France’s Imagined Mission in the Levant: Louis IX’s Crusade in Religious, Colonial, and Nationalist Discourses (1693–2025)
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- C426 (College Building)
About this event
Speaker: Mohamad El-Merheb
Chair: Roy Fischel
Abstract
This paper investigates how the figure of Louis IX (Saint Louis; d.1270) was reimagined from the eighteenth century to the present in order to frame France’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean. Across shifting regimes and ideologies, his two crusades were invoked to articulate a civilising, protective, and expansionist mission in the region.
Central to this discourse was the persistence of a mythic bond between France and Lebanon, which cast Louis IX as the origin of a supposed military, political, religious, and diplomatic tradition. By situating these narratives within broader currents of romantic medievalism, nationalism, Catholic universalism, and republican laïcité, the paper shows how Louis IX’s imagined mission became a durable ideological framework that continues to shape perceptions of France’s vocation in the Levant.
Image: Painting by Jean-Adolphe Beaucé of French Expeditionary Corps landing in Beyrouth, 16 August 1860 (Wikimedia Commons)
