Ragan’s Forgotten Saint-Simonian Travelers in Egypt should interest readers intrigued by the gallery of mirrors that scholars (and foreign correspondents) encounter on finding themselves in alien cultures. In trying to make sense of what they do not understand, they grasp familiar references from their own homelands for clues.
Evidently in need of a change of climate, Ragan left Alaska for Egypt and adopted the notion that the nineteenth-century accounts of French literary tourists, like Chateaubriand or Flaubert, were incomplete or misleading due to their elite positions at home and the comforts they could afford abroad. These privileges inclined them toward biases that laid the foundations for “Orientalist” studies. Instead of promoting “understanding” between West and East, these studies had the effect, maybe even the malevolent purpose, of sustaining a connection advantageous to visitors and their imperial homelands.
If this sounds rather like the recurring theme in the writings of a well-known Columbia University professor, it is because Ragan finds in the school of Edward Said a convenient rejection of earlier researchers and writers whose alleged interest in the Orient really served to cover denigration and exploitation. Ragan’s book, based on his doctoral work, reviews and analyzes the work of a trio of non-elite French visitors to Egypt whose perspectives later scholars neglected because of their old-fashioned scholarly conclusions.
It is always worthwhile to find new source material on any historical topic, but as it happens Ragan’s sources are not exactly unknown, nor are their own observations radically original. While by no means household names, the writings of Suzanne Voilquin, Ismayl Urbain, and Jehan d’Ivray (the nom de plume of Jeanne Puech) are familiar to specialists on Egypt and Algeria. If later scholars have overlooked them, it may be less because of the sympathy they expressed for the exotic people they encountered and sought to help and more because their primary interests lay in the social and political issues of France, not North Africa.
Suzanne Voilquin (1801–1875) was a child of working-class Paris, who could have been cast in Les Misérables. An adventurous, romantic young woman, she made her way to Egypt and stayed, despite modest and, at times, impoverished conditions. She engaged in social work during the terrible plague years of the early 1830s and witnessed the arrival of great French and British commercial interests in Egypt, highlighted by the building of the Suez Canal. The importance of her writings from these years, however, lies mainly in Voilquin’s reflections on the feminist and social causes she carried with her as mental baggage and on the ways in which her ideas evolved as she contrasted her experiences in Egypt with those she had earlier in France.
Ismayl Urbain (1812–1884) could have been invented by Alexandre Dumas, with whom he shared a mixed antillais (Caribbean) and French background and an attraction to military adventures and political intrigues. His father, a French trader from Marseille, never formally married his mother, a Guyanese free woman of color. He came to view himself as a champion of the oppressed while remaining loyal and committed to France’s mission civilisatrice. Urbain himself had reaped the benefits of a French education in Marseille and, among many career moves, went to Egypt as a young man to teach French. A decided original, Urbain encountered Voilquin in Egypt, but his role in French history was secured when he took part in the conquest of Algeria and the debates on colonial policy that followed. Drawn to France’s new subject populations of Arabs and Berbers, his views and critiques contain clues to the what-might-have-been Algerian question that burdens France to this day.
Jeanne Puech (1861–1940) married a French-trained Egyptian doctor and lived with him for some forty years, adopting (up to a point) the manners and mores of the Cairene upper-middle class. She returned to France after his death and went on to write works of fiction and social criticism, mainly concerned with women but also with the evolution of French and British relations with Egypt, which she viewed as broadly detrimental to Egyptians of all classes. In doing so, she, unlike Voilquin and Urbain, took some critical distance from the intellectual-political current that deeply influenced all three main figures of Ragan’s study.
This current was the Saint-Simonian movement of the study’s title. Its name derives from the thinker-activist Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who sought to organize social life and economic activity under the direction of a technocratic-statist elite whose moral foundation would be a reformed (essentially a humanistic and altruistic) Christianity. Karl Marx and his followers dubbed Saint Simonianism a form of “utopian socialism” and criticized it as “unscientific.” However, it is evident two centuries later that whereas Marxism gave rise to police states, mass murder, and catastrophic economic mismanagement, Saint-Simonianism helped lay some of the intellectual and practical foundations for the welfare-administrative states that characterize liberal democracies.
For activist followers, Saint-Simonianism served as a do-good organization preaching respect for the allegedly misunderstood mores and morals of distant lands. These included the nearby vast and varied territory stretching across North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco, which Western adventurers rediscovered after centuries of hostile distance. In their sentiments, they could almost be called proto–anti-Orientalists, which may be why Ragan is drawn to their stories and why Edward Said would have approved of them. The contradiction is telling: defend, or at least rationalize, mores and customs that you despise, simply because the imperialist power, which is what you really dislike, is trying to reform them in the colonized land that you really like. In both your dislikes and likes, you are, needless to say, confused.
The paradox is that the Saint-Simonians were proponents of women’s rights, social justice, and so forth, notwithstanding the abusive and dictatorial behavior in which their leaders, in common with most political cults, engaged, and which Puech would later bitterly denounce. Their hall of mirrors consisted of the contradictions inherent in their own purposes. They wanted to promote technological, industrial, and social progress in the Orient, even as they protected native ways they must have seen as primitive and oppressive.
The risk of disillusionment and failure was apparent to Tocqueville, who observed the early military campaigns of conquest in Algeria. The uplifting programs of well-intentioned missionaries, like Urbain and Voilquin, in the tradition-bound societies of Egypt and the Maghreb did not strike him as winning propositions. To the Saint-Simonians, however, such programs were the key to solving their own personal “issues,” and they pursued them in their politics while promoting them in their prolific and passionate journalism.
The place of women in these societies, to take a blatant example, should have sent Voilquin back to the barricades of her youth and have inflamed the righteous anger of Urbain, as the son of a former emancipated slave. Instead, they found ways to rationalize, “contextualize” as we would now say, the customary attitudes and practices encountered in Muhammad Ali’s Egypt, along the Barbary shores of Ottoman beys, or among Arab pirates and Berber clan leaders.
Ragan defends the originality and enduring pertinence of his subjects’ viewpoints and writings. Specialists, however, have not neglected them to the extent he suggests. However, their viewpoints and writings are more important for intellectual-cultural Western history than for their contribution to understanding nineteenth-century North Africa. Urbain, in particular, played an important role at very high levels during debates on the status and governance of Algeria. He encouraged Emperor Napoleon III’s dream of an Arab Empire allied with France. That dream crashed after the French military disaster at the hands of the Prussians, one consequence of which was the creation of an Algerie française (a French Algeria) quite different from Napoleon and Urbain’s romantic hopes.
It stands to reason that whether one is an aristocrat and man of letters, like Chateaubriand, or a fille du people, like Voilquin, a harem, if examined without romantic illusions, cannot be seen as anything other than what it is. The eccentric romance that Ragan, following his Saint-Simonian travelers, would have us take seriously vanished under the real evidence of North Africa’s history and the present situation.
Reality is a hard school, which may be why the influence of Saint-Simon can be seen in the policies of France’s current president, a known fantasist. At home, in North Africa, and indeed in the Middle East, Emmanuel Macron appears intent on proving a thesis posited two centuries ago, to wit: that we can all get along just fine because we can all recognize the value—and justice—of being good French liberals and embrace vivre ensemble policies. We can do so even when the factual evidence shows that the other lot has no intention of vivre with France, Israel, or any other Western liberal democratic society.
Roger F. S. Kaplan
Author of Conservative Socialism: The Decline of Radicalism and the Triumph of the Left in France (2017)
