LOUIS DE FORBIN’S JOURNEY TO EGYPT: THE REMAKING OF FRANCE’S CULTURAL AUTHORITY AND VISUAL EMPIRE AFTER 1815

This article examines the Egyptian section of Louis de Forbin’s Voyage dans le Levant (1817-1818) to show how antiquities were transformed into instruments of state-sponsored cultural appropriation in the early nineteenth century. Moving beyond readings of the Voyage as an artistic travelogue, it argues that Forbin’s mission functioned as an operational extension of Restoration France’s effort to reconstruct cultural authority after 1815. Cultural appropriation, the article demonstrates, did not occur through isolated acts of collecting but through a co-produced infrastructure shaped by Franco-British rivalry, Mehmed Ali Pasha’s calibrated sovereignty, and layered intermediary networks linking diplomatic authority, provincial administration, local labor, brokerage, and informal markets. Central to this process was the fusion of narrative and visual practices. Textual description and visual documentation operated together as an epistemic infrastructure through which claims to Egypt’s material past were stabilized, circulated, and institutionalized. By situating Forbin’s Egyptian journey within these intersecting political, visual, and institutional frameworks, the article reframes Voyage dans le Levant as a mechanism that brought together travel, representation, and museum ambition to produce France’s post-Napoleonic visual empire.