I owe my existence to a French porcelain bonbon box. Not the delicate bonbonniere1 with hand-painted flowers that still sits on a table at my childhood home in Alexandria, Egypt, but a different box, one my father failed to gift to a woman he once intended to marry.
In 1970, Egyptian marriage custom expected a groom to demonstrate his social standing by offering a bonbonnière as a gift to his betrothed. My father, a quintessential young academic with thick, black frames and a head buried in his library of law books, was not attuned to these mores of class and courtship. One missing box, one offended bride, and one indignant mother-in-law later, the engagement was dissolved.
A photo of my mother’s bonbon box, courtesy of a family friend, Ashraf Ateya.
My father would then purchase not one, but two porcelain boxes: one which he smashed in front of his former fiancée to mark his own indignation, and another which eventually became his first gift to my mother and one of her most cherished possessions.
As a child, I took for granted that this gift was both a symbol of my parents’ love and a marker of their social elegance. Yet as an adult gazing at the rounded dome of my mother’s bonbonnière—a memento all the more precious since my father’s passing in 2003—I grew increasingly curious about the origins of this strange custom. Could such a deeply personal attachment be a product of colonial history? After all, my father was not the first man whose marriage and breakup were entangled with the politics of French porcelain: it was a history he shared with none other than French officer-turned-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Egyptian affinity for French tastes dates back to Bonaparte’s violent occupation of Egypt in 1798, a three-year campaign which gave us, among other things, institutions of civil law, bureaucratic red tape, and the entire discipline of Egyptology.2 I imagined, perhaps, that the custom was introduced by the scores of Egyptian men who were henceforth sent to France on student missions, returning with their heads full of new ideas and their arms brimming with porcelain boxes filled with sweet treats.
Indeed, in the 18th and 19th centuries, French porcelain, like its Chinese predecessors, was a gift fit for kings. The state-owned Sèvres company, the most prestigious French porcelain maker, produced a multitude of finely decorated dinner services for the royal court and as diplomatic gifts to royal families across Europe.3
But French porcelain also had a historical entanglement with marriage and relationships, one which overlapped with the history of French imperial ambitions in Egypt. Built in 1756, the Sèvres factory had as its first patrons King Louis XV and his long-time mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The latter was alone responsible for the purchase of approximately 2,500 pieces of Sèvres porcelain, turning it into a fashion to be emulated by all who wished to demonstrate their sophistication. So marked was Madame de Pompadour’s influence that the factory named several models after her, including the pot-pourri Pompadour and the urne Pompadour.4
Half a century later, following a slump in production prompted by the French Revolution, it was Bonaparte himself who helped revive the ailing factory through a range of new commissions. Among these were two tableware sets depicting scenes from his Egyptian campaign, based on the account and illustrations of diplomat and artist Vivant Denon.5
The first Egyptian Sèvres Service, gifted to Alexander I of Russia in 1807. Except for a few plates, it is identical to Josephine’s set, and also includes the sculpted centerpiece. It is displayed at the State Museum of Ceramics at the Kuskovo Palace in Moscow, Russia. (Wikimedia Commons).
The first set, produced between 1804-1806, was presented to Tsar Alexander I of Russia. The second, produced between 1810 and 1812, was intended as a divorce gift to the woman with whom Bonaparte shared a fraught and passionate love-hate relationship: his wife Josephine. Both represented a decorative style inspired by the era’s “Egyptomania” – a fashionable craze for any and all things Egyptian.6
Josephine’s 72-piece gilded set, which she commissioned herself upon receiving a settlement of 30,000 francs, was painted in the same signature navy as my mother’s bonbonnière. It came with a magnificent sculpted centerpiece containing miniatures of three ancient Egyptian temples, four obelisks, two colossi of Memnon, and nine sphinxes. It epitomized the colonial desire to acquire and possess: of one of the temples, Denon himself had said, “If ever we should be disposed to transport a temple from Africa to Europe, this I am speaking of should be selected for the purpose.”7
Yet in the time it took to produce the set, Josephine changed her mind: declaring it too severe and outmoded, she rejected the gift and sent it straight back to Sèvres.8
A plate from Josephine’s Egyptian tableware set depicting statues of Amenhotep III (also known as the Colossi of Memnon) in Luxor, Egypt. Currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. (Wikimedia Commons).
My mother’s bonbon box, just like Josephine’s divorce gift, is just as much a product of empire as it is an expression of love. Yet I never did discover the exact origins of the Egyptian bonbonnière ritual. Such is the nature of colonial imprint: those which prove most intimate and lasting are as difficult to trace as they are impossible to deny. Unlike Josephine’s outmoded Egyptomania, they cannot be neatly ascribed to a particular place or period in time. But they can be enclosed in a gilded porcelain box, its presence in my childhood home a material testament to the durability of colonial encounters.
- A bonbonnière is a small, ornamental candy box or dish.
- Paul Strathern, Napoleon in Egypt (New York: Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks, 2009); Elliott Hutchinson Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805-1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
- Emily J. Richardson, “Unlikely Citizens? The Manufacturers of Sèvres Porcelain and the French Revolution” (PhD diss., University College London, 2007).
- Richardson, 2007; see also Johannis Tsoumas, “Le Joyau Des Arts Décoratifs Européens: The Sèvres Porcelain Factory Resuscitation from 1804 to 1815.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 9, no. 3 (2017).
- Denon was among a large contingent of scholars, scientists and artists (known as savants) who accompanied Bonaparte on his Egyptian campaign. His illustrated account of the campaign was published in 1802 in the two-volume Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte. In the same year, he was appointed director-general of museums and the first director of the Musée Napoleon, today known as the Louvre. The museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of Egyptian antiquities. For more on the Louvre, see Andrew McClellan,. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
- Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, “The Egyptian Centerpiece of the Sèvres Manufactory” in Beyond Egyptomania: Objects, Style and Agency, edited by Miguel John Versluys, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 169-83.
- Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, “The Egyptian Centerpiece of the Sèvres Manufactory” in Beyond Egyptomania: Objects, Style and Agency, edited by Miguel John Versluys, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 169-83.
- In 1818, Louis XVIII decided to gift the service to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. See also Dawn Hoskin, “The Rejected Divorce Gift & The Egyptian Pharaoh,” V&A Blog, Victoria and Albert Museum, April 1, 2015.
