Photography, the Archive, and Imperialism in the

Nineteenth Century, Part Two

Nineteenth Century Imperialism in the Middle East
Part Two: Flix Bonfils and the Levant
The Levant was essentially a European imaginary configuration imposed upon a certain stretch of
the moribund Ottoman Empire, but more precisely, the Levant, a term derived from the French word
for "rising," or "levant,"meaning "to rise," like the sun or "to get out of bed in the morning." For
French kings, the "Levant" was a ceremonial event, witnessed by privileged courtiers, and the
importation of a French word to an Arab speaking word speaks volumes of the rising Orientalism
during the nineteenth century. During the early decades of the century, the lingua franca of the
coastal region east of the Mediterranean Sea, was a simple version of Italian, but when the ties of
the French government and the Ottoman Empire strengthened, in the second half of the century,
French became the European language of the Levant. On one hand, the Levant was, since the
fifteenth century, a figment of European desires, on the other, its major port cities, such as Beirut
and Alexandria, signified the commercial role of the region as a conduit for European trade. As a
map of the area suggests, the Levant was border territory, a slice of land where East and West met,
where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled, and where empires, British, French and Turkish sat
down to do business.

As the outward looking edge facing

Europe, the Levant was comparatively
familiar, while the interior of the
territories east of the trade coast were
virtually untouched by either the
French or the British, the key players
in the Orient. But as the French were
in the midst of building the Suez
Canal, in 1861 the Emperor Napolon
III became uneasy over the unknown
deserts stretching beyond his control
and knowledge. The blank map,
today's Saudi Arabia, was a truly
dangerous place for the unwary and un-pious to visit, for here was the home land of the most
virulently fundamental strain of Islam, the site of the Wahabee beliefs. The individual selected by the
Emperor to reconnoiter this interior-in disguise-was one of history's strangest characters, William
Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888). Although he came from a privileged sector of British society,
Palsgrave was one of those restless Europeans who fled the conventional and banked like a pool ball
around a variety of identities and guises. He began as a Protestant, became a Jesuit, and, as a
scholar of all things Arabic, Palgrave was as close as any European could come to being an expert on
Muslim society and religious beliefs. In his 2003 book In Pursuit of Arabia, R?shid Sh?z attempted to
untangle the complexities that were Palgrave.
"It is difficult to believe how Palsgrave, who came from a respectable British family the members of
which excelled in the service of Britain, could come to identify himself with France, a rival
Empire..The only way to reconcile theses two apparently contradictory identities was to assume the
role of a European imperialist rather than that of a British or a French one. This enabled him to see
the world divided into two blocs, European and non-European," Sh?z explained.
Like all Europeans, especially missionaries, such as Palgrave, this spy for the Emperor believed
firmly in European superiority. The result of his journey, the purpose of which was to examine and
diagnose the extent to which these "savage" and "ignorant" people could be elevated or saved, was a
polyglot volume, The Personal Narrative of a Year's journey Through Central and Easter Arabia
(1865). The Narrative mixed facts, especially ethnographic descriptions of heretofore unknown tribal
peoples, with the European assumptions and fantasies about them, a combination that did not please

exacting scholars of the "Orient," but, during the decades when France and England were sharing
the power in the Levant between them, delighted the more causal readers, eager for narratives of
imperialism.

Flix Bonfils. The Sphinx (1870s)

But Palgrave deserves our attention today, for he was literally the first European to enter into the
capital of what Sh?z termed "the Wahabee Empire," Riyadh. This "empire" was an internal one,
tucked inside the Ottoman Empire, but, because of power of its unique religious beliefs, the region
could resist and indeed lead a revolution against European interests. Unfortunately, Palgrave
conflated a fringe view of Islam with the broader Muslim faith, and, given that only Saudi Arabia is
still the heart of Wahabeeism, this confusion still exists today. Still, his writings on the Wahabees,
the first of their kind in the 1860s, echo eerily today: he writes of how this branch of the faith was
spread though "the sword" and forced marriages, similar to the tactics ISIL uses in the twenty-first
century. The adventures of Palgrave in the lands of Saudi Arabia, the interior beyond the civilized
lands of the Levant, blazed a trail for T. E. Lawrence to follow during the Great War, when, bringing
the predictions of Napolon III to fruition, he allied the British with the Wahabee regime against the
Turks. In contrast to the dark and unenlightened interior space of fanaticism, the coastal "Orient"
was a place of tourism, rapidly being modernized by the presence of railroads and, of course, the
Suez Canal, which opened in 1871.
It is important to make the distinction between the myth of imperialism and the actual extent of the
literal power of those Europeans, who would dominate in the Middle East, and the limits of the
territorial power of the Turks, the British and the French, can be measured by the careful incursion
of W. G. Palgrave into the land of Wahabeeism and danger. Indeed, it can be argued that
"Orientalism" can be geographically located in the Levant, a crossroads of global influences, where
the European control both begins and ends. Here, it is easy to "imagine" the "mysterious east," in
the process of being mapped and measured and occupied both mentally and physically by Europeans
in such a way to make it safe and preserve its "mystery." During the significant event of opening the
Canal in which ancient Egypt was dragged into the modern world and placed beneath the
imperialism of European rule, a remarkable family of French photographers, headed by Flix Bonfils
(1831-1886) were carefully photographing the entire architecture and archaeology of the region.
Setting up in Beirut in the Maison Bonfils, the activities of Bonfils extended to Jerusalem and Egypt
and even to Greece, all under the nominal control of the Ottoman Empire while being confusingly
but peacefully "occupied" economically by the British and the French. This all-encompassing
generational project by a single family paralleled the consolation of European power in the Middle
East and established a visual and pictorial terrain of scenic vistas that constructed the collective
European imagination of possession and empire.

Flix Bonfils. Jews at the Western Wall. Jerusalem (1870s)

At a time when intrepid Europeans were roaming over the Middle East, collecting souvenirs of
various sizes-works of art, mummies, and in the case of the Germans, entire temples, photographs
became a more acceptable way of removing historical artifacts from their place of origin. Flix
Bonfils, who had studied photography under the nephew of Nicphore Nipce, Nipce de St Victor,
had worked in Arles, until his son Adrien developed respiratory ailments. Bonfils had served with the
French military in Lebanon and remembered its dry climate, excellent for those with breathing
problems. The entire family moved to Beirut and all became involved in the serious business of
photographing the Levant and Egypt, resulting in what is claimed to be 15,000 images, including
some 8,000 stereographs. Upon the death of his father in 1885, the son took up the business,
assisted by his mother, Lydia. Adrien, in fact, seems to have move on by 1900, but Lydia, who had
been in charge of making the albumen for the wet plates, remained so active that she had to be
removed from Lebanon in 1917 when the Great War finally arrived to put the coup de grce to the
Ottoman Empire.
The interests of the family mirrored the imperialist mindset of the French and English: an interest in
mapping through images, creating an inventory of historical sites, and a careful record of an ancient
past, often related to the Bible, that was under threat of modernization as the Ottoman influence
waned and the Europeans pressed their claims on what they considered to be their historic
(Christian) inheritance and the cradles of their civilization. In the 2011 exhibition In Search of
Biblical Lands: From Jerusalem to Jordan in Nineteenth-century Photography at the Getty Museum,
curators noted that &
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