124 ORIENTALISM that Oriental material, both sacred and profane, was then to be found in its oldest and most instructive forin."' Although a legitimist, in 1769 he was appointed the first teacher of Arabic at the newly created school of fangues orientales vivantes, of which he _ became director in 1824. In 1806 he was named professor at the Collége de France, although from 1805 on he was the resident Orientalist at the French Foreign Ministry. There his work (unpaid until 1811) at first was to translate the bulletins of the Grande Armée and Napoleon's Manifesto of 1806, in which it was hoped that “Muslim fanaticism” could be excited against Russian Orthodoxy. But for many years thereafter Sacy created interpreters for the French Oriental dragomanate, as well as future scholars. When the French occupied Algiers in 1830, it was Sacy who translated the proclamation to the Algerians; he was regularly consulted on all diplomatic matters relating to the Orient by the foreign minister, and on occasion by the minister of war. At the age of seventy-five he replaced Dacier as secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions, and also became curator of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliotheque royale. Throughout his long and distinguished career his name was - tightly associated with the restructuring and re-forming of education (particularly in Oriental studies) in post-Revolutionary France.’ With Cuvier, Sacy in 1832 was made a new peer of France. It was not only because he was the first president of the Société asiatique (founded in 1822) that Sacy’s name is associated with the beginning of modern Orientalism; it is because his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. In Sacy’s work, for the first time in Europe since the Council of Vienne, there was a self-conscious methodological principle at work as a coeval with scholarly discipline. No less important, Sacy always felt himself to be a man standing at the beginning of an important revisionist project. He was a self-aware inaugurator, and more to the point of our general thesis, he acted in his writing like a secularized ecclesiastic for whom his Orient and his students were doctrine and parishioners respectively. The Duc de Broglie, an admiring contemporary, said of Sacy’s work that it reconciled the manner of a scientist with that of a Biblical teacher, and that Sacy was the one man able to reconcile “the goals of Leibniz with the efforts of Bossuet.”!* Consequently everything he wrote was addressed

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 125 specifically to students (in the case of his first work, his Principes de grammaire générale of 1799, the student was his own son) and presented, not as a novelty, but as a revised extract of the best that had already been done, said, or written. These two characteristics—the didactic presentation to students and the avowed intention of repeating by revision and extract—are crucia]. Sacy’s writing always conveys the tone of a voice speaking; his prose is dotted with first-person pronouns, with personal qualifications, with rhetorical presence. Even at his most recondite——as in a scholarly note on third-century Sassanid numismatics-—one senses not so much a pen writing as a voice pronouncing. The keynote of his work is contained in the opening lines ef the dedication to his son of the Principes de grammaire générale: “C’est a toi, mon cher Fils, que ce petit ouvrage a été entrepris’—which is to say, I am writing (or speaking) to you because you need to know these things, and since they don’t exist in any serviceable form, I have done the work myself for you. Direct address: utility: effort: immediate and beneficent rationality. For Sacy believed that everything could be made clear and reasonable, no matter how difficult the task and how obscure the subject. Here are Bossuet’s sternness and Leibniz’s abstract humanism, as well as the tone of Rousseau, all together in the same style. The effect of Sacy’s tone is to fonn a circle sealing off him and his audience from the world at large, the way a teacher and his pupils together in a closed classroom also form a sealed space. Unlike the matter of physics, philosophy, or classical literature, the matter of Oriental studies is arcane; it is of import to people who already have an interest in the Orient but want to know the Orient better, in a more orderly way, and here the pedagogical discipline is more effective than it is attractive. The didactic speaker, therefore, displays his material to the disciples, whose role it is to teceive what is given to them in the form of carefully selected and arranged topics. Since the Orient is old and distant, the teacher’s display is a restoration, a re-vision of what has disappeared from the wider ken. And since also the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally exposed, only its most representative parts need be. Thus Sacy’s focus is the anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, in which a relatively small set of powerful examples delivers the Orient to the student. Such examples are powerful for two reasons: one, because they reflect Sacy’s powers as a Western authority deliberately taking