Interwar Mythologies of Civilization

This paper addresses a surprising image of the Prophet Muhammad painted for the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris by the French artist Louis Bouquet (1885-1952). Belonging to the larger decorative program of the Permanent Museum of the Colonies, celebrating the accomplishments of France’s colonial campaign as it embarked upon its second century, Bouquet’s fresco has received only passing attention in existing literature as a modern visual expression of France’s long-held mission civilisatrice. Through a close visual analysis of the fresco and by focusing on the artist’s depiction of the Prophet, I argue instead that the work suggests the instability of this ideology—and the conceptions of “Civilization” it entailed—during the interwar period. In designing his mural for the Permanent Museum’s “Africa Salon,” Bouquet faced the novel task of presenting his viewers with a depiction of the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual contributions of Africa and the Muslim world to French civilization. The choices of composition and visual reference he made in responding to this representational undertaking, while idiosyncratic, present one strategy for addressing larger conceptual and moral problems shared by many of the Exposition’s contributors, critics, and audiences. What could a “civilizing mission” mean following the large-scale destruction and violence of World War I—seen by some as a failure of “Western Civilization”—and in the context of a rapidly transforming international landscape disturbing the very notions of cultural hierarchy on which this mission was built? What alternative mythologies of civilization could be imagined, and how would they be expressed?