The Franco-Prussian war in 1870-1871 brought a great impact on both Germany and France. Germany benefited from the war the establishment of the Second Empire while France was taken the territory of Alsace-Lorraine by Prussia. Such a great debacle challenged France’s identity as a nation-state and threatened the French national image to be feminized. Thus, it became a central preoccupation for the French to find a means to re-orient their collective identity in a nationalist spirit. According to Annegret Fauser’s historical research, one of the identity-searching attempts was to ‘masculinise’ the French culture. Accordingly, patriotic songs and patriotic choice of subjects for vocal music emerged as to respond the Franco-Prussian War by emphasizing their masculine qualities. A further attempt was to differentiate ‘self’ and ‘Other’ in gender terms: Simply put, this attempt feminizes the Orient to be conquered by the West, e.g., the French; it testifies Edward Said’s thesis that “Orientalism [is seen] as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” After the Franco-Prussian War, a considerable number of French oriental operas emerged and they outnumbered those before the war since this genre was cradled at the beginning of 19th century. By citing examples from L&;eacute;o Delibes’ Lakm&;eacute;, Jules Massenet’s Tha&;iuml;s and Charles-Camille Saint-Sa&;euml;ns’ La Princesse Jaune, this paper argues that French oriental operas actively participated the aforementioned attempts by gendering the self and the Other. This paper demonstrates how musically, after the Franco-Prussian War, French nationalism was translated into French oriental operas by affirming the masculine ‘self’ that conquers the feminine ‘Other’.
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This sentence doesn’t quite make sense to me. Can you please try to rewrite it by breaking it up into smaller units?
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It doesn’t make sense to me either. By the way, nation state should not be hyphenated.
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