Saturday, March 15, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Failure looms large in French imperial history: French ambitions in India were severely undermined after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the French Atlantic system disintegrated at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, a slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue during the 1790s led to the loss of a highly lucrative colony, and the Napoleonic order finally collapsed after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The existing historiographical stress on these episodes obscures the resurrection of the French imperial order around the Mediterranean basin between 1792 and 1848, when France established itself as a major power in Italy, Spain, the Illyrian Provinces (which spanned parts of modern Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro), Egypt, and Algeria. In tracing the resurrection of the French Empire, I use a tans-Mediterranean approach and compare French techniques of imperial rule in southern Europe and North Africa. My paper demonstrates that French imperial ambitions between the 1790s and 1840s represent a sustained attempt by a generation of French consular personnel and Napoleonic officers to offset British supremacy in the Atlantic by remolding France into a hegemonic power in the Mediterranean. I argue that consular and military networks succeeded in overcoming the failures of the Napoleonic project after the invasion of Algeria during the 1830s and 1840s by co-opting a sizeable group of indigenous notables, whose collaboration made possible the expansion of the French Mediterranean Empire throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.
