Speaker: Professor Ian Coller of History at the University of California, Irvine
French anxieties about Islam and Muslims may appear to contradict the universalist legacy of the French Revolution. But the genealogy of French Islamophobia is complex and entangled with the revolution and its outcomes. Before 1789, Islam played an outsized role in French culture, politics and economy. Muslims were readily coopted as figures of revolutionary universalism on both sides of the widening divide. This symbolism collided with reality in the invasion of Egypt that became central to articulating Napoleon Bonaparte’s post-Revolutionary compact. This talk will trace some of the broad lines that transformed Muslims from test-cases for revolutionary universalism into projections of its slide into authoritarianism.
Ian Coller is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831 (University of California Press, 2010) winner of the Australian Historical Association’s W.K. Hancock award, and Muslims and Citizens: Islam, Politics and the French Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020).
