[In the following essay, Conroy explores the quest for identity and notions of “self” and “Other” in Racine's plays, looking at collective ethnic groups and individual strangers in various works before focusing on the depiction of the “Oriental” in Bajazet.]

Julian Huxley has provided us with a negative formulation of the relationship between the Other and the creation of collective self-identity: ‘A nation is a society united by a common error as to its origin and a common aversion to its neighbours.’ However, in considering Racine's plays as cultural narratives, I should prefer to adopt two more positive lines of thought from Paul Ricœur which are not, of course, exclusively his. Firstly, the notion of narrative identity: the belief that we create a sense of self through our narratives of our own life experience, that this is a shifting ‘récit’ which perforce requires another to be the hearer. And, of course, that on the macro level this shifting narrative is part of the process of definition of collective identity.¹ One can view the characters in tragedy as performing in front of us this act of narrative identity construction. This is particularly true in Racine's tragedies with their well-known primacy of Logos over Praxis, or where in fact Logos is Praxis. Secondly, the idea that the past, as narrated by one or many, is not a burden on the present, but requires us to acknowledge it: what Ricœur calls the ‘debt to the dead’.² And he emphasizes its role in determining a future. Through dramatizations of historical consciousness Racine, like others, rehearses answers to the questions: ‘who are we?’ and ‘what may we become?’ To quote Louis van Delft:

À l'instar du navigateur, tout individu, pour survivre, a besoin de se repérer: il lui faut avant tout se situer lui-même, situer autrui, se situer par rapport à autrui. […] Or, l'aventure existentielle se ramène, pour l'essentiel, à des rapports à autrui, à une constellation de rapports psychologiques.

[Like the navigator, for survival all individuals need to be able to locate themselves: they need above all to situate themselves, others, and themselves in relation to others … As it happens, the existential adventure comes down in essence to a question of relations with others, and to a myriad of different psychological connections.]³

One aspect of Racine's enterprise, and the legacy of his tragedies, is to provide a terrain for this exploration, along with a series of route-maps. In particular the figure of the stranger, in a variety of forms, places within the plays a device for heightening the sense of self and other. I shall deal briefly with collective ethnic groups, then individual ‘strangers’, before considering the specific case of Bajazet as an extended instance of ‘rapprochement’ through ‘mise à distance’, and in conclusion I shall look at its relationship with Mithridate.

The use of the collective ‘Other’ as a foil for the collective ‘Us’ was not a new enterprise. Self-definition through tragedy has a long history. Of the one thousand Greek tragedies estimated to have been composed in the fifth century bc, some three hundred have left traces. Nearly half of these portrayed barbarian characters, or were set in a non-Greek land, or both. Even those with an all-Greek cast display ‘a pervasive rhetorical polarization between Greeks and Barbarians’. They forged a discourse of the ‘other’, built on a ‘complex system of signifiers denoting the ethically, politically and psychologically “other’” with lasting consequences, especially in their ‘portrait of the Asiatic peoples as effeminate, despotic and cruel’.⁴ When it comes to their approach to pitting the ‘then-and-there’ of the foreigner against the ‘here-and-now’ of the audience, the most salient difference between the Greek dramatists and Racine is that Racine does not bring his own nation on stage. On the level of collective identity the comparisons between French and foreigner remain implicit.

A glance at Charles Bernet's vocabulary analysis⁵ confirms the textual existence of a wide range of ancient and more modern peoples in the plays: Romans, Greeks, Jews, Trojans (naturally), but how many other races, tribes, ‘nations’ are pulled from their relative obscurity, their distant fastnesses, or the oblivion which befalls the conquered: Chaldeans, Dacians, Indians, Parthians, Pannonians, Phrygians, Sarmatians, Scythians, Syrians, Thebans, Tyrians, and so on? Often, it is true, just a passing nod to local colour. Some are barely named, without so much as a qualifying adjective, for example in Mithridate's tirade where the Dacians and Pannonians are one-dimensional participants in the imaginary coalition which will include the Spanish, and ‘surtout’ the Gaulois, who have already been hammering at the gates of Rome (Mithridate, Act III. 1, ll. 790-862). It is flattering that the great Mithridate should count the Gaulois among the forces to reckon with in 63 bc, alongside ‘la fière Germanie’.⁶ Their textual presence serves to enhance the sense of an impending Götterdämmerung: Rome's later downfall is already written, pre-presented in an enumeration of potentially insurgent provinces and kingdoms. An allusion which functions as the most succinct form of ‘prolepse externe’, anticipating the culmination of a strand of the plot, a culmination which lies beyond the boundary of the narrative proper.⁷

Aside from the exoticism of any non-Roman, non-Hellenic, non-Jewish, and hence ‘uncivilized’ peoples of Antiquity, and aside from the contemporary Ottoman Empire, other non-ethnic figures flit around the edges of Racine's stage. In the spread of identities running from the totally aberrational to the highly civilized, monsters, giants and brigands compose a sub-group representative of the moral outer limits. Louis van Delft,⁸ followed by Maurice Delcroix,⁹ among others, has shown how Racine makes use of monsters from La Thébaïde through to Athalie. To the disturbing question ‘How would we be if we were not what we are?’ the ancient study of teratology used to provide a ready answer: we would be monsters. History intimated we would be barbarians. Psychiatry would later suggest we would be psychopaths.¹⁰ Racine's monsters, chillingly internalized, lie somewhere between history and psychiatry. As for his brigands, so famously slain by Thésée, leaving none for Hippolyte, despite their rather unimpressive numbers,¹¹ they deserve mention because as early ‘hors-la-loi’, they represent another extreme figure of a-social barbarity.¹²

If we turn to the micro level, to those individual ‘étrangers’ who actually appear on Racine's stage, their position is variable. What follows here is not an exhaustive list, merely a survey of the most revealing ‘cas de figure’. Each of his ‘strangers’ provides a new ‘foyer’, a particularly clear conflicting focus within the play. Each is a vocal incarnation of that ‘contrapuntalism’ advocated by Edward Said.¹³ Whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, they embody another civilization and speak with distinctive opposing voices. Racine, through them, heightens the effect of ‘heteroglossia’, to use Bakhtin's term.¹⁴ They may be hated figures, the most recent product of an evil race—Athalie, Aman—or the sad figure of a virtuous displaced person, a captive, an exile. Each of them, as called upon by the conventions of tragedy, and the need for exposition, recounts their story, each constructing, as do other major characters, their own ‘identité narrative’. An extreme case is, of course, Andromaque, whose ineradicable recollection determines present and future.

Among these ‘étrangers’, the dominant figure of foreignness is, unsurprisingly, female. Unsurprisingly, given the patrilocal practices of the civilizations evoked by Racine, and which the married women in his audience could readily understand: Bérénice, Monime, Phèdre, Esther, Athalie, possibly Roxane, are where they are because of marriage, or plans to marry. Some are captives. The captive is not always foreign (Aricie), the foreigner is not always captive (obviously), but when the foreigner is captive, as in the case of Andromaque, Racine can mine the rich paradoxes inherent in her political vulnerability yet erotic or sentimental hold over her captor:

Étrangère … Que dis-je? Esclave dans l'Épire,
Je lui donne son Fils, mon Âme, mon Empire.

(Andromaque, Act II. 5, ll. 689-90)

Andromaque herself is an early instance of a motif which was to flourish in later literature, especially ‘littérature fantastique’, a piece of deadly exotica brought home, a ‘souvenir de la Guerre de Troie’, a psychological Trojan horse, which destroys the peace and life of its acquirer.

Among the exiles, the greatest pathos attaches to Bérénice whose exile is self-imposed, or imposed by love, but whose foreignness is an insuperable bar to integration. Roman xenophobia, as explained by Paulin, forever excludes her:

Rome par une Loi, qui ne se peut changer,
N'admet avec son sang aucun sang étranger.

(Bérénice, Act II. 2, ll. 377-8)

It is a law which by another neat paradox turns Titus into an alien in the Imperial City: ‘Gémissant dans ma Cour, et plus exilé qu'elle’ (Act III. 1, l. 752). But the pathos is largely concentrated on the isolated Queen of Palestine, producing that ‘pitié née de l'affliction’ of which Christian Biet speaks in his contribution to this volume:

Étrangère dans Rome, inconnue à la Cour,
Elle passe ses jours, Paulin, sans rien prétendre
Que quelque heure à me voir, et le reste à m'attendre.

(Bérénice, Act II. 2, ll. 534-6)

The resonances of these lines were no doubt particularly strong for the foreign princesses at Versailles, as was the situation of that other exile, Esther, and of the equally exiled daughters of Sion, with which, like many a foreign-born queen, she has surrounded herself:

Jeunes et tendres fleurs, par le sort agitées,
Sous un ciel étranger comme moi transplantées.

(Esther, Act I. 1, ll. 103-4)

It is identity, or rather the concealment of identity, of ‘sa race et son pays’ which provides the mainspring of the plot, and which of course inspired Voltaire's caustic comment on ‘un roi insensé qui a passé six mois avec sa femme, sans savoir, sans s'informer même qui elle est’.¹⁵

Monime, as an Ephesian, descended from ‘ou Rois, Seigneur, ou Héros, qu'autrefois / Leur vertu chez les Grecs mit au-dessus des Rois’ (Mithridate, I. 3, ll. 249-50), considers herself to be an ‘esclave couronnée’ (I. 3, l. 255) among the less thoroughly hellenized followers of Mithridate. Her situation, and struggle for autonomy, is a mise en abyme of one of the projects of tragedy: the recognition and definition of a personal, and collective, identity, in the midst of a world which for her is filled with foreignness.

It is only in Esther that the term ‘race’ is used to mean ‘nation’, or ethnic group. Elsewhere it means ‘house’ or ‘blood-line’. The determinism associated with that needs no further commentary, except (since we are dealing with ‘alterité’) to note the horror of mixed blood, or fear of miscegenation, expressed, for example, through Joas and Phèdre. In the mixed race, it is the worse blood which triumphs. One explanation for the future degeneration of Joas may well be the rôle of flatterers, and the corrupting effect of absolute power, which as Joad warns, ‘ont des rois égaré le plus sage’ (Athalie, Act IV. 3, ll. 1387-1402). The other, and more disturbing, explanation is the one suggested by Athalie. Joas, indeed, one day will be as she hopes ‘fidèle au sang d'Achab’ (Athalie, Act V. 6, l. 1786). Her dying wish presages the later evils committed by the now polluted blood of David. Similarly Phèdre is dominated by Pasiphaë's legacy: ‘Phèdre est d'un sang, Seigneur, vous le savez trop bien …’ (Phèdre, Act IV. 2, l. 1151).¹⁶

The quest for identity is expressed in anxiety about origins, most obviously in Ériphile, the ‘fille sans patrie’, the serially rejected outcast of Iphigénie, who nonetheless contrives to find sources of unhappiness more profound even than her status as ‘étrangère, inconnue et captive’. The case of Éliacin-Joas is quite different: however crucial the revelation of his identity is to others, he personally experiences no anguish at being without knowledge of his genealogy or homeland since he has found adoptive parents, and sanctuary—‘Ce Temple est mon pays; je n'en connais point d'autre’ (Athalie, Act II. 7, l. 640). Almost as bad as having the wrong origins, of being, say, of the ‘race de Laïus’ (La Thébaïde, Act I. 1, l. 28), or ‘fils d'Atrée’ (Iphigénie, Act V. 4, l. 1686), or ‘de Jézabel la fille’ (Athalie, Act I.1, l. 59), is having the obscurest sort. Of Roxane, it is almost impossible to say what her origins are, from where she has ‘arrived’: ‘Esclave barbare’ (Bajazet, Act V. 8, l. 1658)—the epithet is Atalide's—her status as former slave makes her as much an alien as Athalie. A double maxim in Corneille's Cinna summarizes the irremediable nature of such exclusion:

Jamais un Affranchi n'est qu'un esclave infâme;
Bien qu'il change d'état, il ne change point d'âme.

(Cinna, Act IV. 6, ll. 1409-10)

There is, finally, Athalie, usurper and idolator, ‘impie étrangère’. The figure of the stranger is here the means of expression of a radical separation from even the closest kin:

David m'est en horreur, et les fils de ce Roi
Quoique nés de mon sang, sont étrangers pour moi.

(Athalie, Act II. 7, ll. 729-30)

It is an alienation which enables her to ‘veng[er] [s]es Parents sur [s]a postérité’ (Act II. 7, l. 710). But it is, as we know, ‘la fille d'Achab’ who is the true stranger. Stranger to the Jews, and estranged from herself. Controlled by the ‘impitoyable Dieu’ of the Jews, and ‘vingt fois en un jour à [s]oi-même opposée’ (Act V. 6, ll. 1774, 1776).

It is, ultimately, this internalization of the sense of alien otherness which dominates Racine's exploitation of the connotations of words such as ‘étranger’, ‘barbare’, ‘monstre’, and the struggles of a ‘moi-même à moi-même opposée’. He constructs, through the dramatis personae, and the ‘para-personnages’, a continuum extending from soi-même/nous autres to the extremes of alien otherness. This sliding scale measures difference on both the collective and the individual level. It implicitly positions the subjects of Louis XIV at the opposite pole to, let us say, the Scythians who, proverbially, lie beyond the limits of civilization, or those seemingly civilized monsters who flourished in Rome itself: ‘Caligula, Néron / Monstres … / … qui ne conservant que la figure d'Homme …’ (Bérénice, Act II. 2, ll. 397-9). But also the ‘Other’ is the other-who-oppresses-me. Perhaps an-other. Or perhaps oneself. Through a characteristically Racinian process of internalization, the Scythian, or the monster, or the barbarian, lurks within the individual consciousness.¹⁷ The continuum is in the heart and mind of man, the barbarian has invaded the citadel. The history and diversity of human civilization are potentially present in each human microcosm.¹⁸

For early modern Europe, however, the quintessential ‘Other’ was the Oriental. What was Racine undertaking when he decided to compose a modern ‘Turkish’ play? When he wrote Bajazet, instead of recolonizing an old myth to explore current identity, he was developing a new one, by drawing together new and old elements. And he was abandoning the culturally close Graeco-Roman world for a wholly foreign one. Bajazet is, in that sense, a myth of transition. Pierre Ronzeaud, in a valuable recent survey of virtually everything which has ever been written about the political aspects of Racine,¹⁹ underlines the contradictions and perplexity displayed by critics in this area. He warns against the tendancy to see Racine's plays as allegories, or a series of coded commentaries on contemporary events—a tendancy typified by René Jasinski and, to a lesser extent, Jean Orcibal. However, he is more indulgent towards readings which incline towards the contextual, rather than the allegorical, and that is the direction I shall briefly explore in looking at the image of the dark empire of Islam projected by Racine in Bajazet.

It was in 1670 that the Compagnie du Levant was created. The importance of the Levant within Louis XIV's overseas strategy is well known. One of its cultural signs was the marked upturn in the inward flow to Paris of oriental texts. Between 1645 and 1682 the number of oriental manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roy had tripled.²⁰ Their presence, and the competition which existed for their acquisition, a competition led by the King, is a clear statement of an opening out of the reign towards the East. However little might have been understood of their contents, such visible testimony of a sophisticated Other World could hardly fail to induce some relativist thoughts.²¹ Certainly they represent an impressive degree of cultural activity on the part of French orientalists, and the second half of the century saw Paris become an important market for the dispersal of oriental books and manuscripts, as London had in the previous half century. When we consider Racine's sense of things Eastern, a significant aspect of this upsurge of interest in oriental civilization is the involvement with Port-Royal of the noted orientalists, Eusèbe Renaudot and Antoine Galland (1646-1715, translator of the Mille et Une Nuits).²² The marquis de Nointel, another fervent Jansenist, was sent in 1670 as ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and with Antoine Galland, at the behest of Louis XIV, obtained ‘attestations’ from the Patriarchs of the Eastern churches regarding their eucharistic beliefs.²³ The engagement with the East was not merely political, economic and aesthetic, but also philosophical and theological.

Apart from the well-known sources used by Racine (Segrais's Floridon (1656), the verbal account given by M. de Cézy, and, more distantly, Théagène et Chariclée) there are three types of discourse which provide a general intertextual background: firstly, accounts of the Levant provided by missionaries and travellers, secondly, discourse on French imperial claims, with their highly motivated scrutiny of French origins, and finally the growing output from French orientalists. At the ontological outset there is the crucial fact that Racine's knowledge of Greece and Rome comes from Greek and Roman texts, his knowledge of the Orient, like that of his audience, comes from sources which are not oriental. While Alain Grosrichard is correct in saying that the growing number of travel accounts of the Levant familiarized French audiences with some of the details of its history,²⁴ its geography and what passed for its beliefs and mores, these accounts remained heavily stereotyped, while the works of the more erudite orientalists who examined Persian and Turkish texts in the original were of much lesser influence.²⁵

If we accept the hypothesis of a Racine conscious of Louis as one ideal ‘destinataire’ of Racine's tragedies from Alexandre on, we can suppose that Bajazet, to some extent, is intended to fit with the king's attitude to discourses offered elsewhere on his prospect of one day ruling the world, or a larger part of it. The view that this may come to pass is not merely expressed in encomiastic literature, as a hyperbolic expression of Louis's present powers, personal merit and moral authority, it is still in the post-Fronde period a serious topic of politico-juridical debate, and indeed the object of prophecies.²⁶ If Louis, or ‘Mars Christianissimus’ as Leibniz was to call him in 1684,²⁷ required justification for his ambitions, Bajazet certainly could be read as just what was needed. By showing a competing Empire, that of the Ottomans, in the worst possible light it enhances the image of a ‘roi juste et bon’. In other words, if the imperium romanum provided the ideologues of Early Modern Europe with the language and political models they required to construct new empires, the Ottoman empire, reign of darkness, in Racine's version and in the travel literature of the time, could provide a black or inverse image of the government of Louis. It may even be possible to see in Bajazet a consciousness of French claims to the vacant throne of the basileus. Constantine was allegedly originally from Gaul (according to Raulin and Charron) and French polemicists frequently laid claim to the throne of the Eastern Empire, without an incumbent since the fall of Constantinople (1453).²⁸

Bajazet thus belongs to the category of works which ‘sought to define the character of European culture by ideological opposition with the oriental order’,²⁹ as opposed to those orientalist texts which offered displaced critiques of European culture. When Montaigne, through praise of the ‘cannibales’, implies criticism of his own society, he does so by absolving them of the vices of the inhabitants and institutions of Europe. In this he follows a rhetorical topos, evocations of the Golden Age being traditionally expressed in terms of the absence of defects, precisely because they are conceived as the reverse of a description of the ‘here-and-now’ of the author.³⁰ In a symmetrically opposite manner Bajazet, through its negative projection of Ottoman society, implies that Louis XIV's France is enjoying, if not a Golden Age, at least a lesser set of evils.

On the purely political level such a message has several uses: to induce a feel-good factor at home; to disparage a dangerous rival power, albeit an ally; and implicitly to justify France's activities in the New World. The idea of French colonialism as ‘mission civilisatrice’ had already taken root. We can take two contemporary examples among many. Charles de Rochefort, in 1665, in his Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l'Amérique, claims that the sole object of the first French colonies had been ‘the edification and instruction of the poor barbarians’.³¹ Panegyrics such as Balthazar de Riez's two-volume disquisition on L'incomparable piété des très-chrétiens rois de France, dedicated to Louis XIV, in 1672 linked claims to the Imperial crown with wider world domination, and, in part, justified them by the missionary activity promoted by Louis XIV, so zealous for ‘la conversion des peuples Infideles qui sont dans le Canada, dans la nouvelle France, dans l'Empire du Turc & du Persan’.³² It is thus possible at one level to read Bajazet as a cultural aition of expansion. Redrawing geopolitical boundaries requires the support of all kinds of fictions. Racine's projection of the Orient parallels a process engaged in the Iliad, whose poets at a non-literal level produced ‘a discourse which tamed and subordinated in the Greek imagination the land mass which came to be known as Asia, by creating Troy’. As Greek cities expanded all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ‘Asia was […] familiarized and defused by assimilation into hexameter poetry’.³³ A similar dynamic informed the literature of the discovery of America and such heavily mediated colonialist discourse as, for example, The Tempest.

How successful is Racine's projection of another contemporary civilization? Audience reaction was mixed. On the one hand, Bajazet's ending appeared too arbitrarily brutal to Mme de Sévigné. Its justification eluded her: ‘on n'entre point dans les raisons de cette grande tuerie’ (16 March, 1672). Robinet on the other hand levelled the same type of reproach against Bajazet as had earlier been made against Pyrrhus, and as Dryden would later make against Hippolyte: the hero is not sufficiently brutal. Racine has created a ‘Turc aussi doux qu'un François’, a ‘Musulman des plus courtois’, which for Robinet is evidently an oxymoron. Donneau de Visé, tongue in cheek, agrees that Racine is right to invent ‘des caractères d'honnêtes gens et de femmes tendres et galantes’ rather than create ‘barbares’ who would be less pleasing to the ladies.³⁴ Critics have at times tended to see Bajazet as another ‘turquerie’ in a superficial sense, simply exhibiting some of the symbols and trappings of the Ottoman world. Today one can only agree with Louis van Delft in doubting whether Racine's statement in the preface to Bajazet that he has aimed to preserve the ‘coutumes et mœurs de la nation’, and that he has underlined the ‘férocité de la nation turque’ constitute sufficient grounds for thinking that he is involved in a ‘caractérologie des nations’.³⁵ But in a more creative, poetical manner Racine converts the essential features of Islam (as they were perceived in his day) into the very conditions which tragically destroy individual freedom. Whether ‘tuerie’ or ‘turquerie’, the play provides a specular image of French society, both in itself and in the comments it provokes.

Racine, in locating Bajazet in Byzance-Constantinople (Istanbul), is using a ‘lieu de mémoire’ almost as potent as Jerusalem, or Rome. The poignant, yet ambivalent, image of Byzantium, like that of Jerusalem, carries the sense of a fall from grace (through its schismatic defiance of Roman papacy) and, like Rome, the suggestion of decadence. Although it was a place where the remaining Christians were tolerated, their numbers decreased, and the impression given would have been of a slow asphyxiation. Accounts of the Levant dwell on the harem. The ‘sérail’ in Bajazet, of which much has been written (should we see there the shared fantasy of literary critics?), is indeed an ‘antre tragique: lieu exemplaire du désir et du pouvoir’,³⁶ an ‘ensemble clos et labyrinthique’,³⁷ accentuating the frenetic and futile nature of the characters' ever more urgent twisting and turning. It offers Racine a location in which to develop ‘à sa condensation maximale l'unité de lieu’,³⁸ which is his trademark, and where, as Christian Delmas remarks, the enclosed space of the action contrasts with the vast distance separating Byzantium from Babylon, where the real power lies, where the ‘Grand Seigneur’ as military commander deals with those other Orientals, the Persians. The contrasting concentration and distension of space accentuate the sense of ‘sans appel’. But the ‘sérail’, or the harem, and the ‘volcanic temperament’ of Eastern women, are already obsessions of travellers, not to mention missionaries, of the period. There is a significant intertext at work, which is mentioned in Racine's second preface. Against the accusation that his ‘Héroïnes étaient trop savantes en amour et trop délicates pour des Femmes nées parmi des Peuples qui passent ici pour barbares’ [His heroines were too knowledgeable in love and too refined for women born among peoples who are considered here to be barbarians], he instances all the ‘Relations des Voyageurs’ which bear him out. As for the ‘sérail’, the contrast with local French and European courts is marked by a rhetorical question: ‘Y a-t-il une Cour au monde où la jalousie et l'amour doivent être si bien connues que dans un lieu où tant de Rivales sont enfermées ensemble, et où toutes ces Femmes n'ont point d'autre étude dans une éternelle oisiveté, que d'apprendre à plaire et à se faire aimer?’ [Is there a Court in the world where jealousy and love can be more rampant than in a place where so many rival women are locked up, and where all these women have nothing else to do in their endless idleness than to learn how to please and be loved?].³⁹ The Court of Lubricity is undoubtedly the Court of Evil, when judged from the moral standpoint of Racine's contemporaries. Even Versailles can appear virtuous in such company.

The ‘sérail’ is also presented in travel accounts as the place where the contrast between the outside and the inside, appearance and reality, is particularly marked: beyond the severity of the blank walls, the armed guards and the locked doors, there is a world of unbridled sensuality, or so the the travellers' stories go. Bajazet takes the audience into that inaccessible world. The ‘sérail’ becomes, in Racine's play, the habitus of duplicity, in a play dominated by artifice, pretence and concealment, and desperate efforts at reaching the truth. A further contrast (and another fantasy) underlies the Western construction of the ‘sérail’. From the ‘possédées de Loudun’, whose possession is ascribed to the effect of ‘la fureur utérine’,⁴⁰ through to Diderot and beyond, communities of women, particularly convents, exercise the minds of men. The ‘sérail’ as the reverse of the convent, is an avatar of the inverted Satanic world; Racine's later description of Port-Royal provides its antithesis, from which all hint of sensuality is banished and where the interior is in perfect harmony with the exterior.⁴¹

The ‘sérail’ is then both ‘gynécée’ and prison. It would not be a tragic prison if there were some hope of escape, something like a tiny grid high in the dungeon wall, through which the sky is visible. Or the discreet window in the seraglio from which the ladies of the harem could look out, but not be seen. Bajazet, like Hippolyte, dreams of a wider world, of earning a name, asserting an identity. But these hopes are futile. In Bajazet, doors open only to close, as Jean Dubu has shown in his semiotic reading of the ‘portes du palais’ and the Sublime Porte,⁴² which emphasize the claustration of the ‘sérail’. Turned in upon itself it becomes a self-sustaining ‘microcosme infernal’.⁴³ With its ‘Esclaves obscurs, / Nourris loin de la guerre, à l'ombre de ses murs’ (Bajazet, Act IV. 7, ll. 1419-1420) it is a dark enclosure, reminiscent surely of the prisons in which Christian slaves languished, those into which Guez de Balzac imagined he saw the rays of Louis XIII's benevolence penetrating,⁴⁴ those prisons which are so prominent in missionary and polemical accounts of the Orient and Barbary Coast, as, for example, in René de Lucinge's Histoire de l'origine, progrez, & declin, de l'Empire des Turcs (1614),⁴⁵ or in le Père Pierre Dan's Histoire de la Barbarie & de ses corsaires (1637).⁴⁶ In the mind of the audience aware of the Turkish slave trade, the ‘foule […] d'Esclaves’ (Bajazet, II. 1, l. 435) may be partly composed of Christians. The same audience might well have been less aware of another irony: the fact that slaves were regularly bought from the Turks for the galleys of Louis XIV's Navy, among them Eastern Rite Christians from Greece and Central Europe. The King personally gave instructions regarding the acquisition of slaves ‘aux meilleures conditions’.⁴⁷

Another sharp contrast with French practice is seen in Roxane, ‘un des personnages les plus noirs de Racine’ [one of the darkest characters of Racine],⁴⁸ who embodies the perversion of power, although she possesses only the illusion of power. The ignominy of her origins is exceptional in a protagonist (Narcisse, Ériphile, Œnone, Aman are all secondary characters). Her position of authority symbolizes the reign of unreason, is yet another form of inversion, in this play of inverted values. Narcisse, in Britannicus, had offered a similar but less developed exploration of the slave mentality. As Eléonore Zimmermann remarks, Roxane as a slave can see only the exterior aspects of freedom, while Bajazet has an interiorized concept.⁴⁹ With Orcan and Zatime we descend the degrees of humanity: Orcan, of the ‘visage odieux’, ‘né sous le ciel brûlant des plus noirs Africains’ adds blackness to his slavish status: black slave of a black sun (Amurat is the anti-Sun-King, whose realm is darkness), while Zatime is ‘d'une esclave barbare esclave impitoyable’. The ‘muets’ [mutes] are the ultimate victims of despotism, for to be deprived of speech, in Racine's world, is the final extinction of identity.

Against these forces the individual's struggle for autonomy appears hopeless. Bajazet presents, in a sense, an inversion of genre. It is, as Georges Forestier has pointed out, a black pastoral, with a ‘trame’ [plot] borrowed from that genre, and set in the least pastoral of locations, the closed and glittering world of the Ottoman court. Bajazet, a ‘berger en rupture de paradis’ [a pastoral shepherd bereft of paradise],⁵⁰ provides the most acute instance of disparity between the aspirations of a hero and the choices open to him. The world and the individual are locked in deadly combat. In the words of Alain Viala, ‘autour du Sérail, l'Empire bouge, l'armée au loin triomphe, et leurs forces énormes noient dans l'inutile les soubresauts des amants qui se débattent sur scène’ [around the Harem, the Empire stirs, far afield the Army triumphs, and their enormous forces swamp in futility the antics of the lovers who tumble about on stage].⁵¹

Ancestry, lineage, especially of royal or imperial families, may be a source of legitimacy and stability. However, in the world of Bajazet, reverential reference to the Ottoman blood has an ironic ring. It is not the defiant attachment to a notoriously impure bloodline displayed by ‘la fille de Jézabel’.⁵² Bajazet's nostalgia for the ‘grands noms de [sa] race’ (Act II. 5, l. 738) is heard rather as the error of a hero whose points of reference, unbeknownst to him, are dubious.⁵³ The effect here, as in his rememoration of specific ancestors, an earlier Bajazet, or Soliman, or Osman, is pathos. Similarly when Atalide swears by le ‘Ciel’, and ‘Par ces grands Ottomans, dont [elle est] descendue’ (Bajazet, Act V. 5, ll. 1597-8), there is tragic irony in her emprisonment in a belief system which is doubly erroneous: her ‘ciel’ [heaven] is a Mahometan one, and the ruling dynasty is not hallowed. It is logical that she should similarly and tragically remain a prisoner of her passions. The genealogical impulse, here as elsewhere, corresponds to an attempt ‘to reinscribe the time of the narrative within the time of the universe’.⁵⁴

The notion of a legitimate translatio imperii, a central argument in French commentary on French rights to the empire, is perverted in Bajazet. In the Ottoman empire, the transfer of power as described by Acomat is illegitimate: the route to the throne is over the dead body of one or several brothers. If Bajazet kills Amurat he will merely be perpetuating a tradition of violence:

L'exemple en est commun. Et parmi les Sultans,
Ce chemin à l'Empire a conduit de tout temps.

(Bajazet, Act II. 1, ll. 443-4)

Racine presents here the violent alternative, in a dynastic system, to a strict adherence to the law of primogeniture, the unquestioned inheritance by the eldest brother. The inevitable enmity between brothers, while it is, of course, a feature of Racine's tragedies, must here be seen as regressive, archaic, even primitive, in the context of one of the seventeenth century's great powers. The recent history of France had contained examples of tension between royal brothers but Louis XIV's reign saw, on the contrary, public displays of royal fraternal harmony, and a proliferation of paintings and medals celebrating that solidarity—for example, Louis conferring the Order of the Saint-Esprit on Monsieur, or the series of medals and portraits showing the extended royal family. In this way Bajazet provides a gauge of French progress. The seizure of power by Bajazet, although he is ‘of the blood’ and morally superior to Amurat, would then be little more than a coup militaire supported by the Janissaries, a regression to the practices of the dark days of a decadent Roman Empire, and the violent antithesis of the sacred rites associated with the conferring by the Pope of the imperium on Charlemagne, or the transmission of royal power at the sacre. The equivalent ceremony in this play, should Bajazet decide to oust his brother, would hardly appear adequately solemn: Roxane would display the Divine Prophet's dread banner to the terrified people, and Acomat would proclaim Bajazet emperor (ll. 847-52). So Bajazet enhances Bourbon legitimacy. The people are ‘épouvanté’ (l. 847), ‘alarmé’ (l. 244), ‘rempli d'une juste terreur’ (l. 851), ‘craintives’ (l. 1669), and ‘effrayés’ (l. 1670). Of course, a docile population is generally seen as a desirable quantity in seventeenth-century political discourse, including tragedy. But here it is a blind obedience, a characteristic stressed by contemporary French commentaries on Islam. It is a sign of servility, of a mercenary system, of the consequences of despotism. So Roxane can boast that the ‘people’ of the ‘sérail’ [harem] are her creatures, bought and paid for, over whom she has unlimited rights:

                    … [ces] âmes asservies
M'ont vendu dès longtemps leur silence et leurs vies.

(Bajazet, Act II. 1, ll. 437-8)

This power is eloquently attested in Act V, scene 8, by Zatime's obstinate silence: ‘Il y va de ma vie, et je ne puis rien dire’ (l. 1654).

The absence of Amurat (only emissaries penetrate the ‘sérail’, slaves with deadly instructions) symbolically expresses a perception of the ‘vide’ which runs through the orthodox exegesis of oriental life and beliefs. And rather as the absence of the Moors from the actual stage of Le Cid can be seen as their concealment and absorption within the dominant discourse,⁵⁵ the absence of Amurat is also a form of denial of the power of the sultan-emperor. In European portrayals of Ottoman rule the very absence of sedition is interpreted as a sign of despotism. What might otherwise pass for civic order is construed as alien, almost idolatrous. Orcan, for example, anticipates that the sight of the Sultan's written order will produce instant submission, a form of adoration, on the part of Osmin:

‘Adorez, a-t-il dit, l'ordre de votre Maître’.

(Bajazet, Act V. 11, l. 1683)⁵⁶

The foundation of the Turkish Empire is the concentration of power in the person of the Sultan. As Rycaut, one of Racine's sources, puts it: ‘la puissance sans bornes de l'Empereur, est le principe de l'Empire des Turcs’ [the limitless power of the Emperor is the principle of power among the Turks],⁵⁷ and he cites as a further ‘maxime de la politique des Turcs’ that ‘le Prince soit servi par des personnes, qu'il puisse élever sans envie, & ruiner sans danger’ [the Prince should be served by persons whom he can elevate without envy and destroy without risk].⁵⁸ This policy to European eyes seemed to abolish any proper hierarchy of power, leaving a void where the aristocracy should be.

The only power other than that of the Sultan, and the precarious Vizir, lies with the dangerously volatile Janissaries (who previously murdered Osman, on the pretext that he had married against their wishes), a military force but not an aristocracy. If the Sultan were to suffer a defeat at Babylon, the Janissaries, ‘à la haine joignant l'audace’ (Bajazet, Act I. 1, l. 66) would interpret it as ‘un arrêt du ciel qui réprouve Amurat’ (Act I. 1, l. 68); this was obviously not the type of superstitious judgement to which any military leader, for example Louis XIV, would wish to be exposed. But should he succeed they will display ‘une aveugle et basse obéissance’ (Bajazet, l. 62). The fidelity of the ‘braves janissaires’ (l. 29) to Amurat is, then, as suspect as that commanded by any despot, and as suspect as Bajazet's ‘foi’. Their heart is a difficult text to read: ‘Dans le secret des cœurs, Osmin, n'as-tu rien lu / Amurat jouit-il d'un pouvoir absolu?’ (ll. 31-2). His ‘pouvoir absolu’ has the usual limitation. The fate predicted for Néron⁵⁹ is experienced by Amurat. He is feared by the Janissaries and his position is thus insecure:

Moi-même j'ai souvent entendu leurs discours,
Comme il les craint sans cesse, ils le craignent toujours.

(Bajazet, Act I. 1, ll. 43-4)

The spiritual predicament is as grave as the political. Mahometanism was, in Christian eyes, an empty display, and a distortion of Christian truth: ‘Il n'y a personne qui ne sçache que la Religion des Turcs est un composé extravagant de celle des Chrétiens & de celle des Juifs’ [Everybody knows that the religion of the Turks is an excessive mixture of the Christian and Jewish faiths].⁶⁰ The benighted subjects of the Sultan are as credulous in religious matters as their religious leaders are corrupt. By her ‘brigues secrètes’ Roxane has won over the ‘sacrés interprètes’ of the Muslim Faith. Her order, ‘rentre dans le néant dont je t'ai fait sortir’, is, as Eléonore Zimmermann has pointed out,⁶¹ tantamount to arrogating the rôle of God to herself. Bajazet's world is one which is ‘atrocement humain’, more or less deprived of divine law. In such a world, without the ‘true’ faith, the characters are exposed to destructive doubt, and obsessively pursue elusive reassurance. The word ‘foi’ is used 24 times in the play, ‘fidèle’ and ‘infidèle’ 14 times. It is a world where promises, as Acomat states, are never binding on the ruler. Moral values are so inverted that to keep a promise is, for Acomat, to act like a slave: ‘Le sang des Ottomans / Ne doit point en Esclave obéir aux serments’ (ll. 643-4), and the throne, which is supposedly ‘si saint’ has as foundation ‘la foi promise et rarement gardée’ (l. 650).

In the context of the confusion which was commonly believed to reign in the minds of the followers of Mahomet, there is peculiar significance in Racine's use of the word ‘nœud’. Racine in Bajazet uses it in a way which is properly poetic, if we adopt the definition proposed by Maurice Delcroix, speaking of the ‘monstre’: ‘il spécule sur la plurisémie du mot’.⁶² The word ‘nœud’ is indeed remarkably polysemic. Most commonly in tragedies it elegantly expresses the union, variously perceived as ‘funeste’, ‘saint’ etc., between man and wife, or the bonds of kinship or friendship. It thus holds society together. But the ‘nœud’ is also a difficulty, or problem—the Gordian knot, the heart of a litigation. Hence its dramaturgical meaning of ‘l'endroit de la pièce où la principale intrigue se forme, où les affaires commencent à s'embarasser' [the part of the play where the main plot begins to form, and the situation becomes complex].⁶³ As he had done in Britannicus with the notion of ‘poison’, and would later with ‘monstre’ in Phèdre, Racine adopts an emblematic term, stretching it between its figurative (rather overworked) meaning and the first-level or primary meaning. Thus the ‘nœuds par le sang commencés’, which formed in childhood between Atalide and Bajazet, are distinct from the conjugal ‘nœud sacré’ which Roxane demands, the marriage ‘en bonne et due forme’ which will bind Bajazet to her, that demeaning bond to be the paradoxical price of his freedom. As the dénouement approaches, the real ‘nœud’—the noose—shows itself and achieves concrete form in the ‘nœuds infortunés’ with which Roxane threatens to have Bajazet strangled. The sadistic ambiguity of her promise to Atalide exploits the multiple meanings of ‘nœud’:

Loin de vous séparer, je prétends aujourd'hui
Par des nœuds éternels vous unir avec lui.

(Bajazet, Act V. 6, ll. 1631-2)

A further meaning surfaces in Atalide's final use of the word, rightly berating herself for having woven the web of deceit in which Bajazet is snared:

Moi seule j'ai tissu le lien malheureux,
Dont tu viens d'éprouver les détestables nœuds.

(Bajazet, Act V. 12, ll. 1739-40) (my emphasis)

The association is made between the multiple twists in the plot and the complexity and artifice which had become synonymous with Byzantium and oriental sophistication, as well as the horrific manner of Bajazet's death. To an aristocratic French mind, this is a particularly ghastly end. The tragic hero—and indeed any noble d'épée—would prefer to perish by the sword. Execution by strangulation is both ignominious and one of the cultural differences which caracterize, in French eyes, the ‘barbarity’ of the Ottomans.⁶⁴

In his ‘Preface’ to Bajazet, Racine invites us to consider the Ottoman Empire as a throwback: ‘les Personnages Turcs, quelque modernes qu'ils soient ont de la dignité sur notre Théâtre. On les regarde de bonne heure comme Anciens. Ce sont des mœurs et des coutumes toutes différentes. Nous avons si peu de commerce avec les Princes et les autres Personnes qui vivent dans le Sérail, que nous les considérons, pour ainsi dire, comme des gens qui vivent dans un autre siècle que le nôtre’ (my emphasis) [Turkish characters, however modern they are, have a certain dignity on our stage. They can easily be viewed as Ancients. They have customs and usages which are very different from ours. We have so few dealings with the Princes and other persons who live in the harem, that we consider them, so to speak, as a people who live in another time].⁶⁵ He revealingly draws the parallel between Athenian dramatists' treatment of Persians, notably Æschylus's treatment of Xerxes's mother, and his own approach to the seventeenth-century Levant. The ‘Preface’ displays the tendency common in ‘récits de voyage’ to identify the unfamiliar societies encountered in long-distance travel with one's early ancestors; exoticism merges with a primitivism which is also chronological.⁶⁶ Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope is also useful here, in conveniently summarizing the way in which the literary imagination represents time as a malleable, unevenly paced and unevenly distributed phenomenon.⁶⁷ The Byzantium ruled over by Amurat is outside the highroad of progress. Or, in Christian Biet's words, speaking of Mithridate, the Occident is the world of History, the Orient is infra-history.⁶⁸

As a corollary of this, comparison with former selves is for Racine's audience a way to measure progress. According to Christian Delmas, Racine, like Delacroix ‘pressent […] que l'Orient n'est que l'Antiquité vivante’ [feels that the Orient is simply Antiquity brought to life].⁶⁹ The cultural distance, as much as the geographical, produces the gap in which ‘l'élaboration poétique de la matière tragique’ may take place. This is the crossover of the distances (space/time) applied in his Greek and Roman tragedies: the Greeks are culturally closer, temporally further off. In a study of the play's debt to Othon, Jacques Morel remarks on this same sense of non-progress: the Turkish ‘férocité’ claimed by Racine in the ‘Preface’ seems equally applicable to Rome in the aftermath of Nero.⁷⁰ Perhaps, like Hegel, Racine viewed Asian cultures as a prelude to European civilization. It is nonetheless true that in Bajazet his refiguration of time is a new departure in his continuing exploration of the ‘entrecroisement entre l'histoire et la fiction’.⁷¹

Bajazet is not a propaganda piece. It does, however, project an image of a dark empire, a parallel realm to the luminous, legitimate world of Louis XIV. Its inhabitants are lost in the toils of deceit and false appearance, in a world of Error, with its secular and its religious connotations. It is, too, a displacement onto the Orient of the darker fears of the individual confronted with the reality of absolutism. The characters' autonomy, their liberty, the relative liberty of Roxane and of Acomat, is never more than an illusion. These are ‘marionnettes dérisoires en attente d'exécution’ [absurd puppets awaiting execution].⁷² Virtue here presents itself like an astonishing, paradoxical aberration: in Bajazet the real strangers are Bajazet and, to a lesser extent, Atalide.

Racine produces in his plays his own ‘histoire universelle’, one which is much more readable than Bossuet's. Where Bossuet is moralistic, I would claim that Racine is ethical, in Ricoeur's sense of ‘the search for self and communal identity [as strengthening] the ethical dimension of history.’⁷³ When we view his plays as cultural narratives, and as an attempt to locate French identity in the vast sweep of human civilization, the links between them are worth attention. They cast an often ironic light on history: Iphigénie prequel to Andromaque, Athalie prequel to Esther, Mithridate prequel to Bajazet. On the relationship between these two ‘oriental’ plays, Paul Mesnard in 1865, while recognizing that Roman accounts of Mithridate's domestic arrangements suggest parallels with the mores of the Sultans, rejected any intention of reduplication on Racine's part.⁷⁴ His commentary betrays the difficulty he, and others of his time, had in reconciling ‘grandeur’ with ‘barbare’: Mithridate, he says, has a ‘grandeur’ which is ‘toute romaine’. Clearly he would have been happy to erase the memory of the oriental half of Mithridate's ambiguous identity, another ‘indigne moitié d'une si belle histoire’. However, despite their very different dramatic structure, there are enough similarities between these two oriental plays for the connection to be valuable: there is common ground in the series of illusions experienced by the characters of both plays, and in the cruelty and tyranny of Mithridate, precursor of Amurat and yet his superior.

There is a meaning to be derived from the relationship between Mithridate and Bajazet. According to the general verdict, Mithridate passes for one of Racine's more cheerful plays, ‘an optimistic interlude’,⁷⁵ or an almost operatic ‘tragédie lyrique’,⁷⁶ where, for the first time the young couple are not separated at the end. Yet it carries a dark message about civilization. Certainly about the impermanence of empires. For not only does Mithridate's empire crumble around him, it has itself possessed lands which once had held sway over its own heartland. Monime is, in a sense, a piece of Greek booty,⁷⁷ albeit acquired in less violent circumstances than Andromaque. Thus we have within the play, in the person of the reluctant fiancée, the image of Greece, and a hellenized Asia Minor, succumbing to Mithridate. If Mithridate represents active resistance, Monime is emblematic of the colonized. Her body may go to the altar with Mithridate's, her mind and heart, to use the metaphor of the time, will resist. Her point of revolt is Pharnace: Pharnace would be a conqueror too many.⁷⁸ Her parents' submission to Mithridate's will summarizes the submergence of Greek civilization by the ‘Eastern threat’, with all the resonances that situation might have for a seventeenth-century audience, accustomed to hearing that ‘les Turcs sont aux portes de Vienne’.⁷⁹ But Mithridate represents a nation which is seen at the point where the Roman Empire overwhelms it. Within the play the fall of Rome is itself predicted. Racine's layering of these time-frames, when taken in conjunction with the image of the Ottoman empire in Bajazet, conveys not merely the mutability of political power, but the painful possibility of a teleological reading of history which leads downwards, and away from progress. Seventeen centuries, the ‘benefits’ of Roman civilization, the reign of Constantine, Christianity, the rise and the fall of Byzantium, modern ‘progress’, contacts with Europe have changed nothing. An implication of this may, of course, be that a political saviour is ready and available, to lead seventeenth-century Europe away from any such catastrophe: ‘Mars Christianissimus’ is waiting in the wings.

Leibniz, in 1671-2, drew Louis XIV's attention to the desirability of a new crusade against the Turks—the irony here is that his real purpose is to divert France's attention from Europe, by providing a new ‘theatre’ for Louis's war-games.⁸⁰ The Turkish threat has become a way to divert the French threat. What could more aptly illustrate the complexity of the relations between the nations of Europe and the Ottoman Empire? And the fact that Amurat might not lie so far from Louis.

Finally, Racine was perhaps not a relativist, in Todorov's sense. But he was supremely aware that ‘civilization’, whether individual or collective, and in whatever land it is found, is a fragile thing.

Notes

1. See particularly: Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit. III. Le temps raconté (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), pp. 355-9, 371-4; and Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990), 5th and 6th ‘études’.

2. Ricœur, Temps et récit. III, Ch. 3 ‘La réalité du passé historique’, Ch. 5, ‘L'entrecroisement de l'histoire et de la fiction’.

3. Littérature et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1993), pp. 88-9. Of particular interest here is the section on the ‘caractères des nations’ where the moral profiling of nations is envisaged as a cartography of human nature: the character of a particular race, in its particular geographical place, becomes a ‘lieu’ [topos] in the rhetorical sense.

4. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian. Greek Self-definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 2.

5. Le vocabulaire des tragédies de Jean Racine (Genève-Paris: Slatkine-Champion, 1983). See pp. 307-14.

6. Racine's audience would probably have been familiar with the arguments which established the French as ancestors of the Germans (rather than the reverse, as was thought ‘outre-Rhin’). Here the less active role is that attributed to the latter, who await a leader, whereas the Gaulois have already breached the walls of Rome.

7. It is an instance of what one might call prememoration, where historical tragedy embraces the known ‘future’. In Jacques Truchet's words, ‘il n'est de tragédie que prophétique’ [all tragedy is prophetic], and in its temporal sweep history meets future and, beyond human time, eternity. For this particularly French view of tragedy, see Jacques Truchet, La Tragédie classique en France (Paris: PUF, 1975, 1989, 1997), p. 28.

8. In Racine. Mythes et Réalités, Actes du Colloque de la Société d'étude du XVII^e siècle and University of Western Ontario, 1974, special no., XVII^e siècle (1976), 11-24.

9. Maurice Delcroix, ‘La poétique du monstre dans le théâtre de Racine’, in Christine M. Hill (ed.), Théâtre et Poésie. Actes du 3^e colloque Vinaver (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1991), pp. 175-90.

10. This paraphrases Maurice Daumas's answer to the same question (La tendresse amoureuse, XVI^e-XVIII^e siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1996), p. 202). It was not until the nineteenth century that scientists finally concluded that there was no such species as homo monstruosus.

11. Apart from being twice mentioned in Phèdre, they are referred to only once, when Mithridate recalls the Romans' willingness to follow Spartacus: ‘S'ils suivent au combat des Brigands qui les vengent, / De quelle noble ardeur pensez-vous qu'ils se rangent / Sous les drapeaux d'un Roi longtemps victorieux, / Qui voit jusqu'à Cyrus remonter ses Aïeux?’ (Mithridate, Act III. 1, ll. 823-6).

12. They also provide me with a tenuous if not very flattering Irish link: Ménage derives the word from the ‘Brigantes, peuples d'Hybernie, qui sous l'Empire Romain passerent en Angleterre où ils ravagerent toute la partie Septentrionale’ [Brigantes, a people of Hibernia, who at the time of the Roman Empire moved to England, where they destroyed the entire North (Les Origines de la langue françoise, 1650, article ‘Brigands’). He was aware of the rival etymologies proposed by Nicot and by Fauchet (Traité de la Milice). Modern scholarship has absolved the Hibernians and given the etymology, and the blame, to mediaeval Italy, the currently accepted etymology being brigante, irregular soldier. My wish to bring this in here is an illustration of how we, like Racine's audiences, scrutinize his texts for every scintilla of reference to ourselves, with which to build our identities.

13. See his Culture and Imperialism (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993).

14. For Bakhtin on dialogism, see ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422.

15. Le Siècle de Louis XIV (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 1, p. 358.

16. In a more socially conscious way, one reason for Bajazet to refuse Roxane is his horror at the thought of allying his Ottoman blood with an ‘Esclave attachée à ses seuls intérêts’ (Act II. 5, l. 719).

17. This is, of course, another way of expressing those conflicts of the two-sided character which Georges Forestier's chapter in this volume addresses.

18. Self as barbarian is an image linked to conduct of affairs of the heart, ranging from the preciosity of Alexandre's ‘Vous croyez donc qu'à moi-même barbare / J'abandonne en ces lieux une beauté si rare?’ (Alexandre le Grand, Act III. 6, ll. 925-6), through Titus's ‘Non, je suis un barbare. / Moi-même je me hais. Néron, tant détesté, / N'a point à cet excès poussé sa cruauté’ (Bérénice, Act IV. 6, ll. 1212-14) and Bajazet's ‘Je me trouvais barbare, injuste, criminel’ (Bajazet, Act III. 4, l. 995). The image of self as monster is rarer, with Phèdre, of course, providing the clearest case. It must be an intentional irony that of all Racine's characters the one most often qualified as ‘barbare’ is the very Greek Agamemnon (ten times).

19. ‘Racine et la politique: la perplexité de la critique’, Œuvres et Critiques, 24. 1 (1999), Présences de Racine (Tübingen: Gunter Narr), pp. 136-58.

20. This figure is reached if one compares Jacques et Pierre Dupuy's catalogue, at the start of the reign, to the inventory prepared by Nicolas Clément and others in 1682, where the manuscripts are methodically organized into linguistic categories. The Royal Library benefited from transfers from Fouquet's library and the Collège Mazarin, as well as from the acquisitions made by Colbert's envoyés (e.g. Jean-Michel Vansleb deputed in 1671 to track down valuable works throughout the Middle East). Some, of course, ended up in the ‘Colbertine’. See Marie-Rose Séguy, ‘L'Orient—Attrait de l'Exotisme’, in Roseline Bacou, Marie-Rose Séguy and Hélène Adhémar (eds), Collections de Louis XIV: dessins, albums, manuscrits. Orangerie des Tuileries, 7 octobre 1977-9 janvier 1978 (Paris: Éditions des Musées nationaux, 1977), pp. 198-200.

21. Just as the Jesuits' accounts of the history of China had led Isaac de La Peyrère to develop his theory of the Pre-Adamites, thereby construing the Bible as merely the history of the Jews, rather than of mankind, as testified by his Systema theologicum ex Preadamitarum hypothesi, 1655.

22. Their knowledge of Greek and Oriental languages was to prove useful in the preparation of studies and works of controversy.

23. These were of interest not merely to Port-Royal but to Louis XIV, who wished to have proof of the Greek and Eastern Church views on transubstantiation. These superbly illuminated ‘attestations’ were deposited in the Royal Library.

24. Alain Grosrichard, Structure du sérail. La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l'Orient classique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), pp. 26-7. Quoted by Marie-Odile Sweetser, ‘Visions de l'autre dans la tragédie classique: le Romain et l'Oriental’, French Literature Series, 23 (1996), p. 63.

25. For example André Du Ryer's translation of the Coran (L'Alcoran de Mahomet, translaté d'arabe en françois, Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1647) was virtually ignored in France, where preference was given to modern editions of Pierre Le Venerable's twelfth-century Latin version, and subsequently to Maracci's 1698 translation, itself based on the medieval one, and where each sourate was accompanied by its refutation. Du Ryer's work was, in fact, better known in England, where in 1649 it was ‘Englished’ for the benefit of ‘all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities’, as the title proclaims. For details concerning the diffusion and reception of the Coran in France see Dominique Carnoy, Représentations de l'Islam dans la France du XVII^e siècle. La ville des tentations (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998).

26. Alexandre Yali Haran in ‘Les droits de la couronne de France sur l'Empire au XVII^e siècle’ (Revue historique, 299. 1 (1999), 71-91) provides an account of the arguments in favour of French imperial claims, and the survival into the seventeenth century of a current of Messianic prophecy regarding French universal dominion. See also: Gaston Zeller, ‘Les Rois de France candidats à l'Empire: Essai sur l'idéologie impériale en France’, Revue historique, 173 (1934), 273-311; Klaus Malettke, ‘Le Saint Empire Romain Germanique et sa constitution vus par des juristes et historiens français au XVII^e siècle’, in Wolfgang Leiner (ed.), Horizons européens de la littérature française. Dixseptième colloque du Centre méridional de rencontres sur le XVII^e siècle (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988), pp. 185-95. On the general decline in enthusiasm and respect for the notion of the Holy Roman Empire in seventeenth-century France, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

27. Mars Christianissimus autore Germano Gallo Graeco ou Apologie des Armes du Roy Trèschrestien contre les Chrestiens (Cologne: David Lebon, 1684).

28. Antoine Aubéry: ‘nos roys … sont les vrays successeurs des anciens Empereurs, tant de Rome que de Constantinople’ [our Kings are the true successors of the former Emperors, both of Rome and Constantinople], De la prééminence de nos Roys et de leur préséance sur l'Empereur et le Roy d'Espagne (Paris: chez Michel Soly, 1649), p. 182). Earlier French kings (Charles VIII in 1494, and François I^er) had obtained the title, an empty one unless the Ottoman empire were destroyed.

29. Bashir El-Beshti, ‘Signifying Texts and Displaced Contexts: Orientalism and the Ideological Foundations of the Early Modern State’, in David Lee Rubin (ed.), EMF, Studies in Early Modern France, 3 (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1997), pp. 80-93; see p. 84.

30. Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), pp. 356-7. The paradox of exoticism, he states, is its wish to be an elogium without genuine knowledge of the culture in question.

31. Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l'Amerique, p. 283. Quoted in Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 35.

32. L'incomparable piété des très-chrétiens rois de France, et les admirables prérogatives qu'elle a méritées à Leurs Majestés, tant pour leur royaume en général, que pour leurs personnes sacrées en particulier, par le R. P. Balthazar de Riez, 2 vols (Livre I: Paris, G. Alliot, 1672; Livre II: Aix, imp. de C. David, 1674). See ‘Épitre’, third page (unpaginated).

33. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, p. 48.

34. Rohou, Théâtre, p. 995.

35. van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie, pp. 97-8.

36. Rohou, Théâtre, ‘Notice de Bajazet’, p. 979.

37. Georges Forestier, ‘Introduction’, in Bajazet (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992), p. 27. Also Œuvres, p. 1504.

38. Christian Delmas, ‘Préface’, in Bajazet, coll. Folio Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 11.

39. 2nd Preface (1676), in Forestier, Œuvres, p. 626.

40. ‘On appelle en Medecine fureur uterine une maladie de la vulve ou matrice qui jette des fumées au cerveau qui causent de grands emportements & deshonnestes aux femmes qui ont une passion d'amour indomptable. La plus-part des Religieuses qu'on croit possedées, ne sont que des malades de fureur uterine’ [The disease of the vulva, or the womb, is called in Medecine the uterine rash, which causes vapours to the brain, and great excesses and unreliability among women provoked to insatiable amorous passion. Most of those Nuns who were believed to be possessed were only sick with uterine rash] (Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, 1690, article ‘uterin’; cf. Thomas Corneille, Dictionnaire des Arts et des Sciences, 1695). The blame, as we can see, has shifted most rationally from the devil to the physiological composition of women.

41. Port-Royal, as it appears in the Abrégé provides the opposite pole to the harem, where industry and holiness reign both within and without the walls: ‘Tout ce qu'on en voyoit au dehors inspiroit de la piété. […] Mais combien les personnes qui connoissoient l'intérieur de ce monastère y trouvoient-elles de nouveaux sujets d'édification! Quelle paix! Quel silence! Quelle charité! Quel amour pour la pauvreté et pour la mortification! Un travail sans relâche, une prière continuelle, point d'ambition que pour les emplois les plus vils et les plus humiliants, aucune impatience dans les sœurs, nulle bizarrerie dans les mères, l'obéissance toujours prompte, et le commandement toujours raisonnable’ [Everything that could be seen from without inspired Christian devotion […], but what new sources of edification were revealed to those who knew the life within the walls! What peace! What silence! What charity! What love of poverty and self-denial! A ceaseless labour, unremitting prayer, only ambition for the most menial and humiliating tasks prevailed, no impatience amongst the Sisters, no moodiness in the Mother Superiors, always prompt obedience and moderate instructions], Abrégé de l'histoire de Port-Royal, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Luc Estang (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), p. 323.

42. ‘Bajazet: “serrail” et transgression’, in Racine aux miroirs (Paris: SEDES, 1992), pp. 137-48.

43. Eléonore M. Zimmermann, La Liberté et le destin dans le théâtre de Jean Racine, suivi de deux essais sur le théâtre de Jean Racine (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1999), p. 14 (orig. Saratoga, 1982).

44. ‘Quelle apparence, que je ne me réveille point à ce grand bruit, qui se levant icy, se fait entendre aux extremitez de la terre, et que je ne reçoive aucune impression d'une lumiere si proche et si éclatante, qui s'épand desja au delà de la mer, et jette ses rayons jusques dans les cachots de Barbarie?’ [What an idea, that I should never wake up to this great din which arising here can be heard in the far extremities of the Earth, and that I should not receive any impression of a light so close and brilliant, spreading already beyond the sea, and casting its rays even into the cells of Barbary?], Le Prince (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1996), p. 45. This passage follows his encounter with a Flemish gentleman who had been captured at sea and sold as a slave in Algiers.

45. The full title is: Histoire de l'origine, progrez, & declin, de l'Empire des Turcs. Où sont declarees les causes de l'agrandissement & conservation de leurs Estats. Et comme on les pourroit destruire & ruiner. Avec une Complainte d'un Esclave Chrestien, adressee aux Princes Chrestiens (Paris: chez Pierre Chevalier, 1614).

46. Paris: P. Rocolet, 1637; 2nd edition in 1649.

47. Quoted by André Zysberg, Les galériens, vies et destins de 60 000 forçats sur les galères de France 1680-1748 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), p. 67. The market in humans was conducted in a number of ports of the Christian Mediterranean (Leghorn, Venice, Malta, Alicante, Majorca, Cagliari). To the galley slaves provided by the Turks were added, experimentally, Iroquois, and black Guineans who were to be ‘acclimatés’—in the latter case the experiment was as short-lived as the slaves themselves who proved unable to survive the conditions. After October 1685, of course, Huguenots, the ‘galériens pour la foi’ [galley slaves of religion], helped to make up the numbers.

48. Forestier, ‘Introduction’ in Bajazet (Livre de Poche, 1992), p. 32.

49. Zimmermann, La Liberté et le destin dans le théâtre de Jean Racine, pp. 17-18.

50. Forestier, Bajazet (Livre de Poche), p. 44.

51. Racine. La stratégie du caméléon (Paris: Seghers, 1990), p. 151.

52. Cf. Athalie, Act II. 7, ll. 709-30 and V. 6, ll. 1768-90. [This study was completed before the publication of Volker Schröder's La Tragédie du sang d'Auguste. Politique et intertextualité dans Britannicus, coll. Biblio 17, no. 119 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999).]

53. In this he is a little like Junie who only sees among her ancestors the virtuous Augustus. This point is made by Eléonore M. Zimmermann: ‘De même que Junie ne voit chez ses ancêtres qu'un Auguste vertueux, Bajazet puise sa force dans un passé mythique’ [Just as Junie identifies among her ancestors only a virtuous Augustus, so Bajazet derives his strength from a mythical past], La Liberté et le destin dans le théâtre de Jean Racine, p. 17.

54. Ricœur emphasizes the role of genealogical references as a form of symbolical and biological inscribing of the self in time (Temps et récit. III, Ch. 3).

55. This view of Corneille's decision to relegate Spain's enemies to the ‘coulisses’ is developed by Michèle Longino in ‘Politique et théâtre au XVII^e siècle: Les Français en Orient et l'exotisme du Cid’, in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), Littérature et exotisme, XVI^e-XVII^e siècle (Paris: École des Chartes, 1997), pp. 35-59.

56. In the original edition, ‘adorez’ is replaced by ‘connaissez’.

57. Paul Rycaut, Histoire de l'État présent de l'Empire des Ottomans contenant les maximes politiques des Turcs, traduit de l'anglois […] par M. Briot (Amsterdam: Wolfgank, 1670), title of Ch. II. My emphasis.

58. Ibid., title of Ch. V.

59. ‘Craint de tout l'univers, il vous faudra tout craindre’ (Britannicus, Act IV. 3, l. 1452).

60. Rycaut, Histoire de l'État, p. 249. The religion of Islam is presented as both a confused mixture of truth and error, and, in some of its manifestations, as a direct opposite of Christianity. For example, when describing the Order of ‘Kalendivis’, Rycaut states that ‘Ceux qui font profession de cét Ordre, méritent mieux d'estre appelez Epicuriens, que personnes retirées du monde pour mortifier leurs passions, comme font tous les autres Religieux Turcs. Cependant ces phanatiques prétendent par une voie toute opposée à celle des autres, estre de bons religieux en s'abandonnant au libertinage & au relâchement …’ [Those who belong to this Order deserve to be called Epicureans rather than people who retire from the world to mortify their passions, as do all other Turkish religious communities. However, these fanatics claim by a completely opposite path to the rest, to be good holy people in surrendering to a life of laxity and libertinage], ibid., p. 264.

61. Zimmermann, La Liberté et le destin dans le théâtre de Jean Racine, p. 72.

62. Delcroix, ‘La poétique du monstre’, p. 179.

63. Dictionnaire de l'Académie Françoise (1694), article ‘nœud’.

64. The association is so strong that it surfaces in unexpected places: Richelet, defining ‘lacs’, informs us that ‘Les muets du serrail estranglent des Princes, des Visirs, avec des lacs de soye’ (Dictionnaire, 1694).

65. Forestier, Œuvres, p. 625.

66. Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 358.

67. ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, in Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination.

68. ‘Mithridate, ou l'exercice de l'ambiguïté’, in Claire Carlin (ed.), La Rochefoucauld, Mithridate, Frères et Sœurs, Les Muses sœurs, coll. Biblio 17, no. 111 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), pp. 83-98 (p. 89).

69. Delmas, ‘Préface’, in Bajazet, p. 26.

70. ‘Racine lecteur d'Othon’, in Agréables mensonges. Essais sur le théâtre français du XVII^e siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), pp. 237-8. The original text appeared in the ‘Preface’ to Corneille: Othon, ed. J. Sanchez (Mont-de-Marsan: José Feijoo, 1989).

71. See Ricœur for this relationship: ‘… l'entrecroisement entre l'histoire et la fiction dans la refiguration du temps repose, en dernière analyse, sur cet empiètement réciproque, le moment quasi historique de la fiction changeant de place avec le moment quasi fictif de l'histoire. De cet entrecroisment, de cet empiètement réciproque, de cet échange de places, procède ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler le temps humain, où se conjuguent la représentance du passé par l'histoire et les variations imaginatives de la fiction, sur l'arrière-plan des apories de la phénoménologie du temps’ [… the interweaving of history and fiction in the refiguration of time rests finally upon this reciprocal trespassing, on the quasi-historical moment of fiction changing places with the quasifictive moment of history. From this interweaving, from this reciprocal trespassing, comes what is commonly called human time, where history's representing of the past and the imaginative variants produced by fiction come together, against the background of the phenomenology of time and its aporias], Temps et récit. III, p. 279.

72. Rohou, ‘Notice de Bajazet’, p. 988.

73. Edi Pucci, ‘History and the Question of Identity: Kant, Arendt, Ricœur’, in R. Kearney (ed.), Paul Ricœur. The Hermeneutics of Action (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 125-36 (p. 134). For this aspect of Ricœur's view of the past see in particular Soi-même comme un autre, ‘Le soi et la visée ethique’, pp. 199-236.

74. ‘Notice’ for Mithridate, in G.E.F., Œuvres, 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1865), p. 3.

75. William J. Cloonan, Racine's Theatre: The Politics of Love (University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1977), title of chapter on Mithridate.

76. Alain Niderst, ‘Mithridate, opéra?’, in Carlin (ed.), La Rochefoucauld, pp. 125-36.

77. Plutarch, Racine's main source for Monime, underlines this theme of exile among savage men: ‘She […] often bewailed her beauty, that had procured her a keeper, instead of a husband, and a watch of barbarians, instead of the home and attendance of a wife; and, removed far from Greece, she enjoyed the pleasure which she proposed to herself only in a dream, being in the meantime robbed of that which is real’ (Plutarch on Pompey, trans. by John Dryden in Plutarch. Lives, translated […] by several hands (London, 1716)).

78. Her situation, as representative of a subjugated people, is close to that of Esther. In both instances the dominated but, as the seventeenth-century scale of values would have it, the more civilized race and weaker sex has acquired unusual power over the (quasi) barbarian: ‘… le Persan superbe est aux pieds d'une Juive’ (Esther, Act I. 1, l. 28). Cf. Andromaque, whose status as supposedly less civilized Trojan vis-à-vis supposedly more civilized Greek creates a different but equally ironic configuration.

79. Since Suleiman the Magnificent's siege of Vienna (1529), this expression had become a topos, as Laura Alcoba has pointed out (‘La question du pouvoir au miroir Ottoman: Le Viaje de Turquía’, in de Courcelles (ed.), Littérature et exotisme, pp. 17-33 (p. 23)). To the longstanding threat posed in the Mediterranean by Turkish naval strength was henceforth added the menace of a major land force. The fear of encirclement is a fear of asphyxiation. Western European anxieties about this slow strangulation are projected in Bajazet's wish for expansion beyond the prison of the ‘sérail’, and in the whole emphasis on death by garotting.

80. As well as extolling the spiritual and material advantages to be gained from attacking Egypt, he explicitly attempts to persuade Louis that ‘une guerre européenne serait inconsidérée’ [a European war would be foolhardy], Projet d'expédition d'Égypte présenté à Louis XIV, in Œuvres de Leibniz publiées pour la première fois d'après les manuscrits originaux, ed. A. Foucher de Careil (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1864), p. 5.