Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer

      

      Colonizer or Colonized

      COLONIZER

      OR

      COLONIZED

      The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

      SARA E. MELZER

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Melzer, Sara E.

      Colonizer or colonized : the hidden stories of early modern French culture / Sara E. Melzer.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN: 978-0-8122-4363-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. France—Civilization—History. 2. France—Civilization—Philosophy. 3. France—Civilization—Classical influences. 4. France—Colonies—America.

      DC33.4 .M44 2012

325.3'44097

2011030912

       In memory of my parents,Mildred Mahlin Melzer and Lester Melzer

      CONTENTS

       Introduction

       PART I. FRANCE’S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE ANCIENT WORLD

       Chapter 1. The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle: The Memory Wars over “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

       Chapter 2. The Return of the Submerged Story About France’s Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation

       PART II. FRANCE’S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE NEW WORLD

       Chapter 3. Relating the New World Back to France: The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage

       Chapter 4. France’s Colonial History: From Sauvages into Civilized, French Catholics

       PART III. WEAVING THE TWO COLONIAL STORIES TOGETHER: ESCAPING BARBARISM

       Chapter 5. Interweaving the Nation’s Colonial and Cultural Discourses

       Chapter 6. Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?

       Chapter 7. Imitation and the “Classical” Path

       Chapter 8. Using the Sauvage as a Lever to Decolonize France from the Ancients

       Conclusion. The Legacy of the Quarrel: The Colonial Fracture

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      There has never been a document of culture that was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism.

      —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

      “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

      Once upon a time, long before the birth of France, barbarians inhabited its land. These nomadic tribes, dwelling in forests and caves, were known as the Gauls. They dined on human flesh, or so Diodorus, the Greek historian of the first century B.C., recounted.¹ Then they washed down their feasts with wine or a drink they invented made out of barley, now known as beer.² Lacking any moderation, they became prey to their drunken cravings, and were driven to a state of near madness. But in their more sober moments, they aspired to some order and cleanliness: “They consistently use urine to bathe the body and wash their teeth with it,” Diodorus observed, “thinking that in this practice is constituted the care and healing of the body.”³ According to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman reports⁴ about the Gauls, their customs were above all marked by barbaric cruelty. Strabo said of the most northern tribes: “When they depart from battle they hang the heads of their enemies from the necks of their horses, and when they have brought them home, nail the spectacle to the entrances of their homes.”⁵ Such barbarism dominated all their practices. Their priests, the Druids, conducted human sacrifice and engaged in divination by striking a human being “in the back with a sabre, and from his death-struggle they divine[d]” truth.⁶ Cicero deemed this reported custom “monstrous and barbarous.”⁷ In battle, the Gauls were known to show up naked.⁸ While this practice might suggest a self-confident bravery, Diodorus saw it as a foolishness that went hand in hand with cowardice, for they would also flee the battlefield at the strangest moments. Livy viewed the Gauls as unstable in war, commenting that their “habitual practice” was to begin with a “furious attack,” but then their “physical strength melted away; in their first efforts they were more than men, in the end they were weaker than women.”⁹ Diodorus deemed their linguistic practices equally monstrous. “The Gauls are terrifying in aspect and their voices are deep and altogether harsh; when they meet together they converse with a few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another; and they like to talk in superlatives, to the end that they may extol themselves and depreciate all the other men. They are also boasters and threateners and are fond of pompous language, and yet they have sharp wits and are not without cleverness at learning.”¹⁰ As for their sexual practices, Diodorus reported that homosexuality was rampant. Many men did not sleep with their wives and “had very little to do with them” because they would “rage with lust” and “tumble with a catamite on each side.”¹¹ Such was the image of the Gauls that the Hellenistic Greek and Roman historiographers