French Orientalism Representations of Ottoman in Caricatures in Le Petit Journal

Introduction

On September 30, 2005, Jyllands-Posten, a Danish daily broadcast newspaper, published twelve editorial images mocking the Prophet Mohammed. In one image by the cartoonist Flemming Rose, he was depicted with a bomb in his turban. Another one showed the Prophet in heaven dissuading other jihadists in line for suicide bombing to “stop, stop, we ran out of virgins” (Cotte, 2016). Soon after the images were published in Denmark, Islamic community leaders and many Muslim state ambassadors in the country condemned the images and asked the government to punish those responsible for them (Cotte, 2016), but the real outrage over the images came a year later (Hervik, 2012). The cartoons, considered demeaning and abusive toward Muslims and Islam, have reappeared in the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. The response to reappearance of the images of the Prophet was beyond the usual condemnation and violence. The internationalization of ridiculing images of the Prophet lit a fuse of violent protests worldwide from Nigeria to Indonesia. On January 2015, two gunmen who seemed to have some level of military experience ambushed the Charlie Hebdo office, killing total of twelve people, including five caricaturists. The next day millions around the world aligned themselves with the newspaper holding signs that expressed Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie). The cartoon crisis did not end there, on the day of culprits’ trial, the insolent images of the Prophet Mohammad were projected on government buildings in Paris in 2020.

In fifteen years since the caricature crisis began, the debate on freedom of speech versus blasphemy has continued to split ordinary peoples’ opinions, as well as those of academicians, journalist, and politicians all around the world. The differences in opinion have not reached any kind of compromise. Kaisa Murawska-Muthesius argues that the publications of images of the Prophet was sort of encouraging the prevalent notion that Muslims are incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech. Muthesius states that Rose’s cartoon intifada was a part of a confrontation in which “the growing reluctance of Danish artists, who were fearful of breaking the taboo against idolatry, to present the Prophet or to criticize Islam in any way” (Murawska-Muthesius, 2009). This aggressive way of expressing freedom of speech rhetoric and confronting Islamic narrowness of understanding satire reveals important clues about the centuries long influence of French orientalism.

Although this paper does not attempt to shed light on the current cartoon crisis, we find a good reason focus on a similar debate on the cultural, ethical, and legal boundaries of freedom of speech versus how Muslims digest satire and criticism in western media outlets. For this purpose, this paper travels back to the heyday of satire and aims to decode its common rhetoric of freedom of speech and its validity to be a source of information by utilizing exaggerated drawings and mocking images of Ottoman subjects in French cartoons. To do this, we examine the French Newspaper Le Petit Journal’s editorial cartoons from 1909 to 1913 archived by Bibliothèque nationale de France’s online data source, Gallica.bnf.fr. The attempt is thus to understand and conceptualize how French satiric discourse is constructed around the notion of freedom of speech and as valid source of information, while at the same time ridiculing the Ottoman Turkish. This paper also asks the question of how, as a perception factory, Le Petit Journal imagined and presented the Ottoman subject, especially during the war times.

The rationale of this study is two-fold. First, there seems to be only a few studies on Le Petit Journal’s perception of Ottoman society. Second, there are a particularly small number of scholars who have paid attention to French caricatures as a meaning-making tool in respect to their geographic imaginations and symbolic articulations toward Turkish political life in Istanbul. Although literature on media perception of peoples, places, and events are extensively available, Le Petit Journal’s construction of the Ottoman image during the Balkan Wars is not studied in this perspective. Satirical discourse in French society and in professional media circles has been well established (Chupin, Hube, & Kaciaf, 2009), therefore depicting Ottoman subjects in a ludicrous way has aroused very little concern. Furthermore, this paper alternatively connects the journal’s depictions of Ottoman subjects to modern orientalist discourse within which images play a constructive role.