Mobilizing Historicity and Local Color in _Fernand Cortez_ (1809): Narratives of Empire at the Opéra

Abstract

This article interrogates why the creators of Napoleonic opera, specifically of Gaspare Spontini’s Fernand Cortez (1809), were so eager to publicize their source-based method for representing history. The article frames this eagerness in broader developments toward historical realism in nineteenth-century France and its epistemological claims, namely, that history provides true knowledge about the past. These epistemological claims are foundational to how historians and artists sought to mobilize historicity and local color to champion narratives of empire as founded on the supposedly transhistorical process of civilization. In Fernand Cortez these mobilizations revised eighteenth-century skepticism toward sixteenth-century colonialism into a narrative of imperial success that the government hoped would garner support for Napoléon’s Spanish campaign. Ultimately, the emphasis on historicist detail undermined the opera’s specific propagandistic message, but it did provide a model that popularized and disseminated general ideologies about empire and civilization beyond France’s intellectual circles.