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

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.