Artigo Revisado por pares

Tricolor and Crescent. France and the Islamic World * By WILLIAM E. WATSON (Westport, Praeger, 2003), 295 pp. Price HB 28.99. ISBN 0-275-974-70-7.

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jis/etl010

ISSN

1471-6917

Autores

A. Gunny,

Tópico(s)

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Resumo

The publication of this book shows that the importance of studies relating to France and the Islamic world has not been grossly over-stated, as some critics claim. France has had the longest contact with Islam and Muslims. To cover in one volume more than twelve hundred years of history, from the battle of Poitiers won by Charles Martel over Muslim armies in 732 to the departure of the French from Algeria in 1962, presents a formidable challenge. Tricolor and Crescent has only partially succeeded in meeting it. In France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (1988), C. Harrison achieved greater originality by setting geographical and chronological limits to his investigation and by including unpublished archival material from France and overseas. The historian William E. Watson does neither and it is therefore unsurprising that he achieves less. His book may still appeal to the general reader who is interested in learning about the changing relations of France with the Islamic world. If the facts are fairly well-known, it is good to have them clearly presented. The reader is also helped by the useful concluding remarks at the end of each of the eight chapters, which summarize the mass of detail provided and by fifteen appendices, called ‘documents’, which often reinforce the argument contained in the body of the text. Among these, six appear particularly significant. They are: (1) French nineteenth-century justifications of empire. Watson quotes an extract of 1883 from Jules Ferry (1832–97), the French Left leading champion of Empire. But such justifications are to be found some decades earlier, in Clot Bey's Aperçu général sur l’Egypte (1840) and, more vigorously, in de Tocqueville's Rapport sur l’Algérie (1847). Tocqueville contributed to the formulation of French colonial policy towards Algeria in this and other writings. (2) The Algeciras Convention of 1906 in which the ‘Great Powers’ determined the fate of Morocco. With Britain's backing France established a protectorate over Morocco in 1912. (Strangely enough, the source of this text is not given and Morocco is included among the ‘Great Powers’.) (3) The Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 by which the French and the British agreed to a secret partition of the Arab areas of the Ottoman empire, effected as the French and British mandates by the League of Nations in 1922. Much of Syria and Lebanon went to France, which had invested heavily in the latter in the second half of the nineteenth century. France departed half-heartedly from Syria and Lebanon in 1946. (5) The two most important ‘documents’ relate to the France–Morocco joint declaration of March 1956, which provides for the independence of the Kingdom of Morocco. And (6) the Evian accords of 1962 ending French rule in Algeria after more than 130 years. (Here Evian-les-Bains is misspelt as Evian-les-Baines, so too the phrase ‘les mythes fondateurs’ in the bibliography on p. 270; on p. 42 read 1796 for 1769 in connection with Silvestre de Sacy's post at the École Publique des Langues Orientales Vivantes.)

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