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Pascal Firges: Istanbul during the French Revolution. Regime Change in a Transcultural Context
The last decade of the 18th century is a period of radical political change for both, the Ottoman Empire, and France. 1789 was not only the year of the fall of the Bastille, but also the year of the accession of the young reform sultan Selim III. He initiated an ambitious military and administrative reform programme. The term used for his reforms, nizam-ı cedid (new order), was also applied to describe the political changes in France. There are a number of other direct and indirect links between the reform processes in the Ottoman Empire and the political developments in France.
The outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792 catapulted Istanbul onto the centre stage of European diplomacy, because it was practically the only capital which almost continuously hosted the ambassadors of both the revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary faction who all tried to pull the Ottomans into their respective camps.
This dissertation seeks to focus on the French side of these entanglements. It will more specifically deal with the question, how the change of regime in France influenced both the French diplomatic relations with the Ottoman government and the relations between the French state and its subjects in the Levant. Both aspects of regime change are specifically interwoven in the case of the French in the Ottoman Empire, as the French minister at the Sublime Porte also fulfilled the functions of a magistrate for the French community. Amongst other things, this study seeks to show how, in an environment in which agents from very diverse cultural backgrounds interact, policies and discourses that are valid in a specific cultural context, become obsolete and have to be altered in another.
