Entangled empires: the French in China

This dissertation examines attempts French to renew national prestige by establishing a lasting presence in the Pacific, with China at its fulcrum. Culturally informed readings of diplomatic, legal, religious and military archival materials, fiction, and published memoirs locate the foundations of the French presence in Asia within affect-driven encounters among the French and Chinese. Working at the interstices of cultural, social, gender and diplomatic history reveals how both French and Chinese subjects first embraced a partnership based on culture and sentiment to foster material, social, and diplomatic ties between their nations. However, the nascent French quest for global expansion quickly evolved into a drive for conquest. This study begins by identifying the ideological catalysts behind imperial revitalization in the post-Napoleonic era, as French agents sought to unite the pieces of their empire through connections to global networks of trade, diplomacy, and exploration. In the 1840s, members of the French commercial mission cemented new and existing trade connections by fashioning personal relationships with their Chinese counterparts. French missionaries and diplomats alike cultivated an image of benevolent compassion to counter what they believed was an aggressive British imperial manhood. Meanwhile, dueling stereotypes of Chinese nobility and decay mirrored French anxieties over their national future, and served as poles between which French individuals could attempt to articulate the revival of their national body by guiding, but not dominating, their Asian partner. However, intimate bonds could be profoundly unsettling. At the height of various Chinese rebellions in the 1850s, visions of a perilous zone of contact led to profound transformations in Franco-Chinese relations. The cultural weight of this shift appears most markedly in the Anglo-French Expedition of 1860, when the symbolic conquest and subsequent triumphal display of looted Chinese objects in Paris set the tone for an aggressive French occupation of other Asian territories, which continues to weigh on French national identity and foreign policy. As sacred Chinese space was penetrated and pillaged, the shared history of France and China was further entangled when objects conveying the authority of the Emperor were re-incorporated into French and British apparatuses of power through public display.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Molly J. Gibli