A Dragoman and a Scholar

French Knowledge-Making in the Mediterranean from Old Regime to Bonaparte

Bibliographic Data

ID3307264
AuthorsAlexander Bevilacqua (0000-0003-2758-6219, Williams College, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume94
Issue2
Pages247-287
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/719489
OpenAlexW4283362753
LanguageEN
References cited23

What was the relationship between the component parts of early modern French knowledge-making in the Mediterranean? And how did the revolutionary decade transform the Old Regime knowledge ecosystem? This essay seeks answers through the prism of a single life. Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis was a French dragoman (diplomatic interpreter) in the eighteenth century, serving consulates and missions across the Mediterranean and later working as General Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief Arabic interpreter during the Egyptian campaign of 1798. He also undertook a variety of scholarly projects, almost all of which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Using both archival sources and Venture’s scholarly manuscripts, this study reconstructs his long and polymorphous career. Venture’s endeavors help to pinpoint the place of formal scholarship in eighteenth-century French knowledge-making in the Mediterranean, as well as to see how Enlightenment ideas about Oriental despotism were grafted onto the European tradition of Arabic scholarship during the Old Regime. Finally, this essay reveals long-term continuities in personnel, knowledge, and ideas that cut across the revolutionary era. In order to explain such phenomena as the ideological devaluation of Islamic societies, the Egyptian campaign, and the development of nineteenth-century scholarly Orientalism it is necessary to understand the Old Regime and its knowledge-making

Enlightenment · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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