‘Propagender’: Marianne, Joan of Arc and the Export of French Gender Ideology to Colonial Cambodia (1863–1954)

Abstract

In 1873, ten years after the establishment of the French protectorate of Cambodia, the naval officer and explorer Louis Delaporte petitioned the French Ministry of Public Education for state gifts of European art. Female nudes such as Venus de Milo would be the best bet, Delaporte argued, to ‘vanquish the few religious scruples’ of Cambodia’s cultural guardians, the king and the chief monks.¹ Weeks later, armed with copies of Jean Thierry’s Leda with Swan and a host of other depictions of women by Raphael, Rembrandt and Rubens, Delaporte set sail on the first of many missions to cull Khmer monuments for Parisian museums. Delaporte’s calculated export of female imagery foreshadowed a rich traffic in French ideas of femininity and gender ideology.