Volney’s scientific travelogue prefaced French colonial ambition in the Orient

Evidence

What is perhaps less well known is Napoleon’s prior reliance upon the work of the Comte de Volney, a French traveler whose Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie appeared in two volumes in 1787. Aside from a short personal preface informing the reader that the sudden acquisition of some money (his inheritance) made it possible for him to take the trip east in 1783, Volney’s Voyage is an almost oppressively impersonal document. Volney evidently saw himself as a scientist, whose job it was always to record the “état” of something he saw. The climax of the Voyage occurs in the second volume, an account of Islam as a religion. Volney’s views were canonically hostile to Islam as a religion and as a system of political institutions; nevertheless Napoleon found this work and Volney’s Considérations sur la guerre actuel de Turcs (1788) of particular importance. For Volney after all was a canny Frenchman, and—like Chateaubriand and Lamartine a quarter-century after him—he eyed the Near Orient as a likely place for the realization of French colonial ambition. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the instrumentalizing of ‘scientific’ travel writing for colonial ambition — connects to later Islamophobia readings on how ostensibly neutral description of the East served colonial projects.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 207