John David Ragan, Forgotten Saint-Simonian Travelers in Egypt: Suzanne Voilquin, Ismayl Urbain, and Jehan d'Ivray (The American University in Cairo Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
John David Ragan (JDR): This book began in 1970, when I was a radical young student just eighteen years old. I took a year off from school and worked for five months in a country club restaurant as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter. With the money I saved I flew to Europe, bought a Honda 90 motorcycle in England, and traveled for seven months across Europe and North Africa, visiting Egypt for the first time.
The trip was an incredible learning experience which changed my life. I later returned to North Africa and spent two years there. Using student loans and money which I earned working in Alaska, I studied Arabic in Cairo and Tunis, French in Paris, German in Berlin, Spanish in Spain and Latin America, and did a PhD in European history at New York University.
When I looked at French travelers in Egypt as a possible research topic, I was hoping to rediscover the joy of traveling and the profound learning experience which I had found in the 1970s. I was disappointed to find a narrow canon of wealthy literary travelers, whose experiences did not seem to resemble mine. “You won't find budget travelers like yourself in the 19th century,” an historical museum director told me. “Back then you had to have money to travel.” I am Irish. I knew better. My great grandmother was born in 1867 and came to the United States on an immigrant boat when she was sixteen years old. She lived to the age of ninety-nine, and I knew her when I was a child. She was not rich.
So I set out looking for nineteenth-century French travelers to Egypt who were not part of the canon, who had travelled on small budgets and studied Arabic as I had, who perhaps held radical or alternative points of view, and who perhaps saw Egypt differently. I was amazed when my research uncovered an entire world of low budget or working French travelers to Egypt, of women, of people of mixed cultural or racial backgrounds, and of immigrants, whose accounts were marginalized, excluded from history, and eventually forgotten because they were considered unimportant by the colonial elites of their time.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
JDR: I found that the accounts of travelers who have been excluded from history can be rediscovered by extensive research in unweeded library collections which have open library stacks. I began my research in the Jesuit Library of the Sainte Famille in Cairo, which has a collection of roughly one thousand books of travel literature on Egypt, most of them in French. The curator, Father Maurice Martin S.J., allowed me to work directly in the stacks and gave me a table and chair in the travel literature section. I was able to do a shelf read of the entire collection, going along book by book, skimming each one for the table of contents, publication data, and a few passages, putting to the side the ones that warranted further attention. In an American research library, I would not have been allowed into the stacks. I would have had to use other people's bibliographies to request a few books each day and I would inevitably have been sucked back into the same canon of wealthy literary travelers everyone else was using. In the Sainte Famille library, I discovered travelers and books I never knew existed.
My first reaction was “What are all of these women doing here?” There were French women travelers to Egypt who I had never heard of before, who were not part of the canon. For example, there was Suzanne Voilquin, editor of the Tribune des Femmes (“The Women’s Tribune,” 1832-1834), one of the first feminist journals ever published, with an initial print run of one thousand copies in Paris. Suzanne Voilquin was born into the Parisian working class. Her father and brother were hat makers and she had worked eighteen-hour days as a seamstress. She came to Egypt with a radical utopian socialist movement called the Saint-Simonians, which had given her the freedom to plunge into the world of books and ideas which she loved, and to become an editor. In Egypt, she studied Arabic and medicine as an apprentice to a European doctor at a time when medical schools in Europe did not accept women. She was connected to the establishment of a school of medicine for women in Egypt which graduated women doctors for roughly fifty years, until the British closed the school after they occupied Egypt in 1882.
My book includes a bibliography of French women travelers in Egypt and tells the stories of Suzanne Voilquin and a number of others, all of whom published fascinating accounts of their trips, but who were ignored and excluded from the canon, women such as Jeanne Puech, a teenager from the South of France who married a young Egyptian studying medicine in France and returned to Egypt with him as his wife in 1879. She wrote more than twenty books under the pen name Jehan d’Ivray. I discovered her personal archives in an attic in Normandy.
With the help of Philippe Régnier (CNRS), I did extensive research on the Saint-Simonians in the movement’s archives in the Arsenal Library in Paris. More than seventy Saint-Simonians traveled to Egypt, fleeing political persecution in France. I found the accounts of other travelers to Egypt who were excluded from the canon, such as Thomas Ismayl Urbain. He was born in French Guiana, where his mother was born a slave. His father was a French sea captain who never recognized his son but gave him money to come to Paris and study. There Urbain joined the Saint-Simonians, who had communal houses all over Paris and who believed in racial equality and the emancipation of women. Urbane made a splash in the movement with performances of his poetry about what we would call today black identity and black pride.
At the age of twenty-one, Urbain traveled with a group of Saint-Simonians through Istanbul, Syria, and Palestine to Egypt, where he tutored the children of a French doctor and then worked for the Egyptian government, teaching French in Damietta. He was enthralled with Egyptian culture and overwhelmed with the death from the plague of a young woman he had hoped to marry and the death of her Sudanese mother, the wife of the French doctor. He swore he would carry them with him for the rest of his life, which he would spend in the service of people like them. He converted to Islam, spent most of his life in North Africa, and played an important role in the history of Algeria.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
JDR: This book continues my work on colonialism, women, and travelers. One of my previous books is a biography of Emiliano Zapata for young adults, criticizing the brutally oppressive economic structures of colonialism: John David Ragan (Chelsea House Publishers, 1980). I also published the article “French Women Travelers in Egypt: a Discourse Marginal to Orientalism?” in the collection Travellers In Egypt, edited by Paul and Janet Starkey (I.B. Tauris, 1998). This article was originally presented as a paper at the American Research Center in Egypt’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia and later read in absentia at a conference in England at Durham University, of the Association for the Study of Travelers in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE, who also published two short articles by me on my sources in December 1996). I also published an article entitled “Jehan d’Ivray” in Cairo Papers, edited by Jason Thompson (The American University in Cairo Press, 2002). This article, which describes my discovery of the personal archives of Jehan d’Ivray in an attic in Normandy, was originally presented as a paper at an ASTENE conference in England at Oxford University.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
JDR: This book is written to be a passionate and very enjoyable read, for both the specialist and the non-specialist. It brings the stories of these marginalized travelers alive.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
JDR: A memoir of my travels to fifty countries as a young student.
J: Any last words?
JDR: It is important to restore to history the accounts of women travelers and others who have been marginalized and excluded from the canon. Suzanne Voilquin, Ismayl Urbain, and Jehan d’Ivray seem to be classic examples of the intersectionality of a variety of lived experiences and solidarities which are sometimes in conflict with the established orientalist discourse. Their alternative ideas challenge the discursive analysis of a canon of elite texts which is central to our recent historiography. The travelers in my book show us the wonder, the fascination, and the earnest joy of travel as a profoundly liberating learning experience. Theirs are voices from the past which we have forgotten, which we no longer hear, a complexity which we no longer see in the multicultural world of nineteenth-century Egypt. Let us appreciate the diversity which they represent and let their voices be heard.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 3)
The Plague is stalking Cairo.
April 12, 1835: The fragile, yellowed letter breathes panic. “1200 deaths yesterday” . . . “Good-bye” . . . “I embrace you. . . perhaps for the last time.” I sit in the Arsenal Library of Paris, sifting through cardboard boxes full of letters, yellow with age. There are hundreds of them, in faded brown ink, written to addresses in Damietta, Alexandria and Cairo, still spotted with the wax used to seal them closed. In them I hear the voices of the Saint-Simonians, a group of young French radicals and idealists who traveled to Egypt with very little money, hoping to work for the progress of humanity and to change the world.
The Saint-Simonians believed in the emancipation of women and racial equality. Their communal houses all over Paris were hotbeds of activism and intellectual ferment. Their movement was named after the philosopher Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, who had been a mentor to many of these young radicals. The Saint-Simonians had their own newspaper and they were talking about setting up their own political party.
In 1832 the French government smashed the Saint-Simonian movement. It objected to the communal houses on moral grounds and was worried about political unrest and working-class movements, particularly after the Revolution of 1830. The Saint-Simonian leaders were jailed and their communal houses were surrounded by police, National Guard and regular army troops, and shut down.
A core group of the movement’s activists became disillusioned with France, where it was impossible for them to reorganize. Much like modern day Peace Corps Volunteers, these Saint-Simonians offered their services to the Egyptian government. Many of them were engineers and others could work as teachers or in the medical professions. Fascinated with the exotic and full of excitement, curiosity and idealism, these young travelers set out for Egypt.
This book is about three young travelers in Egypt connected with the Saint-Simonian movement. The first is Suzanne Voilquin, a Saint-Simonian midwife who worked in a clinic in Cairo. Before she went to Egypt with the Saint-Simonians, Suzanne Voilquin was the editor of a small feminist journal in Paris, one of the first ever published. She was passionately involved in left wing popular politics and grew up in Paris, working as a seamstress and reading every book she could find. Her father was a hat maker, as was her brother, who was also a labor organizer. Suzanne Voilquin dreams of studying medicine and becoming a doctor, but she cannot do this in the France of the 1830s, where women are not admitted to medical schools.
April 21, 1835: Here is another letter, this one written by the second traveler, a Saint-Simonian named Thomas Urbain. He has asked a young woman in Cairo to marry him. He calls her “Hanem,” his “lady” in Turkish. “I love that girl,” he says. “This love is great in my heart, it is calm, it is sacred.” Hanem and Suzanne Voilquin work together in the same clinic in Cairo, and Urbain seeks Suzanne Voilquin’s help as an intermediary. Urbain is a gifted poet, of mixed French and Black African descent. Just twenty-two years old, he is teaching French in the Egyptian city of Damietta. He was born in French Guiana where his mother was born a slave. His father was a French merchant and sea captain. Urbain joined the Saint-Simonian movement in Paris as a young student, attracted by its ideas of racial equality. He would later convert to Islam and take the name Ismayl.
April 18, 1835: Here in my hand is a third fragile, yellowed letter. Urbain had clearly not yet received it when he wrote his letter of April 21st. This letter is from Suzanne Voilquin in Cairo. “Urbain, Urbain,” it begins . . . “Courage poor friend.” Gently Suzanne Voilquin tells him that “your Hanem” has died of the plague.
These are voices from the past which we no longer hear because they are not famous or well known. For too long, historians have focused on a tiny elite of explorers and wealthy literary travelers in Egypt. As a result, the perception has come to be that “only wealthy people traveled in the nineteenth century,” as the director of one historical museum told me. In fact, millions of Europeans emigrated and traveled all over the world during the nineteenth century. Census records show over 40,000 Europeans in the Egyptian city of Alexandria alone by the end of the nineteenth century. This book tells the stories of three such forgotten travelers in Egypt, who were not wealthy or famous and who traveled on more limited budgets.