The Ottoman Empire and Turkey facing the West
Inaugural Lecture delivered at the Collège de France on Thursday 21 December 2017
Texte intégral
1Dear Administrator,
Dear colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
2I am infinitely grateful for the great honour I have been granted of addressing such an audience in a theatre whose prestige is a reflection of the venerable institution that is welcoming me. I have no words to describe how privileged I feel to have been admitted into this institution, which is now almost five centuries old. I would be lying if I claimed that this was a child’s or a young man’s dream. Suffice to say that at a more tender age, about ten or fifteen years ago, when my stays in Paris overlapped with the late Gilles Veinstein’s lectures – when he held the Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History –, and I would come to listen to my friend and colleague in this very room, I would never have thought that I might one day hold a chair bearing the same name as his. It is with heartfelt emotion that I celebrate the memory of this great scholar, who was taken by illness far too early.
3While I may not have considered this position, others did so for me, and I would like to express my eternal gratitude to them for this. Henry Laurens, backed by colleagues in the fields of Ottoman and Turkish studies, encouragingly suggested that I dare what seemed improbable to me, not to say outright impossible. Distance did not make things any easier, but the way I was welcomed during the much-feared trial of the professorial visits constituted my most precious support in those difficult times. I wish to express once again my immense gratitude to many professors of the Collège, now my colleagues, for the kindness and patience they showed me throughout this daunting process. Finally, I am particularly indebted to the Administrator of the Collège de France, Alain Prochiantz, for having backed the recent innovation of five-year international chairs. This has enabled me to keep my position at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, where I have been teaching for almost thirty years. In these times of hardship, having to leave one of the best teaching and research institutions in Turkey would have been extremely difficult and painful.
4I am now holding a Chair bearing the same name as Gilles Veinstein’s – Turkish and Ottoman History –, even if it differs in many ways. Gilles Veinstein was a specialist of the sixteenth century, whereas I straddle the early-modern and modern periods, with an increasingly clear preference for the latter. This implies a very different context, if only because it corresponds to a time when Europe was becoming increasingly powerful, influential, and arrogant. A necessary consequence is that there is no way around the unavoidable “Eastern Question” underlying the long nineteenth century that I intend to study.
5To be sure, I will not be able to avoid the temptation of linking the past to the present and of examining those breaks and continuities that have so frequently been mentioned, between the recent past and the ups and downs of Turkish politics during the last decades. Although a self-citation may sound presumptuous, I hope you will forgive me if I do so for a good cause and from a purely critical standpoint. On 10 February 2014, Henry Laurens had invited me to give a talk in this very room on “The Ottoman Empire, Turkey and the issue of modernities”.1 At the end of my presentation, I had said: “The question of breaks and continuities between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey is an open debate, in which I do not wish to engage.” Three years later, I must humbly retract this statement, even though I still believe that there are lines which a historian should not cross when speaking about the present.
6Finally, let me mention one additional difference between Gilles Veinstein’s Chair and mine. He was French, and I am Turkish. Does it really matter? In his inaugural lecture on 3 December 1999, Gilles Veinstein had alluded, tongue-in-cheek, to the way he was connected to a long lineage of dragomans and Orientalist scholars who had preceded him at the Collège de France: Guillaume Postel, Denis Dominique Cardonne, Pierre Ruffin, Daniel Kieffer, Alix Desgranges, Mathurin-Joseph Cor, Abel Pavet de Courteille,2 to mention but a few. Might this mean that I represent a break in this lineage, a sudden shift in favour of the native, now deemed capable of speaking for and about himself? Jokes aside, I could at most claim to have contributed to the Collège de France’s “diversity”, and even then, I suppose that my contribution would have been more meaningful had I been a woman. I do believe, nevertheless, that the fact that I am keeping one foot in Turkey, both intellectually and institutionally, is likely to bring a different angle and a new perspective to this Chair. This aspect of the question is to me much more important than any issue of identity or nationality.
7This is all the more true since I have frequently brought up the urgent need to dissociate the discipline from any form of cultural reference likely to be tainted with national, and therefore nationalist, undertones. A few years ago in Turkey – here I go again with self-citation – I had proudly published an article under the title “Rescuing Ottoman History from the Turks”, where I criticised the de facto monopoly that Turkish historians exerted on a field they considered to be their exclusive turf.3 Obviously, my goal was not to shoot myself in the foot, but to remind to what extent Ottoman history was perceived in Turkey – and often elsewhere – as belonging to a national “heritage”, fed by varying doses of Turkish and Islamic identities that are supposed to define the deepest essence of the nation. In reality, the historians I targeted constituted only the tip of the iceberg, a kind of epiphenomenon, grafted on a de facto appropriation of history by Turkey itself, body and soul.
8Of course, this is not a phenomenon peculiar to Turkey. Both in its concept and by some of the reactions that it provoked, France in the World: A New Global History, imagined and edited by Patrick Boucheron,4 bears witness to a self-centred myopia haunting other historical narratives as well. I do nevertheless believe that the Turkish case largely exceeds the limits of the acceptable and the tolerable, due to an almost organic fusion between politics, ideology, and history, obviously to the detriment of the latter and against all notions of common sense. The pressure exerted on our unfortunate discipline by political actors, state institutions, public education, mass media, and popular culture is such that those historians who refuse to contribute to, to participate in, or at least to conform with, this frenzy are suffocated, isolated, and at the very least frustrated.
9One has to face the evidence: Turkey suffers from cliomania and cliopathy; it is at the same time obsessed and sick with history as suggested by these two neologisms for which I wish to claim both paternity and, if applicable, copyrights. Actually, I must add that this has always been so: cliomania has been behind Turkey’s constant desire to entrust history with the political and ideological mission of modelling the nation and its citizens, while cliopathy has been present not only in its myths and inventions, but especially in its fears, complexes, silences, taboos, denials, and negationism, thus revealing a very unhealthy, sometimes aggressive and generally childish relationship to any narrative that dares to challenge the prevailing doctrine. To make things even more complicated, this doctrine itself follows political and ideological trends, pulling in its wake textbooks and the mass media, always eager to please. There once was a time when the goal was to convince the Turkish people that their ancestors were Hittites, or Sumerians, or even Etruscans. Today, the Turco-Islamic past is the only reference, especially in its Ottoman version, and those who oppose it generally do so by claiming the Kemalist heritage, now cleansed of its improbable Hittite pedigree, but still deeply anchored in its own foundational myth from the 1930s, barely revised or corrected in the past decades.
10To get a sense of the extent of this phenomenon, one needs only to observe, for example, the way in which many streets, squares, buildings, institutions, and universities are named after dates, all of which are so important that the year is not even mentioned. Then again, I dare any non-Turk to tell me what the difference may be between the universities of 19 May in Samsun and of 29 May in Istanbul. Obviously, this is not a matter of ten days, but an ideological abyss: 19 May 1919, a fundamental date of Kemalist hagiography, marks the beginning of the Turkish Reconquista, when Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, landed in Samsun; 29 May 1453, a fetish date for partisans of the AKP’s “New Turkey”, celebrates and glorifies the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans. Do I have to specify that the former university was established in 1975 and the latter in 2010, thus illustrating a clear shift in the country’s ideological centre of gravity within just a few decades? I would also add to this the new habit developed by Turkish politicians of projecting anniversaries into the future. Thus, the party presently in power is happy to list a number of due dates that “rhyme” with the grand dates of so-called Turkish history: 2023 for the centennial of the Republic, 2053 for the sixth centennial of the conquest of Constantinople, and 2071 for the millennium of the battle of Manzikert, which opened the gates of Anatolia to the Turks.
11The result is literally a “cliorrhea” – and this shall be my last neologism, as I have decided to spare you “cliocide” – which is invading political and public space, and drowning history, real history, if it ever existed, in a simplistic and populist rhetoric. This is what makes it so powerful, entrancing and intoxicating: like a litany repeated by the press, the media, fiction, and the arts, it has literally conquered the field, leaving little latitude to those historians who still defend a scholarly and critical approach. That is one of the main reasons why this Chair is of particular importance to me. As a prestigious platform federating research and teaching, backed by a powerful network, the Collège de France can and must become a centre of scholarship and scientific dissemination, in this field as in others. For this purpose, it already has a team based around the library of Arabic, Turkish, and Islamic studies, as well as many links with a network of researchers in the major research and education institutions in France in general, and in Paris in particular. To me, this is a major advantage, which makes me hope that this Chair will help to defend, or even to re-conquer, a discipline and a field of scholarship that I feel are threatened by extremely harmful ideological trends and practices.
12Let us return to the crux of the matter, namely this new Chair’s theme: “The Ottoman Empire and Turkey facing the West”. I will perhaps be blamed for using the term “facing”, possibly suggesting a form of antagonism inspired by the Huntingtonian model or by the fact that Turkey today seems to be drifting every day a little bit further away from the West.5 Of course, I would have preferred to speak about “the Ottoman Empire and the West”, or even, as a friend and colleague once proposed to a prestigious university press for the title of his book, “The Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe” – which, predictably, was rejected outright.6 Aside from the fact that I believe that too much wishful thinking may harm a critical perception of history, I nevertheless argue that “facing” also relates to many other forms of interaction beyond the simple opposition one would be tempted to identify it with. “Facing” also works for admiration, curiosity, and emulation; this expression may even sometimes refer to a more passive form of spectacle, or, on the contrary, to a challenge to be faced. At any rate, it seems rather clear that the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the West throughout the long nineteenth century were complex, ambiguous, and variable, and that no single term can suffice to describe them.
13For the purpose of this short presentation of the Chair and its programme, I will limit myself to a discussion structured around three periods that I consider to be decisive in understanding the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the West. First, a period of early influences, from the eighteenth century to the 1830s, was characterised by hesitations and a superficial attitude on both sides. This was followed by a much more determined commitment, especially after the proclamation of the 1839 Edict of Gülhane, also known as the Tanzimat edict, and culminating with the 1856 Edict of Reforms (Islahat Fermanı) in the wake of the Crimean War. Finally, a third and last phase, which started in the early 1870s, marked the end of the honeymoon, as a growing rift settled in between Abdülhamid II’s autocracy and a Europe with liberal claims. This was a long century in three movements, the importance of which goes well beyond the simple question of relations between the Empire and the West. One should rather see this period as laying the foundations of a more specifically Turkish history, some aspects of which seem to be particularly meaningful today.
First contacts
14The Ottomans have of course always been confronted with some version of the West, albeit a constantly changing one. But this exposure gained significance and intensity from the eighteenth century on, at least if one is to believe a rather conventional, but still potent, historiographical tradition. From the early instances of Baroque influences in architecture to the introduction of the printing press, and from the first diplomatic relations to the spread of European consumption goods, a number of clues are often taken as the first signs of a process of Westernisation that would eventually come to prevail in the nineteenth century. However, this significantly teleological reading stands in the way of a better understanding of the internal dynamics of a state and society undergoing change, with many features suggesting the existence of a modernity independent of any form of Western influence. If, in 1721, the ambassador Mehmed Efendi, dazzled by the gardens and waterworks of Marly, claimed that he “understood the very subtle meaning of the hadith stating that the world is a prison for the believer and paradise for the infidel”,7 should we really read this as an admission of inferiority and a thirst for modernity inspired by France’s cultural brilliance, rather than simply as a reminder of the futility of this ephemeral world, exacerbated by the sight of the extravagances of the Regency? Would it not be wiser to compare the impact of artistic and architectural inspirations borrowed from the West to some sort of Ottoman equivalent of the turqueries so popular in Europe during the same period, rather than associating them with a frantic race towards an alla franca modernity?
Figure 1

The Turkish Ambassador in ceremonial dress, with his son, Paris, Charpentier, 1742. Print, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Hennin, 8392. Mehmed Said Efendi, Ottoman extraordinary envoy to Paris in 1741, was the son of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, Ottoman ambassador to the same capital in 1721.
15We will know better once we have systematically exploited the written sources of the period; until then, we have enough clues suggesting that Ottoman society was already undergoing profound changes in the eighteenth century, without having been exposed to the transformative influence of the West, still largely absent from the concerns of the majority of the population. Of course, the situation was somewhat different when it came to the ruling elite and to prominent non-Muslims, particularly Greeks and Armenians. There, certain contacts and exchanges took place, curiosity arose on both sides, forms were copied, texts circulated, and translations were made. However, there were no significant developments beyond very superficial impressions, some vague discourses, antecedents of which could easily be found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If, in a memorandum penned in the spring of 1798 on the “balance of powers” (Muvazene-i Politikaya Dair), the Reisülküttab (Secretary of State) Âtıf Efendi condemned “the infidels known and celebrated under the names of Rousseau and Voltaire”,8 this should not lead us to the conclusion that he, or anybody else from the ranks of the bureaucracy, had read these authors. Most likely, he was just repeating what he had been fed by some diplomat or dragoman of the powers allied against France and its Revolution.
16Assuming that good old Âtıf Efendi had not actually been touched by the Enlightenment, the title of his report was nonetheless telling of a growing concern for the precarious position of the Empire in the face of recent political and diplomatic changes in Europe. Only a few months later, the French occupation of Egypt confirmed the government’s worst fears. The Ottomans recovered with great difficulty from this shock, and only at the price of agreeing to play a secondary and subordinate role on the European scene. Losing a few fortresses to the Austrians, or even the Crimea to the Russians was painful, but still predictable. The sight of one of the Empire’s richest provinces falling into the hands of a French expedition was an entirely different and highly demoralising matter. It is therefore understandable that Selim III, flabbergasted by the news that reached him almost twenty days after the event, chose to stall the matter, to the surprise of the hawks of the Imperial Divan: “The infidels have been tricking us for six years; maybe we, too, should trick them for six months, and mind our own business”.9 What an illusion! Far from tricking the French, the Ottomans had to delegate to the British the task of reconquering the jewel of the crown.
17The wind had turned, and the Ottomans were conscious of it. With a flexibility they had learnt to master, they adapted to Western diplomacy, navigating from one alliance to another with great dexterity. Only a few years after the Egyptian nightmare, when the former invader, now emperor, sent him his portrait, the same Sultan Selim, utterly pleased with this sign of friendship, ingenuously wrote to his Grand Vizier: “You would not know, but it is a well-established custom in Europe for friends to exchange portraits”.10 Such naivety is rather typical of this early phase of political and cultural probing. While Selim was showing off to his vizier, his ambassador in Paris, Halet Efendi, wrote back to his friends at the court to inform them on certain issues of morality, which, apparently, had been troubling them for some time: “All the Armenians and Greeks in the world keep saying that all Muslims are pederasts, that this is shameful, and that Got forbid, such a thing would never occur in Europe; we heard this so often that we ended up believing it.”11 Luckily, a visit to the Palais Royal had been enough to reassure him. There he had witnessed both female and male prostitution, which made him realise that the “vice” was widespread, there too, and practised openly. He could then end his letter with a triumphal note: “God be praised, there are not as many sodomites and pederasts in the lands of Islam”.12 Beyond the timid emergence of a new heteronormativity, the letter was highly significant, almost prophetic. It revealed a strange tension between submission and hatred, a characteristic feature of the Empire’s and the Republic’s future relations with the West, as well as the systematic recourse to the “pot and kettle” rhetoric to ward off any form of critique or accusation. More worrying were the embryonic signs revealed in the letter of the association of non-Muslims with the notion of a fifth column.
The age of reforms
18The Greek rebellion of the 1820s, followed by the Egyptian crisis of the 1830s, dealt a decisive blow to the illusion that the structures of the Empire could be maintained with just a few adjustments and a mere reorientation of its policies on the international scene. In the Greek case, the way in which an uprising had taken on the proportions of a war of independence and, most of all, the ability of the European powers and their public opinions to seal the fate of the Empire and its territories, forced the Ottoman elites to realise their weakness in the face of phenomena of a radically novel nature. Likewise, the sudden rise of Egypt, to the point of threatening the Empire’s very existence, revealed the fragility of the imperial construct faced with the threat of a vassal province, whose modernisation and integration with Europe seemed to give it the means of replacing its suzerain power in the political reconfiguration of the region. Although this danger was warded off – thanks to Franco-British intervention – and Egypt was eventually doomed to a quasi-colonial destiny, the race for westernisation, which Cairo and Istanbul embarked upon throughout the following decades, is a subject worth of in-depth study.
19This series of shocks explains that by the end of the 1830s the Ottomans were ready to engage in a transformative programme of a much more radical and invasive nature that the half-measures they had been content with until then. Replacing the infamous janissaries (Fig. 2) with an army with European uniforms and equipment (replacing is an understatement, considering the violence of the event);13 setting up the first state institutions inspired by Western models; using “modern” symbols and images, starting with the sultan’s portrait;14 sending the first Muslim students to Europe… These were all momentous changes and innovations of consequence, although they never really challenged the essence of the system. It was only with the famous Edict of Gülhane, proclaimed on 3 November 1839 in the presence of the major state elites, along with the diplomatic corps and the Prince of Joinville, that a new era started symbolically, that of the Tanzimat, or reorganisation, devoted to an overhaul of the state and its structures along Western standards.
Figure 2

“Janissaries (Yeni-tcheri)”. Illustration from Joseph-Marie Jouannin, Turquie, Paris, Firmin Didot frères, 1853, pl. 86. Annihilated during the “auspicious event” of 1826, condemned to a form of damnatio memoriae, their image was nevertheless resurrected through Orientalism and tourism in the 1850s.
Figure 3

Sultan Mahmud II in traditional (left) and modern (right) dress. Paintings by Henri Guillaume Schlesinger, around 1837. Illustrations from Tanzimat, Istanbul, Maarif, 1940, pp. 16-17. The Sultan himself serves as a model to illustrate the Westernisation of the Empire.
20The Edict of Gülhane is still the subject of discussion as to its origins and inspiration. While it is true that it remained very much contained within an Ottoman logic and rhetoric, thus suggesting an internal process, it is also undeniable that British influence was behind this crucial step towards a redefinition of the Empire.15 If the commercial treaty signed the preceding year with Britain was the price to pay for protection against the Egyptian threat, the edict claimed to lay the foundations of a state capable of ensuring the security and stability needed for British and European interests in the region to flourish.
21However opportunistic the reasons behind its proclamation may have been, the so-called Tanzimat decree still stands as a major turning point in the process of Ottoman modernisation. Combining both desperation and intent, it led to a recasting of state structures from the top down, with consequences which, one way or the other, ended up affecting even the poorest strata of a complex and plural society, as well as the most remote and isolated areas of the vast imperial domains. The edict itself brought a radical innovation by establishing dialogue between the sovereign and his subjects, thus inciting some observers to liken this text to a constitution. Of course, this was by no means the case, yet even though the document referred primarily to issues of state reorganisation – fiscal base, military conscription, and judicial practices – in ways that stressed continuity rather than change, its rhetoric was entirely novel in its justification of this reorganisation, with almost physiocratic arguments expressed in unprecedented terms: freedom (hürriyet), nation (millet), homeland (vatan), patriotism or love of the homeland (vatan muhabbeti), and so forth. The most astonishing aspect of the text was the promise made to guarantee the property, honour, and life of all subjects, whether they be “Muslims or of any other nation”. This was a timid step towards the recognition of a form of equality between all subjects, as suggested by the use, only in its French version, of the term “citizen”.16
Figure 4

Printed text of the Imperial Decree (hatt-ı hümayun or hatt-ı şerif) promulgated and read on 3 November 1839, known as the Tanzimat decree (reorganisation). Archives of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Paris, Memoranda and Documents, Turkey, vol. 45.
Figure 5

Translation of the hatti schérif read at the meeting held in Gulhané on 3 November 1839. Archives of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Paris, Political Correspondence, Turkey, vol. 279.
22Most of this was wishful thinking; it would have taken more to challenge and undermine the nizam-ı âlem, the world order that regulated an old-fashioned plural society, the stability of which rested largely on equitable inequality. However, there is no denying that the elite benefited greatly from these measures, turning itself into a proper ruling class and shielding itself from the political dangers and risks that its predecessors had been exposed to, especially during the previous autocratic rule of Mahmud II.
23Nevertheless, the reorganisation programme initiated by this new generation of statesmen was not driven solely by a sort of survival instinct. Quite the contrary, it seems to me that most of the elite were genuinely moved by a sincere enthusiasm for the idea of engaging in a project of modernity inspired by norms and technologies witnessed in the West. Obviously, this allegiance was not expressed in terms of modernity – the word was barely emerging in Europe – but by reference to an Arabic neologism, the use of which would become increasingly common in the second half of the century: medeniyet, a rather literal translation of civilisation. This was the new magic word that would be used to describe and legitimise many institutional and cultural innovations inspired by the European model. The way it was used often betrayed a form of candour and naiveté bordering on the admission of barbarism. The official documentation of the 1840s and 1850s, or even later, abounds in arguments justifying the need for some novelty or another on the grounds of their existence “in civilised countries” or “among the civilised nations” (Fig. 6).
Figure 6
![A large-bodied gilt medallion commemorating the Tanzimat; the obverse displays a busy composition of military objects in its center, captioned “Régénération de l’Empire d’Osman par Abdul-Medjid” [Regeneration of the Empire of Osman by Abdülmecid] surrounded by a series of cartouches enumerating the principles of the Tanzimat; on the reverse, an Orientalist depiction of a mosque-fortress battered by crashing waves, under the inscription “L'Empire subsistera Dieu le veut” [The Empire shall prevail, it is God’s will].](/cdf/file/21504/tei/fig_6.jpg/download)
Tanzimat Memorial Medal, 1850. Author’s collection. The mottoes and symbols of the medal reflect all the rhetoric of the Tanzimat, from the regeneration of the Empire to the image of a mosque-fortress resisting the fury of the waves.
24This notion of civilisation and its systematic – I would even say synonymic – application to the West is one of the greatest intrinsic weaknesses of the transformation process promoted by the nineteenth-century elite. It put them at the mercy of a dependent, almost defeatist vision of the Western world, de facto eliminating any vision of modernity beyond the norms and model that it proposed. Given this blindness, or rather this strong cultural bias, it should not come as a surprise that the Ottomans ended up appropriating the basic principles of Orientalism, either by adopting a form of self-deprecation, or by projecting this negative vision upon sections of the population deemed to be Oriental – or at least more Oriental than themselves. Since the Tanzimat elite recognised Westernisation as the only possible remedy for the supposed ills of an Eastern nature, they could but submit to the very logic of Orientalism and its vision of an unchanging East, unable to advance without a push from the West. This impasse explains why Ottoman modernisation and, even more so, its later Kemalist version, took the form of essentially Orientalist projects.17
25In more concrete terms, this almost unconditional submission to a Western notion of modernity resulted in a clear tendency to view the process itself as a sort of checklist of formal conditions to be fulfilled, with little concern for their content or for the way in which they would be implemented. The development of archaeology and museography in the Empire, an inexhaustible subject of much of my current research, provides me with one of the most obvious examples.18 Thus, the “national” account of the discipline from the creation of an antiquities museum in 1846 (Fig. 7) until its maturation under the aegis of its famous director, Osman Hamdi Bey, would take a completely different turn if it were recognised that the museum owed its existence to a temporary enthusiasm that lasted barely two years, that it then sank into virtual abandonment for over three decades, that we do not know the origin and date of acquisition of most of the objects entered into the collections during this period, and that, even during its most prosperous days, it had a very small number of visitors, almost all foreigners.19 This is particularly true of most of the cultural and intellectual projects of the time: an ephemeral university, a stillborn imperial library, a very precarious academy of sciences, a museum soon left in disrepair.
Figure 7

Λ. Γαλανάκης (L. Galanakis), Ναός της Αγίας Ειρήνης - Οπλοθήκη και Μουσείον (Sainte-Irène church - Arsenal and museum), in Αλέξανδρος Γ Πασπάτης (Alexandros G. Paspatis), Βυζαντιναί Μελέται: Τοπογραφικαί και και Ιστορικαί μετά πλείστων εικόνων [Byzantine topographic and historical studies with many images], Constantinople, Antonis Coromilla, 1877, pp. 336-337. Sakkoulidis Library, Sismanogleion Megaron, Consulate General of Greece in Istanbul.
26Despite this superficiality, the achievements of the Tanzimat were still spectacular in many respects. Systematically and conscientiously, its statesmen engaged with the task of setting up an administration and a codification likely to establish the rule of law, without ever relinquishing an extremely conservative governance model. This was a major challenge, which they largely met, despite huge difficulties inherent to the nature of the project. Modernising the Empire, recasting it according to a foreign model whose bases were not yet solidly anchored, was in many ways highly risky. The new rules of the game were bound to endanger traditional balances by causing disruptions in a society that was highly compartmentalised and hierarchised according to age-old rules and customs.
27This is how one should understand the context of the famous Reform Edict of 1856, often described as completing and improving that of 1839, by finally explicitly recognising the equality of all subjects, regardless of their creed. In a society based on the recognition of Muslim primacy, this was a shock, which those traditionally deemed superior could hardly accept without a reaction. The story is well known of the imam in an Anatolian village, who, asked by his parishioners to explain the deeper meaning of this innovation, said, “from now on, we shall no longer call the ghiaours, ghiaours”, or, to better render the meaning of the quote, “we are no longer allowed to call the damned infidels, damned infidels”.20 The fact that Articles 8 and 9 of the decree specifically prohibited the use of “any expression or name tending to make one class of subjects inferior to the other, because of religion, language or race” proves that there was truth in the imam’s witticism.21 However, what made this document particularly problematic was the very openly sectarian way in which the issue of equality of subjects was addressed almost exclusively in the context of the emancipation of non-Muslims.
28There is no mystery: if the equality of non-Muslims was so prominent in the edict, it was mostly because it had been dictated and imposed by the “Great Powers” in the wake of the Crimean War. According to Europe, the Ottoman Empire needed to correct its major defect, which made it incompatible with the logic of the Western world. The fact that the Empire and its ruling elite were Muslim constituted an aberration in a world where non-white, non-European, and non-Christian peoples were under Western domination. Short of correcting this error by colonising the Empire altogether, the best solution was to force it to grant equal status to non-Muslims, in the hope and expectation that the latter would end up acquiring some power, thus initiating a great move in the direction of a form of “de-barbarisation” of the Orient.
29The Empire played along with astonishing sincerity. Although the great majority of the Muslim population refused or simply pretended to recognise this new equality, the State committed itself to this goal with great resolve. Public offices and political positions opened up to non-Muslims with a form of enthusiasm that ended up rubbing off on the rest of the population and creating fertile grounds for the invention of an Ottoman nation. Labelling this as the “springtime” of the Ottoman peoples may be an exaggeration, but it is true that the two decades following the 1856 Edict were a fascinating period, a rollercoaster punctuated by insurrections, secret societies, speculative booms, crashing stocks, cultural exchanges, scientific advances, artistic quests, liberal movements, reactionary uprisings, and so on. Many Muslims had to come to terms with a growing tension between the requirements of Western modernity and local values, often wrongly labelled as traditional, while many non-Muslims were able to gain, or regain, confidence in an Ottoman future.
30However, the process was destined to fail, if only because of the disproportionate nature of the task, the limited means at the state’s disposal, and the poor management of available resources. European politics were also heavily responsible, considering that the great and the lesser powers’ ultimate goal was to ensure the viability of their interest and investments, with little, if any, concern for the success of reforms. Many did not even believe in the process, convinced as they were that the Empire was doomed and that, in any case, the benefits of civilisation were largely incompatible with Oriental character and nature. When, in 1867, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuad Pasha, told French ambassador Nicolas Bourée that Christian and Muslim Ottomans would henceforth enjoy a common homeland, Bourée sarcastically retorted that since the term homeland did not exist in Turkish, he thought it impossible that such a notion would ever take root in the Empire.22
The end of the honeymoon
31We have now come to the third and last part of my presentation, covering the “darkest” period of the long nineteenth century, namely the autocratic regime established after 1880 by Sultan Abdülhamid II, which lasted until the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The first signs of the failure of the Tanzimat can probably be traced back to the early 1870s, resulting from the combined impact of an economic and financial crisis and of a political shift caused by the demise of the last two great names of the movement, Âli and Fuad pashas. The year 1876 was however the trigger. A terrible year, by any count; an unprecedented annus horribilis that I will qualify as “long” – following the example of historians who take the liberty of speaking of “long” centuries. My year of 1876 starts in the fall of 1875 and ends in the spring of 1877.
32The chronology of these eighteen months borders on a nightmare: financial bankruptcy, demonstrations in Istanbul, an uprising in Bulgaria, a coup led by Midhat Pasha, Sultan Abdülaziz’s dethronement, his dubious suicide, war with Montenegro and Serbia, the bloody repression of the Bulgarian revolt, the new Sultan Murad V’s nervous breakdown, the spread of news from Bulgaria, the condemnation of the “unspeakable Turk” by Thomas Carlyle23 and William Gladstone24, Murad’s replacement by his brother Abdülhamid, European pressure for the pacification of the Balkans, the promulgation of a botched constitution (Fig. 9), war declared on Russia, and Midhat’s fall and exile.
Figure 8

“Hic Rhodus, hic salta” [Here is Rhodes, jump here!], a caricature by Václav Hradecký, published in L’Assiette au beurre. Abdul-Hamid II ou trente ans d’assassinats, no. 135, 31 October 1903. Author’s collection. A Balkan soldier kicks a “Turk” out of Europe, in the direction of Asia.
Figure 9

The Constitution of the Ottoman Empire proclaimed at the Sublime Porte, 23 December 1876 [“La Constitution de l’Empire ottoman proclamée à la Sublime Porte, le 23 décembre 1876”], Le Monde illustré, 13 January 1877. Author’s collection. The picture was based on a sketch by J[ulien] Viaud, better known by his pen name, Pierre Loti.
33There is no need to go into the details of this series of catastrophes that ultimately led, one year later, in 1878, to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Russian army. Suffice it to say that Sultan Abdülhamid came out of this ordeal as the only winner. Taking advantage of the chaos caused by defeat and the ruling elite’s distress, he suspended the constitution and dissolved Parliament, thus preparing the ground for his personal rule. Hamidian autocracy was therefore to rely on a process running counter to the main trends of the preceding era of the Tanzimat. From a state structured on a bureaucracy headed by the Grand Vizierate, a gradual shift displaced the centre of gravity of power towards the imperial palace and, more specifically, the Sultan himself. Meanwhile, the major institutions in the system – ministries, councils – were neutralised, marginalised, or simply abolished, with the exception of the army and police forces. The void thus created was filled by the creation of personal and informal networks, based on the limited delegation of power by the Sultan himself. A wide network of spies and informants reinforced the feeling of insecurity and precariousness, which guaranteed the system’s survival.
34On 23 August 1876, barely a week before Sultan Abdülhamid’s accession to the throne, in a letter to Safvet Pasha, Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Ottoman ambassador in Berlin, Edhem Pasha, criticised their colleague Midhat Pasha’s constitutionalist ambitions, in terms that I perhaps do not need to translate: “Bize konstitüsyon değil, enstitüsyon lazım”. I will translate it anyway, in case your Turkish is a bit rusty: “What we need is not a constitution, but institutions”.25 This was a desperate appeal by a conservative statesman who saw a danger in the liberal policy followed by Midhat, mostly to strengthen his own power. Edhem Pasha should not have worried; by botching his constitution and by sacrificing it to political expediency, Midhat Pasha had undermined the foundations of his own project. Abdülhamid first got rid of the pasha and then of the constitution, thus ending the Empire’s first and very short-lived parliamentary experiment. Viewed from this perspective, Edhem Pasha’s comment takes a darkly prophetic turn, considering that, once freed from the shackles of the constitution, the new sultan’s greatest achievement was his ability to get rid of the institutions created during the Tanzimat. Abdülhamid’s autocracy depended essentially on the dismantling of the state structures and of the rule of law, which had been painstakingly established during the preceding decades.
35His task was of course facilitated by the superficiality and therefore the fragility of these institutions’ foundations. Additionally, he could also rely on the feeling of desperation that had overcome the population, especially Muslims, in the wake of the preceding ten years’ events: economic and financial crisis, rapidly eroding reforms, a stinging defeat at the hands of the Russian army, and so on. Although the latter trauma took place under the new sultan’s reign, it secured him the means to feed and legitimise his policy. The loss of Balkan territories, the plight of the displaced Muslim populations who had to take refuge in Anatolia, the feeling of having been abandoned by the West that was increasingly hostile since the Bulgarian crisis: all of this exacerbated a rising sense of frustration which, combined with vindictive feelings, needed only to be channelled to become a powerful ideological instrument.
36It was this strong feeling of exasperation bordering on despair that Abdülhamid skilfully managed to exploit to shift the base of his regime’s legitimacy from the rule of law to a sort of state of emergency. Ensuring the survival of the state had already been one of the major concerns of the bureaucratic elites, based on the ideal of an Empire inspired and supported by the West, and fed by the communion of its constitutive nations. The Hamidian state now needed to ensure its own survival despite Europe, by relying on its Muslim population, perceived and presented as the only loyal and legitimate base of an empire forced to withdraw and to entrench itself in an otherness that it now fully embraced.
37Abdülhamid had the genius of knowing how to combine this withdrawal with all the available means of modernity and with a powerful ideological construct that fed on that same modernity.26 Comparing the incomparable, his was a sort of autocratic and repressive version of the French Third Republic, which gave him substantial room to manoeuvre and ensured the maintenance of his system for three decades, that is, for practically as long as the Tanzimat before him. He thus succeeded in significantly extending the lifespan of an Empire which, only a few years earlier, was believed to be destined to disappear. Despite Western public opinion increasingly pitted against him, the Great Powers let Abdülhamid be, since he was careful not to pose any threat to their interests, and since the prospect of the chaos his fall would precipitate seemed much more terrifying than the violence underpinning the maintenance of his regime.
Conclusion
38The three phases that I have described with respect to the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West and with modernity throughout the long nineteenth century have each left their mark on the decades and the regimes that succeeded Abdülhamid’s reign during the twentieth century. Sultan Selim’s naivety and candour, his urge to emulate the West without necessarily fully understanding it, and his desire to obtain its approval, can be witnessed throughout the centuries following these first sentimental contacts, explaining that still today, relations with Europe and the West remain deeply enmeshed in an emotional context, resulting in somewhat disconcerting mood swings. Similarly, Halet Efendi’s more or less conscious tug-of-war, between the tendency to care about his image in the West and finding ways to reject any form of blame at all costs, were to remain an essential element in managing an ambiguous relationship between feelings of submission and rebellion in the face of the other’s critical gaze.
39The legalist and bureaucratic heritage of the Tanzimat, especially in its conservative and elitist understanding of the role attributed to the state in the transformation of political and social order, was unquestionably to remain one of the leitmotivs of Turkish political culture, especially during the Republican era. This observation should, however, be taken with a proviso, that of taking into account one of the intrinsic weaknesses of the Tanzimat heritage with respect to one of its major achievements, that of the equality of citizens. We have already seen the extent to which this innovation was hard to accept in a traditional context that promoted the notion of equity, of crucial importance for the legitimisation of an unequal and hierarchised social order. The chances that this novel notion of equality would take root in social praxis were seriously reduced by the fact that it had been introduced, following Western pressure, in an explicitly sectarian framework, only to claim and obtain the emancipation of non-Muslim subjects. This situation greatly decreased the Muslim population’s enthusiasm for a political and legal concept that was perceived as being designed essentially to limit their own prerogatives, to the advantage of the “infidels”.
40This explains that during the – admittedly, rather short lived – euphoria that followed the 1908 revolution, the Young Turks appropriated the French revolutionary motto of “Freedom, Equality, Fraternity” (Liberté, égalité, fraternité) but felt the need to add a fourth virtue, that of “justice,” translated from the Ottoman term adalet, corresponding to the notion of equity so crucial to Ottoman political thought. It also explains that once the great majority of non-Muslims were eliminated, the concept of equality inherited from the Tanzimat was relegated by the Republic to a cosmetic form of secularism whose objective, far from recognising the equal status of non-Muslim citizens, consisted rather in diverting and neutralising the political and ideological power of Islam, considered as a threatening rival to Kemalist ideology.
Figure 10

“Hürriyet ve İstibdad – La Liberté et le Despotisme” [Freedom and Despotism], cover of Kalem (The Pen), no 10, 23 October 1324/1908. Author’s collection. Caricature celebrating the end of Abdülhamid II’s autocratic rule, after the Young Turk revolution of 1908.
41These fears were not unjustified, and if Islam remained a powerful social and ideological cement, this was largely because Abdülhamid’s regime had succeeded where the Tanzimat had failed. As I have just suggested, Abdülhamid’s legacy is certainly not the only one to have impacted Turkey in the twentieth century, but it seems to have been the most resilient, with a notable propensity to resurface, especially in times of crisis. He was behind the emergence of forms of violence that had more to do with the nation state than with the empire, as suggested by the proto-genocidal nature of the massacres committed against the Armenian population of Eastern Anatolia in the 1890s. We also owe him the sacralisation of the state, as an indispensable prerequisite of a vision justifying that its survival should prevail over individual rights and liberties. Likewise, it is during his reign that, by modernising and by appropriating a rhetoric consistent with this modernity, Islam became a powerful ideological catalyst, often capable of feeding Turkish nationalism, but at times likely to undermine it, if it was perceived to sway too much in a secular direction. Last, but certainly not least, it was under Abdülhamid that the state lost much of the institutional and judicial autonomy that the Tanzimat elites had painstakingly tried to establish. This opened the way to the risk of the state falling into the hands of individuals or groups, whenever they, like Abdülhamid before them, wielded sufficient power to besiege and eventually conquer a structure whose sacredness is commensurate with its malleability.
42This is how I would like to conclude this brief synopsis of a fascinating era, filled with surprises and, most of all, of crucial importance in understanding the destiny of an entire region, up to the present day. That, however, is not the prime objective of this Chair. Loyal to a tradition based on a critical treatment of history, I believe that one should try to understand before claiming to be able to explain, and that the most gratifying exercise is not to answer questions, but rather to ask proper ones. The story of this very long Ottoman nineteenth century has often been told with many shortcuts, preconceived ideas, and speculative claims. I am conscious that I have myself contributed to it today. It is about time we pause to look back and study, examine, and analyse its rich documentary evidence, too often taken for granted, and which I hope may reveal, if only partially, its fascinatingly complex narrative.
Notes de bas de page
1Edhem Eldem, “L’Empire ottoman, la Turquie et la question des modernités”, lecture at the Collège de France, 10 February 2014: http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/henry-laurens/guestlecturer-2014-02-10-17h00.htm.
2Gilles Veinstein, Histoire turque et ottomane. Leçon inaugurale faite le vendredi 3 décembre 1999, Paris, Collège de France, 2000.
3Edhem Eldem, “Osmanlı Tarihini Türklerden Kurtarmak” [Rescuing Ottoman History from the Turks], Cogito, no. 73, Spring 2013, pp. 260-282. For a recent English version, see, Edhem Eldem, “Rescuing Ottoman History from the Turks”, Turkish Historical Review, no. 13, 2022, pp. 8-27, https://doi.org/10.1163/18775462-bja10029.
4Patrick Boucheron (ed.), Histoire mondiale de la France, Paris, Seuil, 2017. English translation: Patrick Boucheron (ed.), France in the World: A New Global History, translated by Stephane Gerson, New York, Other Press, 2019.
5Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York/London, Free Press, 2002.
6My friend and colleague Daniel Goffman, whose work was ultimately published as The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
7 الدنيا سجن المؤمن وجنة الكافر “Relation de l’Ambassade de Mehemet Effendi, à la Cour de l’Empereur de France, écrite & présentée au pied du Trone du très-Puissant Empereur des Ottomans, Sultan Achmet, par son Esclave”, Mercure de France. Dédié au Roi, décembre 1743, vol. II, Paris, Guillaume Cavelier, 1743, p. 2844; Relation de l’ambassade de Mohammed Effendi (texte turk) à l’usage des élèves de l’École royale et spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, Paris, Firmin Didot frères, 1841, p. 51.
8“[…] Volter ve Ruso demekle maruf ve meşhur olan zındıklar […]” Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Tarih-i Cevdet [Cevdet’s History], vol. VI, Istanbul, Matbaa-i Osmaniye, 1309/1892, pp. 394-395.
9“Altı senedir kâfirler bizi iğfal eyledi. Biz dahi altı mah kadar onları iğfal eyleyüp mümkün mertebe işimize baksak”, Enver Ziya Karal, Osmanlı Tarihi [History of the Ottoman Empire], vol. V, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983, p. 29.
10“Avrupa’da dost dosta tasvirini hediye eylemek gayet mutena âdettir, sen bilmezsin”, note from Sultan Selim III to his Grand Vizier, State Archives of the Republic of Turkey, Ottoman Archives (BOA), Istanbul, HAT 257/14805, 1221/1806; E. Z. Karal, Selim III.’ün Hatt-ı Hümayunları, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1942, pp. 92-93.
11“Ezcümle her ne kadar dünyada Ermeni ve Rum var ise Müslümanlar mahbub-dostdur, bu nasıl ayıb şey, maazallah Frengistan’da olamaz, amma olsa o saat ateşe yakarlar, hem pek ayıbdır deyü işite işite cümlemiz bu itikatda idik […]”, letter by Halet Efendi, 21 December 1803, Topkapı Palace Archives, facsimile published in Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi Kılavuzu [Guide to the Topkapı Palace archives], Istanbul, Devlet Basımevi, 1938, document XXVIII. For the full text and its analysis in English: Edhem Eldem, Consuming the Orient, Istanbul, Ottoman Bank Archive and Research Centre, 2007, pp. 217-218.
12“[...] el-hamdülillah Memalik-i İslamiyede bu kadar oğlan ve gulampara yokdur”, letter by Halet Efendi, 21 December 1803, ibid.
13Vak’a-i Hayriyye [The auspicious event] was the name given to the destruction, manu militari, of the janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II, on 15 June 1826.
14Edhem Eldem, “Pouvoir, modernité et visibilité : l’évolution de l’iconographie sultanienne à l’époque moderne”, in Omar Carlier and Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach (eds.), Le Corps du leader. Construction et représentation dans les pays du Sud, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, pp. 171-202.
15Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Islamic roots of the Gülhane rescript”, Die Welt des Islams, vol. 34, 1994, pp. 173-203; for a recent critical reassessment of the edict, see, Edhem Eldem, “L’édit des Tanzimat: une relecture”, Turcica, vol. 52, 2021, pp. 201-307.
16“Si au contraire le citoyen possède avec confiance ses propriétés de toute nature […] il sent chaque jour redoubler en son cœur l’amour du Prince et de la patrie, le dévouement à son pays”, Translation of the hatti schérif read in the meeting held at Gulhané on 3 novembre 1839, Archives of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Paris, Political Correspondence, Turkey, vol. 279. Our English translation: “If, on the contrary, citizens confidently possess their properties of all kinds [...] they will feel their love for the Prince and the homeland, and their attachment to their country, growing in their hearts day by day”.
17On Ottoman Orientalism, see, Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”, The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 3, 2002, pp. 768-796; Edhem Eldem, “Les Ottomans, un empire en porte-à-faux”, in François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin (eds.), Après l’orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Orient, Paris, IISMM-Karthala, 2011, pp. 285-302.
18For a general study of the subject: Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem, Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914, Istanbul, SALT, 2011. For more detailed studies, see, Edhem Eldem, “The Archaeology of a photograph: Philipp Anton Dethier and his ‘Group for the History of Greek Art’”, Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, vol. 127, 2013, pp. 499-530; id., “Early Ottoman archaeology: Rediscovering the finds of Ascalon (Ashkelon), 1847”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, vol. 378, 2017, pp. 25-53; id., “Et si Diane n’était pas lesbienne ? Biographie critique d’une statue(tte) d’Artémis du Musée archéologique d’Istanbul”, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, vol. 141, 2017, pp. 389-446.
19Edhem Eldem, “The (still)birth of the Ottoman ‘Museum’: A critical reassessment”, in Maia Wellington Gahtan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg (eds.), Collecting and Empires: An Historical and Global Perspective, Turnhout, Brepols, 2018, pp. 258-285.
20“Erzerum’s governor, Samih-Pasha, who has a high degree of Christian confidence, ordered a mullah to preach in the mosque to his fellow believers not to call Christians ghiaours anymore. The mullah went up into the pulpit and started like this: According to the desire and will of our government, let us not call them ghiaours anymore. He was a witty man”, La Terre sainte, vol. II, no. 40, 1 March 1877, p. 369. Obviously, this is an anecdote that was often repeated by authors who had no way of verifying its authenticity.
21“Hatti Humayoun (du 18 février 1856 – 10 Dzémaziul Ahir 1272)”, in Grégoire Aristarchi Bey, Législation ottomane ou recueil des lois, règlements, ordonnances, traités, capitulations et autres documents officiels de l’Empire ottoman, Constantinople, Démétrius Nicolaïdes, 1872, vol. II, p. 18.
22Letter by Nicolas Prosper Bourée, French Ambassador in Constantinople, to the Marquis de Moustier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 20 February 1867, Archives of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Paris, Political Correspondence, Turkey, vol. 369.
23“The only clear advice I have to give is, as I have stated, that the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question, and the country left out to honest European guidance; delaying which can be profitable or agreeable only to gamblers on the Stock Exchange, but distressing and unprofitable to all other men.” (“Mr. Carlyle on the Eastern Question”, Times, 28 November 1876.)
24William Ewart Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, London, John Murray, 1876.
25Letter by Edhem Pasha to Safvet Pasha, 23 August 1292/1876, BOA, Y. EE. 44/13.
26Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains. Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909, London, I.B. Tauris, 1998.
Auteurs
-
Edhem Eldem
Visiting professor, International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History
- Liz Libbrecht (trad.)

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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