Image (and) Nation: The Russian Exotic in 19th-Century French Travel Narratives

Abstract

Drawing from a variety of nineteenth-century French travel narratives on Russia, the paper “Image (and) Nation: The Russian Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Travel Narratives” explores the idea of nation as a cultural construction and narrative. The paper attempts to address in particular the role of ``exotic othering'' in creating French national identity in the decades following the Revolution. Where post-Revolutionary France discovered a formidable political and military enemy in tsarist Russia, the French likewise viewed the continued enslavement of the Russian peasants as the example par excellence of tyrannical government. Russia thus appeared in the eyes of many a French traveler as the diametrical opposite of post-Revolutionary France founded on liberal Enlightenment ideals. In bringing to light both widely-read and lesser-known French accounts of travel to Russia, this paper suggests how a developing French national identity coalesced in part around the articulation of cultural difference from the Russian Other. Evoking the critical work of Homi K. Bhaba, Edward Said, Benedict Anderson and Lisa Lowe, the paper describes tropes of the exotic as they appear in these nineteenth-century French travel narratives on Russia and suggests how such narrative depictions of the Russian landscape, the Russian woman, and Russians in general established and reaffirmed – through an implicit cultural comparison – the idea of the French nation.