Diane Greco Josefowicz on French Egyptomania

All the books you have chosen are part of the research you did for your own book, The Zodiac of Paris. What made you interested in this part of France’s history?

The book began when Jed, my co-author, stumbled into a tiny bookshop near the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and found an antique and expensively bound collection of pamphlets which all had to do with this thing called the Dendera Zodiac. He headed to the Louvre, where he quickly found the zodiac installed in a chamber off the main Egyptian Hall, where it can still be seen today.

The Dendera Zodiac is an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with mysterious symbols of the stars and planets as well as hieroglyphics. It was first discovered by the French during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and was brought to Paris in 1821. The zodiac appeared to depict the night-time sky from a time predating Biblical Creation, and therefore cast doubt on religious truth.

So in our book we set out to tell the story of this incredible archaeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France. While we were unearthing this story we used newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence to help us find our way. The five books I have chosen were also extremely helpful and gave a real insight into this fascinating but little known episode in history.

Tell me about your first choice, Paris Between Empires by Philip Mansel.

Historians who like to write about 19th-century French history often focus on the same things: the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic era are at one end of the timeline and the establishment of the Second Republic at the other. People focus on these two periods for obvious reasons, because there is so much politically going on. But what gets missed is the Bourbon Restoration, in between. When we were doing preliminary research for our book, we found there weren’t too many books available to us to put that era in context, but this is one of them.

The Restoration, which begins in 1814, is marked by two interesting things. The first is the union of monarchy and the Catholic Church. Napoleon opened the door to this union by making various deals with the Vatican in the first years of the Consulate. When the Bourbons returned to power, this alliance between Church and state deepened considerably.

The second interesting aspect of this period is its approach to history. The reactionary tenor of the period can be seen in the government’s imposition of an official policy of what was called ‘oubli’, or forgetting, of the past Napoleonic era. All relics of the time, like books and uniforms, had to be burned. Press censorship was extremely oppressive and history was essentially rewritten to minimise the effects of the prior period’s very real and sweeping social and political changes. What was really useful for us was how much detail there was about the era in the book. You get the sense that anyone involved in politics had to be very slippery in order to survive.

Mansel is very good on the period’s political animals, like Joseph Fouché, whose résumé included stints as Napoleon’s minister of police as well as a powerful position under the Bourbons. These intrigants really were a breed apart, exceptionally self-seeking and opportunistic. Power moved from faction to faction, and if you were too closely linked to one faction it could work against you when that faction fell out of favour.

Your next book is The Orient of the Boulevards by Angela C Pao.

One of the most intriguing aspects of our research was tracking down the vaudeville play that was written about the zodiac, Le Zodiaque de Paris (from which we took the title of our book). The play was performed in Paris in September 1822, not long after the zodiac arrived. The play is a mirror of the public perceptions of the zodiac. It dramatised the range of responses to the zodiac’s arrival. And people did respond in various ways, from disbelief that something so bizarre could be anything more than a curio, to a belief that the zodiac was proof that religious authority was bogus. The play was performed at what was called a boulevard theatre.

At this time, as I mentioned, there was a lot of censorship and only a handful of theatres had official status and government support. At the state theatres, you could see the plays by the usual heroes of French drama ­– Racine, Molière, Corneille. And of course you could go to the opera. But if you wanted something different, edgier, more illicit, the boulevard theatres were the place to go. They were numerous, popular and affordable and gave audiences a lot more variety than the state theatres because they included forms like melodrama and vaudeville. They were also exciting. While the shows were heavily censored like everything else, the crowds were rowdier and the actors and playwrights did play to this aspect. Theatre riots were not uncommon.

Pao’s book looks at the evolving representations of the Orient on the stages of the popular boulevard theatres of Paris from the early 19th century until their destruction during Haussmann’s urban renewal. She shows just how popular things to do with the Orient were at the time. Le Zodiaque de Paris, the vaudeville play about the Dendera Zodiac, can be counted among these plays that put ideas about Egypt on the popular stage.

Before we move on to your next book, can you explain why the French were so taken with all things Egyptian?

There had been a low-grade fever of Egyptomania in Europe for centuries. Many intellectuals, wondering about the origins of Western civilisation, looked to Egypt as an alternative to ancient Greece and Rome.