A Parisian Sultana (original: La Sultane parisienne) was written by Adolphe Belot. Belot (1829-1890) was a playwright and author of novels. His plays are sensationalist, flaunting their excesses under the guise of Naturalism, and several of his novels are pornographic.

A Parisian Sultana, set in 1872, is about Laura de Guéran, a wealthy young widow living in Paris. Twenty-five-years old, blonde, she is beautiful, but her “face is a strange mixture of good nature and firmness, of amiability and resolution, of gaiety and sadness.”¹ De Guéran is the daughter of a member of the Royal Geographical Society and as a child and teenager she knew all the celebrated travelers of the age, including Overweg, Speke, Richardson, Vogel, and Schweinfurth. When she turned twenty-two she fell in love with and married the wealthy French explorer the Baron de Guéran, and moved with him to Paris. Although English by birth she quickly fell in love with Paris and the French and became a French patriot. With her husband she enjoyed two years of married bliss.

Then he disappeared, somewhere in Egypt, and she was notified that he was dead. After a year's mourning she summons three men to her apartment; the three are in love with her and have all proposed marriage to her. She tells them that she is going to Africa to find her husband's remains and to see where he fell and why, and to publish his works, and that the three should come with her. One of the men, a doctor, declines on the grounds that his mother is dying and he must stay with her. This is hard for him, because he clearly loves her, and she is genuinely sorry that he is not accompanying her. The other two agree, and together with an older doctor and a reliable female Cockney maid/companion they go to Africa.

A Parisian Sultana follows their travels through Saharan Africa and the adventures they have there. They encounter enemy tribes, rampaging elephants, and slavers, and survive abandonment by their native guides. After Laura and her friends discover that Laura's husband might still be alive in a country on the southeast coast of Africa, they trek there, picking up an army of native warriors on the way (their king falls in love with Laura and is persuaded to accompany her south). They eventually find the Baron, who has been made the lover/prisoner of the beautiful, powerful, and majestic queen Walinda, a “Venus in ebony” in charge of a great army of ferocious Amazon warriors. Laura’s forces defeat Walinda’s army in pitched battle. The Baron attempts to escape from Walinda, but she falls on him with her spiked armor and badly wounds him. Walinda is captured by Laura. Walinda tries to kill Laura, to regain the Baron (who she is in love with), but she kills the Baron instead and then drowns herself out of grief. The group returns to Paris and Laura marries the doctor, who after the death of his mother travels into Africa to find Laura.

A Parisian Sultana is both a well-informed travelogue through Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa and an entertaining and well-written adventure and romance novel with Lost Race elements. Adolphe Belot had not traveled to Africa when he wrote A Parisian Sultana, but the book reads as if he had, and clearly he did substantial research to get the details and the feel of African locales correct; his descriptions are memorable, especially of urban Cairo and rural Egypt, and his invocation and use of primary sources is Vernean. Moreover, Belot is comparatively progressive in his portrayal of Africans. He is refreshingly free of the worst sorts of racism (though not all of them), and he treats the African tribes and characters with respect. Belot is also vehemently anti-slavery and gives a grueling description of the conditions on a slave ship on the Nile.

Unfortunately, A Parisian Sultana is, despite Belot’s best efforts, part of the French pro-colonialist discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century, a discourse which both led to the French colonization of numerous African countries and justified it. When A Parisian Sultana was published, France was already in possession of Senegal, Algeria, and the Ivory Coast, but the rush to colonialization was in full effect, and within a few years France would be assertively and militarily extending its overseas empire in Africa across the northern, western, and central part of the continent. Novels like A Parisian Sultana, which extolled the natural beauty of Africa but portrayed the Africans as savages—magnificent, respectable semi-civilized savages, but savages nonetheless—virtually pleaded with the French to invade the countries portrayed in order to “civilize” and “Christianize” them. Belot’s racism is of the benign sort, and A Parisian Sultana portrays the Africans as being civilized savages—but it remains racism, and the novel remains a justification for colonialism.²

Of note is the character of Walinda. By making her the queen not just of a country but the leader of an army of African Amazons, Belot demonstrates a knowledge of the historical women warriors of Dahomey,³ whose final appearance on the battlefield, on Nov. 4, 1892 against the French at the gates of Cana, had not yet taken place when A Parisian Sultana was published. Unfortunately, Belot also plays into a number of stereotypes:

The motif of the African queen is ambiguous at best, for it draws on a number of mythical, classical, and popular sources that have been variously mobilized over the centuries to serve different purposes for different constituencies. The African queen encodes a heterogeneous sign open to multiple interpretations and appropriations in a variety of genres and media, spanning from the mythical Queen of Sheba to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Despite national specificities that connoted individual countries’ unique encounter with the “other,” in the Western colonial imagination African women became a metaphor and an archetype for the colonial conquest. They stood for exotic and erotic male fantasies, black Venuses “inherently primitive-and-sexually available and [simultaneously] menacing-and-dangerous” (Ponzanesi, “Beyond the Black Venus” 165)…the trope of the African queen belonged to the same symbolic regime and acted as a sublimated substitute for all African women. The term queen recalls the realm of fairy-tales and magic, projecting onto foreign lands and peoples those imaginative exotic expectations that paved the way and powerfully contributed to the colonial enterprise. Beyond royal stock, for many men involved in wars of conquest in the colonies, and of propaganda at home, the allure of an African “queen” represented the promise of sexual and territorial reward. Such narratives and tropes in turn supplied the discursive backing for the material possession and objectification of black women.⁴

From conquest to objectification to sexual possession, A Parisian Sultana features all of these stereotypes, to the degree that the novel can be taken as an archetypal example of them. The sole difference is in the sway that Walinda holds over the Baron—A Parisian Sultana is coy regarding the Baron’s willingness to remain Walinda’s lover in the years before Laura comes to rescue him. In this regard Walinda is not so much a femme fatale or Fatal Woman as a different kind of stereotype, the hyper-sexualized and sexually-insatiable African woman. That Walinda has, the novel lightly hints, overwhelmed the Baron and rendered him passive through sex speaks volumes about how Belot, and to a great degree French writers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, viewed French men and African women.

A Parisian Sultana is well-written and entertaining, but its racism and race-based sexism will be distressing to modern readers.

¹ Adolphe Belot, La Sultane parisienne (Paris: E. Dentu, 1878), 4.

² Jean-Marie Seillan’s Aux sources du roman colonial (1863-1914): l’Afrique à la fin du XIX siècle (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2006) is good on how the French fiction of the era “made Africa…the fictional laboratory of its genocidal dreams.”

³ The entire story of the “Amazons of Dahomey” is well-told in Stanley B. Alpern’s Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York: NYU Press, 2011).

⁴ Clarissa Clo, “African Queens and Italian History: The Cultural Politics of Memory and Resistance in Teatro delle Albe’s Lunga vita all’albero and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle,” Research in African Literatures 41, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 28.