Biography

French diplomat Edouard Antoine de Thouvenel began his political career in 1850 as the political bureau chief of the foreign ministry and served in Spain, Paris, Brussels, and Athens before he was appointed to İstanbul as ambassador in June of 1855. The son of one of Napoléon I’s generals, the ambassador left his infant son and sick wife behind and arrived in İstanbul on one of the most heated days of the Crimean War. The same year on December 28th, following a grand procession from the French Palace in Pera to Çırağan Palace, Thouvenel, who served as ambassador until he was recalled in 1860, presented the medal of the Légion d’Honneur to Sultan Abdülmecid on behalf Napoléon III. The ambassador implemented a policy in support of the reforms and modernization attempts of the Ottoman State and played an instrumental role in the issuing of the Declaration of Reforms (Islahat Fermanı) on 28 February 1856.

A year before his arrival in Turkey, a portrait of Thouvenel in official attire was painted by portraitist Adolph Diedrich Kindermann, a diplomat who had earlier served as the German consul in Paris. Thouvenel’s wife Marie and cousin Marie de Melfort arrived in İstanbul a year after the ambassador did. The letters these two young women wrote –separately– to the ambassador’s sister Henriette constitute intriguing documents that shed light to the life in foreign embassies and their circles in İstanbul. Thouvenel commissioned paintings of the French Palace in Pera and the Summer Palace in Tarabya to French artist Germain Fabius Brest, who visited İstanbul for the second time in 1855, presumably lived in the city for three or four years, and was renowned for his İstanbul paintings after he returned to Paris. A note on the reverse side of the paintings depicting the Summer Palace in Tarabya indicates that the ambassador and his family are portrayed aboard the ornate caïque in the foreground. Referring to the said palace as “the most beautiful mansion in the world” in a letter he once wrote, the ambassador also took pride of the palace’s “magnificent” garden. While the ambassador’s wife did not much enjoy the Palace at Pera due to the muddy and crowded streets, Thouvenel was much impressed by the tall ceilings and spacious halls of the building, which he described as the “consummate imperial palace.”