This disproportion becomes even more accentuated when we consider the duration of the Quarrel. Scholars differ on how to date it. Many date it to before the seventeenth century, interpreting it as a vast, sprawling, and amorphous set of controversies that include Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) as a key moment. Hundreds of other writers, both before Du Bellay and after him, took up their pens to prove the worth of the French language and of its literary culture in relation to that of Ancient Greece and Rome. But precisely how far back the Quarrel extends is unclear. Hubert Gillot reasonably traced it back to the late fifteenth century.4 Similarly, the Quarrel’s forward reach is also unclear. Marc Fumaroli and Anne-Marie Lecoq expanded it to 1761, although one could plausibly stretch that date even further forward to encompass Victor Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell, published in 1827.5 My point, however, is not so much to set exact dates in either direction as to emphasize the Quarrel’s long duration. If these debates generated enough passion to last three centuries, they had to have hit a very raw and powerful nerve. But what was it? Why was imitation such an explosive issue?
This strange disproportion has caused many scholars to trivialize the Quarrel and yet acknowledge its importance. The term itself, “Quarrel,” suggests a trivialization, lacking the weightiness of its British counterpart, the Battle of the Books, as Joan DeJean has rightly observed.6 Ernest Curtius implicitly trivialized the Quarrel by seeing in it simply a standard conflict between the old and the new.7 Acknowledging the long-standing trivialization, Terence Cave has suggested that the Quarrel’s “surprising virulence” may have caused the “histories of literature … [to] treat the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns as a rather parochial dispute among French lettrés of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.”8 In some sense, most scholars have been hard pressed to explain what was really at stake, which is precisely why many trivialize it.9 Or they just assume that time has dulled its edge because the issues that were important then have lost their sharpness for us now.
In this chapter, I argue that imitation was an explosive issue because it hit a nerve that neither we nor the Quarrel’s participants fully understood. It is not unusual for individuals or groups to become embroiled in emotional disputes over issues they cannot articulate or even fathom. Not uncommonly, they displace the real issue with smaller, more trivial ones. All they know is that they experience anxiety and anger but cannot name their real source. The early modern writers could not name it because they did not have the language or conceptual tools to do so. They called it imitation, but this word hid a deeper conflict.
This chapter unearths this buried conflict by extending the Quarrel’s foundations back to the late fifteenth century. The late seventeenth-century debates were simply the tip of a giant iceberg that was connected, at the base, to the debates of the late medieval era. The issues varied over the centuries, to be sure; but they were nevertheless all still part of one large, overarching set of controversies that constitute the Quarrel. Stretching the Quarrel’s foundational moment back two centuries is hardly a quibble about dates or nomenclature. It reflects the Quarrel’s larger dimensions by exposing the roots from which its debates about imitation have been severed: France’s colonized past.
This past, however, was invented in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when France’s humanists exhumed the Gauls, claiming them as ancestors to escape Greco-Roman domination and suffocation, as discussed in the previous chapter. This proposed Gallic heritage gave rise to the Quarrel’s foundational battle. It was a “memory war” about the writing of French history. Were the Romans an “us” or a “them”? The meaning of imitation would ultimately be shaped by the outcome of this memory war. Were the elite imitating models from their civilizers or from their former colonizers? Would the imitation of Roman thought forms liberate the French or subjugate their hearts and minds? This foundational question gave imitation a sharp edge.
This chapter thus uncovers the memory war at the base of the Quarrel and discusses how it mattered for France’s cultural self-understanding. But before doing so, it is important to elucidate its key terms, “ancient” and “modern.” It is difficult to define them in a stable and meaningful way, for several reasons. First, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the term “Ancient” referred both to the Ancient Greeks and Romans as well as to France’s early modern writers who fused their identity with their models. This very confusion comes out of the colonial dilemma I am discussing: the ancients had internalized the discourse of the Ancients and (con)fused their identity with them.
Second, the term “Ancient” is problematic because it conflates the Greeks and Romans as if they were essentially the same. However, Rome was much more important for France than was Ancient Greece. Anthony Pagden observed that Rome in particular “provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium Romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of Western Europe.”10 The Romans were the more important model, which also made them greater figures of resentment. The effects of Roman rule were present in the every day life of France’s cultured elite, especially in their language, law, and customs.11 Many members of the French elite used the term “Rome” as a code word to express their anger against several different adversaries, as I indicated in the previous chapter. Resentful of the Romans, many men of letters turned toward the Greeks as an alternative. Hellenism came into vogue in the 1550s with Ronsard’s attempt to counter the “Latinate” poets from Lyon. Others, such as Henri Estienne and Blasset, argued that French derived etymologically from Greek, not Latin.12 The Greeks, however, were hardly a safe haven, since they were problematic in yet other respects. Thus, although I will usually differentiate the Romans from the Greeks, at other times I will group them together as Ancients because many Romans, seeing the Greeks as their cultural masters, absorbed a number of their assumptions, values, and beliefs as foundations for their own, making it impossible to consistently differentiate Greek from Roman culture.
Third, the term “ancient” is confused in its relation to “modern” because the implied opposition does not hold firm. Neither camp can be aligned with a systematic, consistent set of beliefs. Most authors do not fit squarely on one side or the other, because many were modern with respect to some issues and ancient with respect to others. Moreover, the categories “modern” and “ancients” were themselves not clearly fixed, for they often slipped into their opposite. Thus these labels do not appear to be meaningful, since they do not have a rational consistency. This instability is perhaps one reason why many scholars tend to trivialize the Quarrel and have not accorded its debates the great importance they deserve.
More generally, it should be observed that the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns existed within several different fields of inquiry. I focus on imitation as a literary and cultural conflict to defend the nation’s language and letters. The battles in this conflict were bound up with the construction of French history. I separate out these literary and cultural battles from the related conflicts in philosophy and science, which overlapped at their core. In science and philosophy, Francis Bacon and René Descartes were moderns who challenged the standard beliefs about what counts as “knowledge.”13 They asked: By what methods does one pursue knowledge? What are its sources? Who are its authorities? What are its goals? While these questions are linked to the nation’s literary and cultural battles, their connections lie beyond our present concerns.
The Memory War of the Two Gauls
When the French cultured elite exhumed the Gauls and enthroned them as their ancestors, they faced a central question: Which Gauls did they have in mind? The Gauls were not a monolithic unit; rather, they could be divided into multiple subgroups.14 The major distinction here is not the difference between the Gauls and the Celts, since most historians use these terms interchangeably, as do I.15 Instead, the most important distinction I am making is between the Gauls before colonization and after colonization. Some sixteenth-century intellectuals (whom I loosely label “moderns”) championed an independent, precolonized image of the Gauls to break with their former colonizers