to criticize and escape royal censorship and imprisonment. 

When Montesquieu wrote the Spirit of the Laws he was comparing different forms of government.  For the despotic form of government he used the sole example of Persia.  In French philosophy Persian despotism was oriental despotism.  It would often be represented through the oppression of women in the system of the harem.  Montequieu's Roxanne, Uzbeck's wife would revolt, destroying the entire social order symbolized by the harem in her wake.  The description of the harem played a central role in this game of political representation and disguise.  The third part of the paper will examine the role played by the fantasy of the oriental harem, which after representing the 'other', the Persian or the Turk, would come to represent the enemy within.  The 'other' within French society was first the Protestant, then the aristocrat, both represented as the 'oriental'.  Moreover, by the middle of the eighteenth century the harem as described by Diderot was none other than the French court.

  
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