French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire: Diplomacy, Political Culture, and the Limiting of Universal Revolution, 1792–1798, by Pascal Firges

Abstract

A book in English about the Levant in the late eighteenth century is to be welcomed, even if this monograph is more narrowly focused than the title would suggest. At its core, the study examines the experiences of French subjects in Istanbul, Izmir and Aleppo at the time of the French Revolution. There were probably no more than 1,500 French merchants, craftsmen and state employees in the Ottoman Empire at this time, 300 of whom congregated in Izmir and perhaps the same number in Istanbul. The author, Pascal Firges, writes principally about the latter community. However, he scales up his survey to embrace the history of diplomatic dealings between Turkey and revolutionary France during the formative years before the invasion of Egypt in 1798. He also presents his case-study as opening a ‘trans-local’ window on the dominant narratives of the French Revolution in a gesture towards the global history approach. The embedding of the political turmoil in France into the diplomatic history of eastern Europe and the Levant makes for solid, if rather uninspiring, reading, while the attempt at a trans-local interpretation of the metropolitan French Revolution lacks conceptual clarity and does not have much substance to back it up.