A fascination for the exotic: Suzanne Voilquin, Ismayl Urbain, Jehan d'Ivray and the Saint -Simonians. French travelers in Egypt on the margins

In a compelling narrative, this dissertation illuminates an entire world of low budget, working and emigrant travelers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Mediterranean. It brings to light a remarkable number of travel accounts by women and by people of mixed racial and cultural heritage and varied political beliefs, unearthed through exhaustive primary source research.;The dissertation focuses on three personal portraits. Suzanne Voilquin, a midwife and Saint-Simonian, traveled to Cairo in the 1830's, practiced there and learned to speak Arabic. Of working class origin, she had learned to read, become politically involved and edited a small feminist newspaper with several other women in Paris. She later worked as a midwife in Russia and in Louisiana. Her account gives us a window into the world of nineteenth century working class travel. Thomas Ismayl Urbain was a twenty-one year old French teacher in Damietta in the 1830's, also a Saint-Simonian. Of mixed Black African and European descent, he was born in French Guiana, where his mother was born a slave. He learned to speak Arabic, married a North African woman, worked as an interpreter and spent most of the rest of his life in North Africa. His account shows a world of people of mixed racial heritage, the result of European colonial expansion. Jehan d'Ivray, the third traveler, was a sixteen year old woman from the South of France who married an Egyptian medical student and returned with him to Egypt as his young wife in 1879. Her personal papers, thousands of pages of journals, letters, and manuscripts, were discovered by the author during the research for this dissertation.;These travelers show a multiplicity of opinions and a complex diversity which indicates that the orientalism described by Edward Said was not so much a Foucauldian discourse which prevented people from thinking differently; instead it was a more porous and permeable consensus of acceptable opinion, as described by Noam Chomsky, which gradually silenced dissident voices through a process of reinforcement and selection. This dissertation seeks to recover those voices and to let them be heard again.