ITIER Jules (EN)
Jules Itier and the China Mission
There are many archives that shed light on the biography of Jules Itier, the highly original customs director: his marital status, a population census, and his service record in the customs administration, and so on. This provides indispensable complementary information about the man, and each photo, each page of his diary, and each object brought back from his travels, shed further light on him.
The fourth of a brotherhood of five children, Alphonse Eugène Jules Itier was born in Paris, on 8 April 1802 (AP, V3E/N 1 189). His father, Jean Joseph Paul Itier, a native of the Hautes-Alpes (Laragne, 1769–27 August 1804, Paris), died in Paris, two years after his son’s birth, at the age of thirty-three (AD (archives départementales) 34, 1 J 1660), at 158 Rue Neuve in Luxembourg (1st arrondissement): commander of the fifth battalion of the Hautes-Alpes during the first call for volunteers in 1793, he was transferred the following year to the fifty-first Brigade of Italy. He left the army in 1796, to support his family, and then moved to Paris to work as a banker (AD 34, 1 J 1660). In 1797, he married Marie Zoé Dubois (1778–1834), who herself was born into a dynasty of customs officials from the region of Grenoble and was the sister of Jean-Joseph-Marie Dubois-Aymé (1779–1846). A polytechnicien and Egyptologist (he took part in Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte in 1798), he was appointed, upon his return, Director of Customs in Lorient, Nantes, and Marseille (Gimon, G., no. 8, 1979, p. 82). Jules Itier benefitted from the support of a family circle that was closely linked to the activities of the ports, industry, commerce, and overseas affaires.
Service record
He began his studies at the Lycée Napoléon in Paris (Lycée Henri IV) in 1809 and completed them at the Collège Royal in Marseille (present-day Lycée Thiers) in 1819 (Magnier, M., 1877). Encouraged by his maternal uncle, Jean-Joseph-Marie Dubois-Aymé, Jules Itier initially envisaged a scientific career. He was admitted to the École Polytechnique after being the ‘preparation assistant of the chemist Vicat’ (Tamisier, M. F., 1880, p. 41). However, he embarked on an administrative career and he rose rapidly up the career ladder. His service record attests to this (AD 34, 5 P 182). Admitted at the very young age of seventeen, on 11 April 1819, as a supernumerary at the Customs Directorate in Marseille, where his uncle, Dubois-Aymé, was the director. He was promoted to the rank of clerical officer at the Customs Directorate in Belley (in the Ain département) in 1822, then sub-inspector at the Customs Directorate in Lorient in 1825, and La Rochelle in 1831. He was appointed inspector at the Customs Directorate in Bayonne in 1832, then in Perpignan in 1833, and Nantua in 1836. He joined many learned societies, in which he became an active and correspondent member (Staniszewska, B., 2017, p. 48).
A customs officer on a mission
His service record also shows that he was sent ‘on a mission to Africa, America, Oceania, and in Asia, from 1November 1842 to 1 August 1846’ (AD 34, 5 P 182)—missions that were publicly funded by the Ministries of Finance and Commerce. He had just turned forty. During the first semester of 1843, the government sent him as a special customs inspector to Senegal, Guyana, and the Antilles to promote France’s commercial expansion in these regions (FR ANOM 2400 COL81/3). As soon as he returned to France and before he had time to report on his mission, he was selected to take part in the commercial and diplomatic mission to China, at the Embassy-Extraordinary of Théodose de Lagrené (Mazauric, R., 2012, pp. 13–15), for the conclusion of a trade agreement, the Treaty of Huangpu (CADC, TRA18440022) proposed by Louis-Philippe and François Guizot, the Minister of Foreign Affairs (AN, F/12/2589 to F/12/2591). The trip lasted from 1843 to 1846. On 16 November 1843, in Brest, Jules Itier departed on a long journey that took him around the globe: to the island of Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), Bourbon Island (Réunion Island), Malacca (Malaysia), Singapore (Malaysia), Manilla (Philippines), Macao, Canton (China), the islands of Mindanao, Sulu and Basilan (Philippines), Borneo, the islands of Java and Sumatra (Indonesia), Cochinchina (Vietnam), the Bay of Tourane, Macau, and Hong Kong. He returned to France via Georges Town and Poulo Penang Island (Malaysia), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Aden (Egypt), the Suez, and Cairo; he sailed up the Nile to Philae, and crossed the Libyan desert, Alexandria, Malta, and Gibraltar, and arrived in Brest.
Political engagement
When he returned to China in February 1846, he married Henriette de Brémond (AD 38, 9NUM/5E186/24/185) in Grenoble. He was honoured as Officier de la Légion d’Honneur on 29 November (AN, LH/1337/65). On 1 August, he was promoted to the rank of principal inspector at the Customs Directorate in Marseille.
Appointed at the age of forty-six as customs director at Montpellier, he spent ten years, from 1June 1848 to 1 October 1857, in this ‘learned city, where he loved to stay’ (Tamisier, M. F., 1879, p. 43). His son, Paul-Jules-Aimé, was born in this city on 12 November 1849 (AD 34, 3 E 177/105). That year, he bought the priory of Véras (AD 05, 15 J 8–9), not far from Serres, from where his family originated in the Haut-Alpes. It was in this département that he took up the post of general councillor of the Canton of Serres, then Rosans. His profession of faith, during the elections of April 1848, after the proclamation of the Second Republic, stated: ‘all good citizens will come together to found our young Republic on the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’. On 22 September 1870, after the fall of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the Third Republic, a declaration was made: ‘Entrust me (…) with the difficult task of founding the French Republic on the unshakeable principles of liberty in order, the equality of duties and rights, and fraternity according to the Gospel’ (AD 05, 15 J 10, 15 J 11).
A long-standing passion for the sciences
In 1855, he was accepted into the ranks of the Académie des Sciences et Lettres in Montpellier. He wrote for the city’s Bulletin de la Société d’Agriculture and had many articles and brochures published that attested to his interest not only in his metier but in many other sciences. Appointed Principal Collector of Customs in Marseille on 1 October 1857, in the Directorate where he had started out as a customs officer, he was elected on 2 May 1859 to the Académie des Sciences et Lettres in Marseille. He retired on 1 September 1866, and chose Montpellier as his home port, ‘a city whose scientific renown had always attracted him’ (Magnier, M., 1877). He passed away at the age of seventy-five, at 34 Rue Saint-Guilhem, on 13 October 1877. His funeral was held in the Church of Sainte-Anne. He was buried in Serres, in the Hautes-Alpes (Magnier, M., 1877).
A dispersed collection
A written and visual testimony
Jules Itier made the most of the official missions he was obliged to undertake by the July Monarchy that took him to Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific (1842–1846) as a customs inspector; he was able to apply Daguerre’s process, with which had just become familiar, to record the scenes and landscapes of the far-distant lands he visited. In 1843, as part of the diplomatic and commercial Lagrené mission to China, he published on his return a large work entitled Journal de Voyage en Chine in three volumes (Itier, J., 1848–1853), which comprised more than a thousand pages of invaluable notes about the last years of the Qing Dynasty in China, and which attest to his passion for ethnography and exploration.
But his true legacy was his pioneering work on the first known daguerreotypes of China (as well as those of Vietnam, Singapore, Manilla, Sri Lanka, and Egypt). These were some of the first photographic views of China taken by a Westerner. These photos have an added interest as they are complemented by Jules Itier’s descriptions of the conditions in the which the shots were taken, his commentaries on them, and his diary entries.
Curious about this fascinating country—which was closed off to Europeans at the time—and its inhabitants and countryside, he photographed the region of the delta of the River of Pearls, along with the bay of Macau, the floating city of Canton, general views, pagodas, and temples, as well as portraits, costumes, and the lives of the Mandarins, street scenes, shops, and trading posts. Around forty of these daguerreotypes are now held in public collections. In 1968, the priory of Véras (in the Hautes-Alpes), where Itier had assembled his personal collections, was sold by the descendants of the family. The buildings deteriorated and archives and valuable objects were dispersed. In 1971, François Albert Itier sold thirty-seven of his great-great grandfather’s daguerreotypes to André Fage, the first director of the Musée Français de la Photographie in Bièvres (Essonne). In 1978, during a visit to Véras, the collector Gilbert Gimon (Gimon, G., 1979, 1980) found a number of daguerreotypes that the family had overlooked (Massot, G., 2015, p. 321). He rediscovered this collection of daguerreotypes and published two articles which were used as references for many years. Since 1971, other institutions around the world have acquired Itier’s daguerreotypes: the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (1984), the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (1985), the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (1987), the National Museum of Singapore (2005), the Macau Museum of Art (2006), and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (2008). Although thirty of Jules Itier’s daguerreotypes are held by known private collectors, just as many need to be located (Massot, G., 2015, p. 322) and sometimes turn up in auctions. The investigations to trace these daguerreotypes are ongoing. In 2012, two successive exhibitions attested to the growing interest of researchers in the reporter and photographer. The inaugural exhibition held in the new Pierresvives building in Montpellier, under the aegis of the General Council of the Hérault region, which wished to pay tribute to China, gave the Archives Départementales the opportunity to focus on this unique figure, who spent most of his life in Montpellier. He even imagined that one day French spirits and Muscats (Frontignan, Lunel) would conquer the Chinese market and ‘take root’ on the quays of Macau! (Mazauric, R., 2012, pp. 40–44)
The other exhibition—under the aegis of the General Council of the Essonne—, which was entirely devoted to Jules Itier, gave the Musée National de la Photo (in Bièvres) an opportunity to exhibit (at the Centre Culturel de Chine in Paris) the largest collection of daguerreotypes of China held in a public institution (’Jules Itier: Premières Photographies de la Chine 1844’, 2012).
Today, Terry Bennet’s research (2009) and Gilles Massot’s in-depth study (2014, 2015, and 2018) have enabled us to re-evaluate Gilbert Gimon’s contribution, gain a better understanding of the photographic work that Jules Itier undertook as part of the Lagrené Mission, and put forward a fresh interpretation of his oeuvre.
The collected objects
Jules Itier adopted a multifaceted scientific approach, and was a geologist, agronomist, and naturalist. When he returned to France in February 1846, he brought back a considerable number of observations about natural history, samples of stones and fossils, and various articles of local craftsmanship, as did his traveling companions, four experts from French industry: Isidore Hedde (1801–1880), Auguste Haussmann (1815–1874), Natalis Rondot (1821–1900), and Édouard Renard (1812–1898). Delegated by the chambers of commerce in Paris, Lyon, Mulhouse, Reims, and Saint-Etienne, and placed under his authority, they also acquired expertise and collected many technical objects, tools, which were presented together in four public exhibitions held in Paris, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, and Nîmes between 1846 and 1849 (French Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, 1846; Hedde, I., 1847, 1848; and Hedde, P., 1849).
Jules Itier kept some of these objects in his property at Véras, which was like a cabinet de curiosités (Mazauric, R., 2012, p. 16) or donated some of them to public institutions. Hence, in August 1846, he donated stoneware and porcelain objects to the Musée de la Manufacture Royale in Sèvres and recorded this scrupulously in his diary (Itier, J., 1848–1853, Vol. II, p. 65, p. 88). The manufactory’s inventory details thirty items (Mazauric, R., 2012, p. 31, note 84; 2014, p. 55). Fifteen of them (an oil lamp, a fountain in the shape of a small theatre, an incense burner, a child riding on the back of a water buffalo, etc.) were exhibited in 2012 at the Archives Départementales exhibition in the Hérault region.
Other objects were added to the collections of the Conservatoire des Arts and Métiers via the French Ministry of Commerce. The register of donations at the CNAM records, for the year 1853, a small collection of four Chinese objects brought back from Canton by Jules Itier. (Mazauric, R., 2012, p. 30, note 83; and 2014, pp. 54–55). Three of these objects were also exhibited in the Archives Départementales exhibition in Hérault in 2012.
Furthermore, in 1919, Jules’s son, Paul Jules Itier (1849–1936), donated to the Musée Départemental of the Hautes-Alpes, in Gap, part of the collections of geology, natural history, and Chinese ethnography bequeathed by his father, as attested in the museum’s hand-written inventory (Mazauric, R., 2012, p. 16, note 52). The museum also houses a plaster bust of his father, dating from 1865.
In April 1852, Jules Itier enriched the collections of the Faculty of Sciences in Montpellier through a donation of corals brought back from Martinique and Singapore, and swallows’ nests from Sumatra, and so on (general inventory of the Faculty’s collections, 1843–1883). Furthermore, he popularised many unfamiliar products such as sorghum, rubber, and gutta-percha (gum from natural latex), and tried to grow Asian textile plants (Itier, J., 1850) in our climate, with which ‘he enriched the Jardin des Plantes in Montpellier’ (Itier, P. -J., 1896, p. 532). An adventurous and enterprising individual, Jules Itier used the China Mission to proclaim that ‘today, the only propaganda that can overcome distances, dissipate prejudices, and merge the European and Chinese civilisations, (…) is the pacific propaganda of the modern sciences’ (Itier, J., 1848–1853, Vol. III, p. 187).
Jules Itier's travels
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