Colonialism, imperialism, decolonization have been part of European culture in ancient and modern times. After the Greeks and Romans, there were other colonizers and empires, including settlements and expansion by the Vikings in Iceland, Greenland, Vinland (Newfoundland) and elsewhere. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese and the Spanish expanded and the English, French, Dutch and others followed suit. The period of high European imperialism was from about 1815 to 1914, and only with the First and Second World Wars did the European empires decline and decolonization begin. After the Second World War, this decolonization intensified and all the remaining empires, including the Portuguese, French, British, Dutch and Russian (Soviet) ended. This is a central fact for Europeans and people worldwide. A number of European writers and intellectuals were part of a long-time critique of the excesses of imperialism and the abuse of power – Bartolomé de Las Casas, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre. In a generation that came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, Michael Foucault in France performed a critique of power and Edward Said in the United States produced a critique of colonialism. They themselves were part of an opposition to established powers and politics and became part of a move to question and understand structures of power and representation in old imperial centres such as France and Britain. Said is important to a general reader, and not simply those in universities, because he tries to show the workings of the representations of the Middle East, the Orient and imperialism generally in the British and French empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That Said uses French sources in his analysis written in English shows how these two traditions are intertwined. For instance, Said draws on Sartre as someone who centres philosophy on choices, existential and political, that are made, and on Foucault, who analyses the uses and abuses of power and the archive. Said builds on these French thinkers, although he admits his debts while differentiating himself from them. He favours Sartre’s emphasis on choice over Foucault’s stress on determining structures. Said uses a French tradition to define his own critique in English of British and French representations in empire and their uses of their studies, archives and writing of empire and the relations between colonial powers and those peoples they had colonized in the East (Orient). Said, himself interested in politics, music and many other aspects of culture, uses French thought to show the nuances of colonialism and Orientalism and focuses, as I do in this article, on details. His detailed analysis of representation shows an understanding of the contradictions and intricacies of the culture of the colonial writers and intellectuals and of the colonized cultures they represented. Representation was also misrepresentation. Said also used a wide range of sources among French-speaking intellectuals, such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, and, in addition to drawing on Karl Marx, he also made use of the work of Louis Althusser and focused on French figures such as Napoleon. Said’s discussion of the relation between colonizer and colonized focuses, among others, on Joseph Conrad and Gustave Flaubert, working in English and French respectively. Said interweaves two major imperial representations and cultures, that of France and Britain, and he does so, as this article demonstrates, in productive and intriguing ways. My article illuminates Said’s views on colonialism, Orientalism, imperialism and other topics, especially in light of his use of French-speaking intellectuals and culture, but also points to some of his own contradictions and blind-spots, appreciating his details while not always agreeing with the generalizations and effects of his theories. In other words, it follows Said himself in what he sometimes thought of the Orientalists he analysed.

The Palestinian–American critic Edward Said (1935–2003) is a key intellectual figure in the theory and interpretation of western European colonization and decolonization and is of interest across many fields and to interdisciplinary areas within universities and in the wider community. His work was academic and public, literary and cultural, aesthetic and ethical, philosophical and political. His writing, which draws on European ideas and traditions as he exposes their drawbacks, is of interest in Europe, North America and beyond, concerning imperialism and neo-imperialism and has great implications for Europe’s past, present and future. This article will pay close attention to Said’s words in some of his most significant texts. He saw criticism as personal engagement and a matter of character and not simply scholarship (on Said’s method, see D’haen Reference D’haen2017, esp. 436). Said’s work was and continues to be influential in the fields of colonialism and postcolonialism as well as in more general literary theory. He himself, however, also drew on many influences, and those issuing from French culture deserve further exploration (see Hart Reference Hart2008, 272–273 and Hart Reference Hart2011). French and French-speaking culture were also the subjects of representation in Said’s own work. He embarked on his career with a work on the Polish–British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Autobiography (1966). Hence, I will start my own discussion of Said by looking at the role the French-speaking world plays in his interpretation of Conrad, one of the most adept European writers representing European imperialism (on Nostromo and Said, see López Liquete Reference López Liquete2013, 397).

Conrad was one way for Said to enter the world of fiction, empire and colonialism. In Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Said, among other things, first sets out a framework for colonialism and postcolonialism. After having thanked Monroe Engel and Harry Levin, his mentors at Harvard, for reading the manuscript (Said Reference Said1966, ix; Said Reference Said1963–1965; see Levin Reference Levin1965–1985 and Poirier Reference Poirier1984), Said turns to a major French source:

Said reaches back to a work that Sartre (1905–1980) published in 1948 to stress the contradiction between cause and understanding in the unconscious, implicitly qualifying the work of Freud and Jung. More specifically, Said observes:

For Said, Sartre’s insight is a challenge to understanding and has implications for literary interpretation. Said is interested in what is understood consciously: ‘The literary critic is, I think, most interested in comprehension, because the critical act is first of all an act of comprehension: a particular comprehension of the written work, and not of its origins in a general theory of the unconscious’ (Said Reference Said1966, 7). Specific conscious understanding in interpretation concerns Said more than in a general theory of the unconscious. This interest leads him to epistemology: ‘Comprehension, furthermore, is a phenomenon of consciousness, and it is in the openness of the conscious mind that the critic and writer meet to engage the act of knowing and being aware of experience’ (Said Reference Said1966, 7). Experience and knowing are part of the conscious world of the study of literature.

Power and powerlessness are often concerns in colonialism. Said connects Sartre to Conrad and focuses on the theme of powerlessness in relation to the matter of consciousness and narrative. Moreover, he raises an objection: ‘It can be objected, I suppose, that Conrad’s narrative methods (which Sartre’s theory relates to) are only some of his tools as a writer and as such should be considered either as plain technique or as manifestations of his unconscious’ (Said Reference Said1966, 101). In a wider context, Said also sees Conrad in terms of Sartre:

Past and present, as Sartre saw, become intertwined in understanding individual consciousness and existence. Said repeats Sartre’s terms in discussing the ‘magical alteration of objective reality’ (Said Reference Said1966, 105; see Sartre Reference Sartre1977). The existentialist influence extends to Said quoting from and translating de Beauvoir that ‘each man makes decisions from the place he occupies in existence; but he must occupy a place, for he can never withdraw from it’ (de Beauvoir Reference de Beauvoir1944, 32 quoted in Said Reference Said1966, 122). A person cannot avoid a place in the world and is therefore engagé, signifying political commitment and assuming a definite position.

The range of Said’s drawing on work in French is wide. He argues that Conrad’s writing from 1905 to 1912 is Baudelairean, that The Mirror of the Sea (1906) is a phrase taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘La Musique’ and that the portrait of Conrad himself as a double man in this non-fiction book, whose subtitle is Memories and Impressions, is like the artist having a double nature in Baudelaire’s ‘De L’Essence du Rire’ (Conrad Reference Conrad1906; Baudelaire Reference Baudelaire, Le Dantec and Pichois1961, 8, 77, 993, 1045 in Said Reference Said1966, 124). Said often returns to Sartre, and sees, in one of Conrad’s narrators, an instance ‘of what Sartre would call refuge from an unbearable situation’ (Said Reference Said1966, 130). In discussing Conrad’s views on the difficult morality of art, the tension between observed truth and felt truth, Said calls on the original French lines from Paul Verlaine, ‘la chanson grise / Ou l’Indécis au Précis se joint,’ which I translate as ‘the grey song/ Where the undecided to the precise joins’ and signifies that the precise observation gives body to the uncertain in the truth of the song of art (Verlaine Reference Verlaine1950, 214 in Said Reference Said1966, 130). Images and truth, accuracy of expression and abstract expression are hard to balance. Said concludes: ‘It is a terrible realization, but egotism is the compromising savior of both the art of existence and the existence of art’ (Said Reference Said1966, 130). Here the existential meets the aesthetic. He uses Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (written 1896, published 1897) as an embodiment of what he has been saying, the storehouse of ivory in this story being a fetish in the term the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs (1885–1971) uses to discuss this matter in his Existentialism or Marxism? The two white men in charge of the trading station, Kayerts (the chief) and Carlier (the assistant), bring efficiency and mercantilism to the jungle and only later recognize that their search for ivory is tied to the buying and selling of humans. Kayerts kills Carlier and hangs himself on the cross over the storehouse (Conrad Reference Conrad, Simmons and Stape2012 [1897], 77–99; Said Reference Said1966, 141–143; see Lukacs Reference Lukacs1960a, Reference Lukacs1960b; Goldmann Reference Goldmann1962). Said is examining the relation between Conrad’s existence and his art, the former being enough material for the latter. For Said, the surface of The Shadow-Line (written 1915, published 1917) is like a dialectic between Conrad’s experience of the sea and of his literary writing. Here Said calls on Nathalie Sarraute’s idea of conversation and sub-conversation, which she, a writer and theorist of the nouveau roman, set out in L’Ère du soupçon (1956), published in English as The Age of Suspicion (1963). Said sees a dialectical relation between the formal narrative of the sea that is being told and the quiet and allusive felt substance of Conrad’s concerns as a literary artist. For Said, The Shadow-Line, a novella about maritime life set in the East, has a particular beauty and courage because it admits failure, something hard to acknowledge for the sailor and the writer as youth recedes and with it hope (Conrad Reference Conrad, Stape and Simmons2013 [1917]; Said Reference Said1966, 168–169; see Sarraute Reference Sarraute1956, Reference Sarraute1963). The narrator is restless to explore new paths, but experience teaches him that he has already explored everything. This disillusionment can, as Said says, be portrayed comically, and to illustrate his point about Conrad he alludes to Pantagruel’s army in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book 2 (1532–1534) via Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946, translated 1953). This army descends in the mouth of Pantagruel, the giant, along with the narrator of the story, Alcofribas, and discovers that all is like home but presses on anyway (Rabelais Reference Rabelais1894; Auerbach Reference Auerbach2003 [1953], 270 in Said Reference Said1966, 170). Even more so, Said sees in the opening of The Shadow-Line a reflection of the opening of one of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen poems’ in Les Fleurs du Mal, which again he quotes in French:

And which I translate as

Said reads the boredom, weariness and dissatisfaction of Conrad’s narrator through the speaker of Baudelaire’s poem. One provides a gloss for the other. The narrator of The Shadow-Line does not consent to darkness and is determined to move on, thus not enacting a union of past and present, individual and darkness as with Charles Marlow at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (serialized 1899, as a book in 1902). Marlow is on a ship on the Thames and tells the narrator about his trip up the Congo, the darkness of the rogue trader, Kurtz, of the ivory trade, of Marlow himself and of European colonialism. In short, this novella represents some of the abuses of European imperialism in Africa (Conrad Reference Conrad and Knowles2010 [1899], 41–126; Said Reference Said1966, 171). In his first book, then, Said from beginning to end makes great use of French-speaking thought, literature and culture, something that he will continue to do throughout his life as a writer, teacher and scholar.

In Orientalism (1978) Said examines the British and French constructions of the ‘Orient’. Orientalism was a scholarly field in the West that studied Asia and Said tries to understand this discipline, its pros and cons, as part of British and French imperialism. Some Orientalists in late eighteenth-century Britain argued that India should be ruled according to its own traditions while others preferred anglicizing it. Thus, there was not one coherent Orientalism. Said raises questions of stereotyping the Orient, focusing mostly on the Near or Middle East. Orientalism opens with a French rather than a British colonial context, past and present:

One of the epigraphs to Orientalism is the following quotation from Karl Marx: ‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978]; Marx Reference Marx2006, Section VII 58; see Marx Reference Marx1852). Marx’s words relate to his analysis of the revolution of 1848 in France and, more particularly, to Louis Napoleon’s triumph or coup, seeing Louis as assuming the representation of the farmers that at the time made up ‘the large mass of the French nation’ but that were not united and could represent their class interests by parliament or convention (Marx Reference Marx2006, Section VII 58). In Orientalism, Said turns Marx’s analysis of the issue of representation in a French revolution back against the French in the Orient. In the passage from Orientalism that I have quoted, Said makes the French journalist generic rather than giving him a name, so in a sense he begins by doing to the French what they have done to the Orient. He does mention the more famous figures from the past, Chateaubriand (French author and diplomat, 1768–1848) and Nerval (French writer, 1808–1855), but the name of the journalist – Thierry Desjardins (1941–) – is left for an endnote (see Chateaubriand Reference Chateaubriand and Regard1969 and Nerval Reference Nerval1960). He is first called ‘a French journalist’ and then ‘He’. Said then makes a second move that does what the French had done in constructing the Orient – he generalizes. The ‘He’ who was French now becomes a ‘European’. This person was, according to Said, right from his European point of view. Said brings in the stereotype to counter the stereotype. But he catches himself from going all the way, saying that ‘The Orient was almost a European invention’ and so hangs something on the ‘almost’ as a qualifier. The phrase ‘since antiquity’ seems to mean after the ancient world but the ‘since’ is suspended. Later in the book it becomes apparent that he means Homer, Aeschylus and others, and that the ‘Orient’ was to do with romance, exoticism, memory, landscape, experiences. Said relies heavily on adjectives in succession to build the atmosphere, to shape the ‘almost’ invention of the Orient by the Europeans – ‘exotic’, ‘haunting’, ‘remarkable’. He moves from the present (or recent past) of the journalist to the past of Chateaubriand and Nerval to the present again, the ‘now’ in which the Orient ‘was disappearing’. Then Said hedges or qualifies his representation (and misrepresentation) by saying: ‘Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process’. ‘Perhaps’ and ‘seemed’ appears to be a hedging that is part of a displacement or act of ventriloquism, an imagining of what these Europeans thought (as if, like Orientals, they all thought the same way, except for some qualification just in case). One might assume that the ‘they’ are those ‘Orientals’ – the ones who have a stake, as if that had never occurred to the Europeans, that the ‘they’ had lived there even before and ‘were suffering’. Said, who had erased the name of the journalist, re-inscribes Chateaubriand and Nerval by repeating their names. Possibly, given the syntax, the ‘they’ are the Europeans who are now suffering as the Orient dissolves but given that the opening of the book starts with Beirut in ‘the terrible civil war’, it is likely that it is the ‘Orientals’ who are suffering. Said continues his generalizations. His analysis goes to ‘the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate’. So, Europeans who visited this place were cognizant of this mimesis, this imitation or representation of this Orient and what was happening to it now. Moreover, Said provides a further gloss on these two related matters that ‘had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers’. He began with the French in a specific context and then moved to the Europeans and the Orient and now returns to this still nameless journalist (his nationality left out). The second time the journalist is designated by his profession ‘and his French readers’. France and Europe, like Lebanon and the Orient, are places of generality and stereotype. This makes for a dramatic opening to Orientalism, but it also might tend to intellectual and cultural melodrama, the very thing that Said, contra Marx, has set out to avoid (see also Valéry Reference Valéry1924, 20, quoted in Said Reference Said1966, 82).

Orientalism changed the academic debate over European colonialism in the Middle East and Asia generally and has been suggestive and controversial (see Clifford Reference Clifford1980; Prakash Reference Prakash1990; Irwin Reference Irwin2006). In framing his breakthrough book, Said says that the French and the English ‘have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 1). He talks about Orientalism as an academic field, a general and imaginative discipline (from Aeschylus to the present), a corporate institution. This last meaning of Orientalism is a Western way or style for dominating, having authority over and restructuring the Orient. In relation to this third aspect of Orientalism, Said appeals to Michel Foucault’s idea of discourse in The Archeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish as a means of identifying Orientalism. For Said, Foucault (1926–1984), French philosopher and historian, enables him to analyse Orientalism as a discourse, which allows for an understanding of ‘the systematic discipline’ that European culture, after the Enlightenment, employed to manage and produce the Orient in terms of politics, society, military, ideology, science and imagination (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 3; see Foucault Reference Foucault1972, Reference Foucault1977). Said’s view of Orientalism is nuanced, despite himself slipping into the trap he sees Orientalists falling into – stereotyping – from time to time in his own generalizations about the French, the British and the Europeans. However, Said understands that the discourse of Orientalism, with its ‘network of interests,’ cannot be evaded, escaped or opposed (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 3).

Said has three qualifications concerning Orientalism: the Orient is not merely an idea but has a reality; the ‘configurations of power’ need to be studied; Orientalism is more than ‘a structure of lies or of myths’ and has remained ‘unchanged as teachable wisdom’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 5-6). In some ways, then, he is proposing that Orientalism as a structure of power is perdurable, that it is transhistorical. His historical generalizations and configurations of power come up against the particulars of history. The change of history can, for Said, include the unchanging. Within the second qualification, which has to do with power and domination of the Occident over the Orient, he takes as an example the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) and his relation with a woman in Egypt:

Said is back to undoing what Marx said about representation in the epigraph to his book. Moreover, Said takes Flaubert as representing Kuchuk Hanem, the Egyptian courtesan, but in the same move makes this relationship the representative example of Western strength and the discourse that domination enabled. This instance, then, is a synecdoche, as ‘It fairly stands for the pattern’, that is a representative example in a book that partly shows the abuses or excesses of Western representation. He makes a type of Flaubert to argue against the latter’s stereotyping of Kuchuk Hanem and, with her, the Orient. The West preys on the Orient, which is like a prostitute in Said’s imagery. He names Kuchuk Hanem twice but never the French journalist with whom he starts off Orientalism. This amounts to a kind of erasure to make up for the erasure of the ‘Orient’ that the French and the Europeans or Westerners, like Flaubert, have enacted. Nonetheless, despite Said’s elaborate and perceptive qualifications, his own act reproduces the same problems.

There is an oscillation in Said between particulars and generalities. He is conscious of this tension and this awareness makes his analysis more intricate and suggestive. Here is another instance of this understanding of the ambivalence of empire and culture, something I have also tried to elaborate in my own work:

Thus, for Said, culture is a hegemonic system that may inhibit somewhat but also constrains productively. This double action is something that Foucault, Gramsci and Williams discuss, so Said calls on Italian as well as British theoretical sources in conjunction with his French ones. For a literary scholar, like Said, the details are what matters most in Orientalist work and not the conclusions, some of which are misguided or racist:

There is therefore a generosity of spirit and understanding in Said, an understanding of contradiction and mixed results, that is attractive. So ‘modulated evidence’ becomes his focus.

Said, in discussing his own method, also turns to more socialist or Marxist thinkers, including the French Algerian-born philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990). Specifically, Said examines Althusser’s idea of a kind of ‘inaugural delimitation’, ‘a specific determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis’, something that is helpful to him in launching his study of Orientalism (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 16; see Althusser Reference Althusser1969). In delimiting his study, Said does not want to produce an encyclopaedic work on the European idea of the Orient, which can be found in works such as Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale, Johann Fück’s Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, or Dorothee Metlitzki’s The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 16; see Schwab Reference Schwab1950). Said limits his analysis to ‘the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 17). Nevertheless, he shows that the Near or Middle East cannot be cut off from the rest of the ‘Orient,’ for instance India or the Far East. He observes that, for Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Egypt and India were connected, mentions the French contribution in deciphering the Zend-Avesta, Paris as a centre of Sanskrit studies, and Napoleon’s interest in the Orient as related to the British role in India. Said concludes that ‘these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest in the Near East, Islam, and the Arabs’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 17). Furthermore, he studies the French and British in the Orient or Near East because they were the pioneers. According to Said, Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), the first modern and institutional European Orientalist, studied Islam, Arabic literature, the Druze religion and Sassanid Persia, and was ‘the teacher of Champollion and of Franz Bopp, the founder of German comparative linguistics. A similar claim of priority and subsequent pre-eminence can be made for William Jones and Edward William Lane’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 18; see Dehérain Reference Dehérain1938). Said sees the French and the English Orientalists as the foundation of Orientalism and the precursors to American Orientalists. In his view, an important development was the ‘new science of Indo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of Things, a whole web of related scientific interests’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 22). Philology reconfigures knowledge about the languages of East and West. In terms of the analysis of power, discourse and knowledge, Foucault is important to Said’s investigation of the Orient and Orientalism. But Said qualifies this debt: ‘Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 23). The individual and the will matter as much as the collective and the determined. There are both distinctive voices but also networks of quotation and citation. Nerval, Flaubert and Richard Burton (Orientalist, 1821–1890) all cite and quote a key work by a British Arabist, Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Said also distinguishes himself from Foucault in another regard:

Close textual reading is important to Said so he can understand better the relation between the individual and the collective. Said goes to current theoretical sources, including those from France, and Orientalist scholarship, an important part of which was French.

Furthermore, Said calls attention to the centrality of Paris in the nineteenth century to Orientalism and to scholarship in this ‘field’, invoking two French encyclopaedic works. Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale (1950) discusses the period from about 1765 to 1850 while the much earlier Vingt-sept Ans d’histoire des études orientales by the nineteenth-century Orientalist Jules Mohl, examines the years 1840 to 1867 (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 51; Mohl Reference Mohl1879–1880). Said also takes note of the detailed work of Gustave Dugat (1824–1894), a French Arabist, and talks about the textual nature of this Orientalism (Dugat Reference Dugat1868–1870). In 1829, as Said observes, the French writer Victor Hugo (1802–1885) said that ‘Au siècle de Louis XIV on etait helléniste, maintenant on est orientaliste’ (In the century of Louis XIV we were Hellenist, now we are Orientalist, my translation) (Hugo Reference Hugo and Albouy1964 1, 580, quoted in Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 51; on Hugo, Auerbach, Said and exile see Tong Reference Tong2017, 533). Said also turns to the literary aspect of Orientalism when he speaks about ‘a genre of Orientalist writing as exemplified in the works of Hugo, Goethe, Nerval, Flaubert, Fitzgerald’ and others (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 53). In discussing the term ‘Orient’, Said turns to ‘what Claude Levi-Strauss has called a science of the concrete’, that is how the human mind seeks order (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 53; see Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1967). Said, who in some other works of his also speaks about the properties of time (beginnings and so on), also appeals to Gaston Bachelard’s ‘poetics of space’, seeing history and geography as positive (empirical) and imaginative (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 54, see Bachelard Reference Bachelard1964). At the same time he recognizes the vulnerability of Christian Europe in the face of the spread of Islam and its conquering armies (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 59–60).

The French influence and French theory are vital for Said’s framework, thinking and method in Orientalism. He examines Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697), which had a preface by Antoine Galland (1646–1715), the first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights and an Arabist, and observes: ‘In such efforts as d’Herbelot’s, Europe discovered its capacities for encompassing and Orientalizing the Orient’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 65, see 63–64; Galland Reference Galland1777). A sense of superiority creeps into these efforts. But Said can call on French-speaking scholarship to support his own case of the cultural blindness and false superiority of Europe, for instance appealing to the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) to say that the European encounter with Islam strengthened the representation of the Orient and epitomized Islam as an outsider that shaped European civilization from the Middle Ages onward (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 70; Pirenne Reference Pirenne1939). Before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (the French had lost India to Britain in the 1760s), there was the work of Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), a French Indologist who travelled to Surat, where he found Avestan texts, which allowed him to translate the Zoroastrian Avesta in 1759. As Raymond Schwab sees and after him Said observes, this work by Anquetil-Duperron, along with his translation of the Upanishads in Paris in 1786, helped to open up wider vistas to other civilizations (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 76–77, see Schwab Reference Schwab1934 and Thiry Reference Thiry1973).

In a short space, I have examined only some aspects of the role of the French and French-speaking figures, intellectuals, translators and others in Said’s work, including in Orientalism. For the sake of brevity, I will now concentrate briefly on one central figure whom Said discusses: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). As part of his plan to rival the British (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 17; Napoléon 1843), Napoleon not only invaded Egypt but also sent a scientific expedition there (1798–1801), resulting in the Description de l’Égypte (1809–1828), turning the Orient into fertile ground for scientific exploration and creating a live body of knowledge (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 22, 42–43, 84; Description de l’Égypt 1809–1828). Fourier’s preface to the Description de l’Égypte calls Egypt the theatre of Napoleon’s gloire, glory (a word that Louis XIV liked and was associated with) (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 86; see Fourier Reference Fourier1809). Said calls Napoleon ‘the first modern conqueror’ of the Orient (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 88) and maintains that with him the ‘very language of Orientalism changed radically’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 87). The Napoleonic expedition set the stage for Islamic studies and Orientalism undertaken by for instance Sacy, Renan and Lane (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 122). As a youth, Napoleon had read Marigny’s Histoire des Arabes (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 80), and he also relied on the work of the Comte de Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787, 2 vols; Volney Reference Volney1821) (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 81). Unlike the Spaniards, who in the New World threatened the Natives into submission with the Requerimiento (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 82), a document they read aloud to justify conquest, Napoleon used scholars and their knowledge of the Koran and Islam to conquer. Most of what Napoleon and Mathieu de Lesseps (1771–1832), a French diplomat who served as liaison to the French army during the Egyptian expedition, knew about the Orient came from Orientalist books and they set the stage for furthering French and by extension Western power through military might and later, via Mathieu de Lesseps’ son Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894), the Suez canal (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 89, 95; de Lesseps Reference de Lesseps1881). Many of Napoleon’s translators were students of Sylvestre de Sacy, who, from 1796 on, had been teaching Arabic at the École publique des langues orientales (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 83). Sacy was one of the writers of the report Napoleon in 1802 commissioned from the Institut de France on the state and progress of the arts and sciences since 1789 (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 122, 126). Napoleon wanted to open Egypt up to European scrutiny (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 83). His Institut d’Égypte was the only institution in the West that encouraged the academic study of the actual Orient (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 52), changing the way Orientalist projects were prepared (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 79). Whereas, as Benjamin Constant noted, the English and Germans saw India as the origin of civilization, the French decided after Napoleon and Champollion that Egypt was where things originated (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 137, see Constant Reference Constant and Roulin1957; Gérard Reference Gérard1963). Said also refers to the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), who had been a member of Napoleon’s expedition, and to whom Balzac dedicated a section of the preface to La Comédie humaine, and his son Isidore Saint-Hilaire (1805–1861), mentioning that Flaubert had probably read them, but also how Renan relied upon their theories of ‘unity of composition’ to claim the superiority of Indo-European languages over Semitic Oriental languages, the latter supposedly being inorganic as opposed to the former’s organicity (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 144; Balzac Reference Balzac1950; Flaubert Reference Flaubert1973; on Balzac and Orientalism, see J. Marx: Reference Marx2017; and on Balzac and China, see Le Huenen: Reference Le Huenen2017).

Concerning Orientalism, Said says: ‘Anquetil, Jones, the Napoleonic expedition define the tradition’s earliest contours’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 156). After Napoleon, according to Said, the Orient was a place of pilgrimage (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 168). After the defeat of Napoleon, the British, by the 1880s, had extended their empire uninterrupted from the Mediterranean to India (169). Said states that, unlike Volney and Napoleon, nineteenth-century French pilgrims, especially literary pilgrims, starting with Chateaubriand, sought in the Orient an exotic and attractive reality rather than a scientific one (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 170). In Lamartine’s pilgrimage there is a kind of recollection of Napoleon’s dream of world hegemony (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 179; see Lamartine Reference Lamartine1887 [1835]). Said always pays close attention to texts, literary and otherwise. He quotes at length a passage on suffering populations from Saint-Marc Girardin (1801–1873) writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes on 15 March 1862. Napoleon had done the same about the Egyptians against the Turks (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], 217). In Said’s view, then, Napoleon is a figure of –and a constellation for figures (my terminology) of – Orientalism. Napoleon is seen as a French intellectual, general, and leader who modernized and helped to bring Western ideas and science into the realm of Orientalism and empire.

In Culture and Imperialism (Said Reference Said1994b [1993]), another significant contribution to the field, Said discusses the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus (1913–1960), and the French imperial experience: ‘In widening the historical perspective from Camus as an attractively solitary writer of the 1940s and 1950s to include the century-old French presence in Algeria, we can perhaps better understand not just the form and ideological meaning of his narratives, but also the degree to which his work inflects, refers to, consolidates, and renders more precise the nature of the French enterprise there’ (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 174–175). More specifically, Said wishes to consider Camus’s novels as part of the history of the French involvement in Algeria, making it French and keeping it so, and not as fiction that informs us about the author’s mind (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 175). He sees Camus’s fiction as an aspect of France’s ‘political geography of Algeria’ (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 176). Said argues that ‘because Camus’s most famous fiction incorporates, intransigently recapitulates, and in many ways depends on a massive French discourse on Algeria, one that belongs to the language of French imperial attitudes and geographical reference, his work is more, not less interesting’ (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 181; emphasis in original). He rejects Camus’s view that Algeria has many peoples in it, including the French who have lived there for about 130 years, and sees that the style, moral dilemmas, personal fates of the characters and the irony draw on and ‘revive the history of French domination in Algeria, with a circumspect precision and a remarkable lack of remorse or compassion’ (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 181). Said reminds the reader of the military campaigns, excesses, genocide and harsh policies of the French in Algeria (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 181–182). For him, ‘Camus’s novels and stories thus very precisely distill the traditions, idioms, and discursive strategies of France’s appropriation of Algeria’ (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 184). As Raymond Williams did with George Orwell, Said is calling into question Camus’s status as a great French, European and Western writer of the human condition (Said Reference Said1994b [1993], 185). Said thus tries to situate Camus in the discourse of French colonial writing concerning Algeria.

In Representations of the Intellectual (Reference Said1996 [1994]), Said, to begin with, draws on two sources: Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian, and Julien Benda (1867–1967), a Frenchman; he also discusses in the interviews in The Pen and the Sword (1992, reprinted 1994; see Said Reference Said1994 [1992]). Gramsci says that all people are intellectuals but not all have the function of intellectuals, whereas Benda sees intellectuals as philosopher kings in a small group (Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971, 9 in Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 3; Benda Reference Benda1969 [1928]: 43 in Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 5). In La trahison des clercs (1927, translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals), Benda provides Said with some aspects of discussing intellectuals that appeal to him, even though they might disagree on other matters. Benda’s original French title gives a religious aspect to the history of intellectuals, a clerisy. As Said notes, Benda sees Socrates, Jesus, Spinoza, Voltaire and Ernest Renan as examples of intellectuals, those who are not of this world and seek eternal standards and truth (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 5). Benda views intellectuals as clerics who seek joy in science, art or speculation, and not, as with the laity or most people, in material gain (Benda Reference Benda1969 [1928], 43 in Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 5). But, as Said observes, Benda, despite asserting the otherworldliness of proper intellectuals, also favours engagement, when they are moved by informed passion and justice and truth to denounce corruption and oppression and to defend the weak. As examples, Benda praises the engagement of Fenelon, Massillon, Voltaire, Renan, Buckle and Nietzsche (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], see 5, 6). Writing in 1927, Benda criticizes intellectuals for giving up moral authority to organized, collective passions such as abuses of class, nationalism and sectarianism and disguising expediency and national honour as truth (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 6). These rare intellectuals, in Benda’s view, oppose the status quo, something that appeals to Said: for instance, Benda praises Voltaire’s defence of the Calas family and critiques the nationalism of Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 7).

Said also refers to Michel Foucault, who has stated that the universal intellectual – Said says that Foucault was most likely thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre – has yielded to a specific intellectual who works in a discipline but gets outside it too (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 10, see Foucault Reference Foucault and Gordon1980, 127–128). Said argues that intellectuals are individuals with a calling for ‘the art of representing’ in various manners and media and are committed and take risks, are bold and vulnerable. Moreover, he says that when he reads Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell ‘it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat’ (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 12–13, see 14). Sartre, who opposed the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, is an especially important figure for Said, who has high regard for Sartre’s discussion of the man of letters or author being hemmed in by society in the search for freedom (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 74–76, see 66, 72; see Sartre Reference Sartre1963). This is the tradition with which Said identifies himself and by translating Sartre’s writer into an intellectual, Said in essence finds his inspiration for the title of his own book in Sartre’s words.

Other writers and intellectuals interest Said. For instance, he discusses Flaubert’s The Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869), which represents disappointment with, and a merciless critique of, intellectuals (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 18–20). In showing how things have changed since Benda’s book came out, Said reminds us that since the Second World War intellectuals in Europe and the West have had less influence than during the imperial period and that intellectuals come from different places and traditions (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 25). For instance, other peoples, ‘in Aimé Césaire’s great phrase, want a place at the rendezvous of victory’ (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 39, see Césaire Reference Césaire1983, 72). These native intellectuals must be careful, as Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) saw when he examined the circumstances during the Algerian war of independence against the French (1954–1962), because to replace the white policeman with a native one is not enough, as a further aim should be, echoing Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), the invention of new souls (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 40–41). Fanon wisely, according to Said, set out the suffering of the Algerians in a wider context of afflicted peoples as a means of being aware that the afflicted might afflict others (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 44). Said sees Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and C.L.R. James (1901–1989), three great black anti-imperialist intellectuals, two of whom wrote in French, as those who can warn us against injustice and the need for justice for all (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 93). Moreover, Said observes at the end of this book on intellectuals: ‘But the only way of ever achieving it is to keep reminding yourself that as an intellectual you are the one who can choose between actively representing the truth to the best of your ability and passively allowing a patron or an authority to direct you’ (Said Reference Said1996 [1994], 121). The intellectual is active not passive, engaged and not at the sidelines of history. In Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (2003), Said responds to David Barsamian that people have forgotten the aim, ‘as Aimé Césaire described it, the rendezvous with victory, where all peoples in search of freedom and emancipation and enlightenment gather’ (Barsamian and Said Reference Barsamian and Said2003, 189–190; see Said Reference Said2000a, 3–4, 7, 31–32; Brennan Reference Brennan, Aruri and Shuraydi2001, Reference Brennan, Sökmen and Ertür2008 and Makdisi Reference Makdisi, Sökmen and Ertür2008 for discussions of French contexts; on Said and exile, see Cheung Reference Cheung2017, 614).

Said likes freedom and engagement. His wife Miriam C. Said and he himself see the importance of humanism, including of Auerbach as a humanist (Miriam Said Reference Said, Sökmen and Ertür2008, x; see Edward Said, ‘Introduction’, Reference Said2003 [1953], xxxii; see Radhakrishnan Reference Radhakrishnan, Sökmen and Ertür2008). In his work as a critic and intellectual, Said is in the tradition of Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474?–1566) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Césaire and Fanon, and perhaps even Auerbach, and he draws on a wide range of French and other sources, from many traditions, secular and religious. A central theme for Marx, Auerbach, Said and others discussed here is representation, a key question in philosophy, politics, literature and other fields. Freedom and representation have a vital relation in Said. He ends his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, which is a book-end with the Preface to the 1995 edition (written in 1994) in the later edition, with a sentence worthy of Sartre: ‘I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom’ (Said Reference Said2003 [1978], xxiii). But Said could be ambivalent about Sartre (see Said Reference Said2000b; Kobayashi Reference Kobayashi2004; Makdisi Reference Makdisi, Sökmen and Ertür2008, 58). That human road to freedom was not only in Paris or in France as an heir to the French Revolution, but should be, as Said has said across his works, extended beyond there and beyond Europe to all.