Victor Séjour. La Tireuse de Cartes.

(MORTARA, EDGARDO).

Michel Levy

Paris

1860

A Drama in Five Acts.

Links the desired need for freedom of both Jews and and Blacks equally. Juan Victor Séjour Marcou et Ferrand (1817-74) was an American Creole of color and expatriate writer. Born in New Orleans, he moved to Paris aged 19 where he spent the rest of his life. This work is by far the most important and influential dramatization of the Mortara case. It influenced Napoleon III, Emperor of France, to intercede with Pope Pius IX in his attempt to free the young boy. “Séjour’s La Tireuse de Cartes (The Fortune-Teller) is a result of the enormous amount of public attention received by the Mortara case, revealing an era of trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African-American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent.” See Elèna Mortara, Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations (2015).”