The Persian Mirror examines how the French Crown, court, and intelligentsia understood and interacted with Safavid Persia from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on a fascinating collection of literary, artistic, and historical sources, Mokhberi reveals how Safavid Persia served as foil for contemporary French concerns about the French monarchy, politics, devotion, and culture. Mokhberi deploys impressive methodological flexibility as she analyzes sources that reported on, commented on, praised, or scorned Safavid Persia and its rulers: travel literature, French-inflected editions of Persian folklore, diplomatic memoirs, eyewitness accounts of Persian diplomatic missions to France, salon paintings, popular prints, and early journalistic texts. Taken as a whole, The Persian Mirror can be read as a kind of extended preface to Montesquieu's Persian Letters. That Enlightenment text, in which a fictitious Persian envoy offers perceptive comments on French culture and society in a series of diplomatic letters home, is well known; less so is the story of how France came to know and admire Persia in such a way that the fiction of a wise Persian observer of French affairs could actually work as a literary conceit. It is this story that Mokhberi lays out here.
The Safavids provided a compelling contrast to other Islamic polities as early modern European observers perceived them: Persia was far enough away not to be a military threat; the Persian shah was (allegedly) more cultured and civilized than the barbarous Turk; his dynasty and court were founded on an ancient legacy of imperial rule, one that might date as far back as Darius or Alexander; and he and his followers were (allegedly) sympathetic to Christians or even inclined to become Christian themselves. In all, European observers found in Persia a positive model of Muslim statecraft, one no less fanciful than the negative images they conjured of Turks or Moors, and one equally keyed to their own priorities, prejudices, and concerns—but a positive one, nonetheless.
Mokhberi focuses on how these images played out in the peculiar political and religious currents of early modern France. During the Wars of Religion, conservative French Catholics saw in Persia a crypto-Christian ally against the infidel Turk. French diplomats on missions to the Safavid capital found their Persian counterparts to be well-informed, rational connoisseurs of new diplomatic protocols. French courtiers at Versailles sought to cast Louis XIV as an imperial figure equal to the great shah. And French consumers eagerly adopted Persian customs (which in practice were just as much Turkish or Arabic), such as drinking coffee, smoking water-pipes, wearing silks, and visiting baths, and then eagerly collected pictorial representations of Persians enjoying the same. Each set of customers found a slightly different Persia—devout, rational, absolutist, or epicurean—to match their own passions and concerns.
Mokhberi's treatment of the dévots (devout French Catholics) of the late sixteenth century and their fascination with a crypto-Christian Persia is especially strong; her larger point that the Counter-Reformation saw no one Orientalist way of thinking about the Orient, or even about Persia, is well made. Equally strong is her extended study of the spectacular visit of the Safavid ambassador Mohammad Reza Beg to the French court in 1715, during the last days of Louis XIV. Mokhberi offers a dazzling analysis of the meanings, texts, and subtexts of an early modern diplomatic mission, from its elaborate protocols to the significance of its gift exchanges, speeches, gestures, sights, sounds, and commemorations. Her treatment of this episode is sensitive and well-grounded in the literature of the new diplomatic history, to which these chapters make an important contribution. At the same time, her attention to the popular response to the mission, as recorded in periodical literature, prints, diaries, and other sources provides a rich, added dimension to the account, as we see not just what the Persian embassy did at Versailles but how the visit was read and understood by the broader public.
This is an accomplished study that should be of interest to historians of early modern France and French literature, scholars interested in the long history of Christian-Muslim interactions and exchange, and students of early modern diplomacy.
