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The Battle of the Nile in 1798 may have dashed France's hopes of taking India, but it set the stage, so to speak, for a form of aesthetic and mimetic colonization of it through the theatrical and musical discourses of opera. In nineteenth-century France, opera was one of a series of discursive practices that helped the nation restore its prestige by appropriating culturally what it failed to conquer militarily. Curiously, however, in doing so it engaged the Parisian public's (well documented) contradictory responses to the entire idea of empire: desire mixed with anxiety.
Published Online: 2008-02-27
Published in Print: 2003-10-14
© Walter de Gruyter
