218 ORIENT ALISM no longer confined to “scientific specutation.” It urged the citizenry not to “forget that our former preponderance was contested from the day we ceased to compete . . . in the conquests of civilization over barbarism.” Guillaume Depping, a leader of what has come to be called the geographical movement, asserted in 1881 that during the 1870 war “it was the schoolmaster who triumphed,” meaning that the real triumphs were those of Prussian scientific geography over French strategic sloppiness. The government’s Journal officiel sponsored issue after issue centered on the virtues (and profits) of geographical exploration and colonial adventure; a citizen could learn in one issue from de Lesseps of “the opportunities in Africa” and from Garnier of “the exploration of the Blue River.” Scientific geography soon gave way to “commercial geography,” as the connection between national pride in scientific and civilizational achievement and the fairly rudimentary profit motive was urged, to be channeled into support for colonial acquisition. In the words of one enthusiast, “The geographical societies are formed to break the fatal charm that holds us enchained to our shores.” In aid of this liberating quest all sorts of schemes were spun out, including the enlisting of Jules Verne—whose “unbelievable success,” as it was called, ostensibly displayed the scientific mind at a very high peak of ratiocination—to head “a round-the-world campaign of scientific exploration,” and a plan for creating a vast new sea just south of the North African coast, as well as a project for “binding” Algeria to Senegal by railroad—-“‘a ribbon of steel,” as the projectors called it.’* Much of the expansionist fervor in France during the last third of the nineteenth century was generated out of an explicit wish to compensate for the Prussian victory in 1870-1871 and, no less important, the desire to match British imperial achievements. So powerful was the latter desire, and out of so long a tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in the Orient did it derive, that France seemed literally haunted by Britain, anxious in all things connected with the Orient to catch up with and emulate the British. When in the late 1870s, the Société académique indo-chinoise reformulated its goals, it found it important to “bring Indochina into the domain of Orientalism.” Why? In order to turn Cochin China into a “French India.” The absence of substantial colonial holdings was blamed by military men for that combination of military and commercial weakness in the war with Prussia, to say nothing of long-standing and pronounced colonial inferiority compared with Britain. The

Orientalism Now 219 “power of expansion of the Western races,” argued a leading geographer, La Ronciére Le Noury, “its superior causes, its elements, its influences on human destinies, will be a beautiful study for future historians.” Yet only if the white races indulged their taste for voyaging—a mark of their intellectual supremacy—could colonial expansion occur.” From such theses as this came the commonly held view of the Orient as a geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded. The images of agricultural care for and those of frank sexual attention to the Orient proliferated accordingly. Here is a typical effusion by Gabriel Charnes, writing in 1880: On that day when we shall be no longer in the Orient, and when other great European powers will be there, all will be at an end for our commerce in the Mediterranean, for our future in Asia, for the traffic of our southern ports. One of the most fruitful sources of our national wealth will be dried up. (Emphasis added) Another thinker, Leroy-Beaulieu, elaborated this philosophy still further: A society colonizes, when itself having reached a high degree of maturity and of strength, it procreates, it protects, it places in good conditions of development, and it brings to virility a new complex and delicate phenomena of social physio. logy. This equation of self-reproduction with colonization led LeroyBeaulieu to the somewhat sinister idea that whatever is lively in a modern society is “magnified by this pouring out of its exuberant activity on the outside.” Therefore, he said, Colonization is the expansive force of a people; it is its power of reproduction; it is its enlargement and its multiplication through space; it is the subjection of the universe or a vast part of it to that people’s language, customs, ideas, and laws,?! The point here is that the space of weaker or underdeveloped regions like the Orient was viewed as something inviting French interest, penetration, insemination—in short, colonization. Geographical conceptions, literally and figuratively, did away with the discrete entities held in by borders and frontiers. No less than entrepreneurial visionaries like de Lesseps, whose plan was to liberate the Orient and the Occident from their geographical bonds,