“O homines ad servitutem paratos!”: Bajazet and the Scandal of Slave Rule

Of all Racine's plays, Bajazet is, according to the ARTFL database, the one where the word "esclave" occurs most frequently. (2) More than a fashionable addition to the series of successful syntheses of classical dramaturgy and galant aesthetics with which Racine had hitherto regaled his audiences and readers, Bajazet is a careful study in political theory with a pointed lesson: when slaves rule, things go wrong. (3) Bajazet thus continues the interest that Racine shows elsewhere in the links between absolute sovereignty and absolute submission. In Britannicus, for instance, he relies on the implied message that Louis XIV, the absolute monarch, is a good king because he liberates his population from slavery, i.e. their routine harassment and exploitation at the hands of the feudal lords and the horrible condition of civil war that would accompany any state disturbance (such as those of the Fronde). The mere fact of his being in charge frees the populace from coercion, fear and want. Freedom and absolute power go together. The sovereignty of Louis XIV undoes the dominium of the French feudal lords (dominium here used to mean the power of a master over his slave), much as Augustus Caesar had done. (4) Parallels with Augustus were part and parcel of the seventeenth-century encomia of Louis XIV, constituting key components of the image-complex--what Jean-Marie Apostolides aptly calls "la mythistoire"--that kept the state apparatus operating smoothly. With respect to Augustus, readers will remember the bombastic opening of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti: "At the age of 19, I, Augustus Caesar, acting on my own responsibility and at my own expense, raised an army with which I championed the liberty of the Roman republic against the tyranny of a powerful faction that had long oppressed them." ("Annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi per quem rem publicam dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi.") (Anc. 1.1) In other words, Augustus Caesar's imperium liberates Rome from the dominium (or rather the dominatio) of the many factions that terrorized the populace in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's assassination. A similar mechanism is at work in absolutist France, propagating the view of the king as a guarantor of freedom. Racine's interest in this Hobbesian scenario affords us some clues regarding the setting of the play in Turkey. The argument that the topic was fashionable in 1670 is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far.(5) In Racine's political model, the Ottoman empire acts as a latter-day equivalent of the Rome of the first century C.E., which is to say the same topic that had furnished him with the plots of Britannicus and Berenice. In this respect, the Ottoman Empire would have been of interest precisely because it provided an intriguing test case. (6) Here was a vast, centrally ordered empire, built on a model similar to the one to which French kings had aspired, with one remarkable difference: its formal dependence on the institution of slavery, to the point where the bulk of the ruling class and warrior (askeri) caste were slaves. This paradoxical status of enslaved or formerly enslaved persons rising to positions of power seems to have had a special attraction for Racine. (7) In both Britannicus and Berenice, he does hot mask his contempt for the freedmen who influence imperial Roman state policy. The opposition is there in Bajazet, too, but the emphasis shifts from imperial freedmen to slaves outright. Similarly, Paul Rycaut, whose History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire was one of Racine's sources, repeatedly emphasizes the servile nature and origin of the Ottoman state, adding that the Sultan himself had slave origins. (8) His account deserves quoting at length: The absolute power in the Prince implies an exact obedience in the Subjects; and to instill and confirm that Principle no art or industry is wanting in the education of those who are placed in the Seraglio, with design of preferment to Offices and great Charges; so that even the Oath of Obedience which Friers and other Religious men vow to their Superiors at their first initiation into Ecclesiastical Orders, is not more exactly or more devoutly observed or possessed by them, than this Doctrine of submission to the will of their great Master is carefully taught to his young Scholars who stand Probationers and Candidates for all the Government of the Empire. …