French Orientalism emerged from political loss, producing an imagined rather than real Orient

Evidence

In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient. He came there to a place in which France, unlike Britain, had no sovereign presence. The Mediterranean echoed with the sounds of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon. What was to become known as “la mission civilisatrice” began in the nineteenth century as a political second-best to Britain’s presence. Consequently French pilgrims from Volney on planned and projected for, imagined, ruminated about places that were principally in their minds; they constructed schemes for a typically French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient, which of course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was the Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being, an Orient whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative, unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 429

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the colonial-postcolonial vocabulary: la mission civilisatrice and the distinction between imperial power (British presence) and imaginary projection (French aesthetics) carry forward into later Islamophobia readings on how European self-conception legitimated colonial rule. — connects to: Political defeat turned Viennese bourgeois assimilation into a retreat into art — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 207; French structuralism’s rise followed decolonization defeats and masked rightward political drift — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 249
• DEFINE: Defines ‘la mission civilisatrice’ as a political second-best born of France’s absence from the Orient rather than a confident premise.
• QUESTION: How does la mission civilisatrice persist today as a legitimating frame for intervention even where no prior sovereign loss exists to explain it?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 429