The writing of French history thus became a site of struggle in which the moderns developed a “new history” to respond to this dilemma. The term “new history” was not anachronistic; it figured in the title, Dessein de l’histoire nouvelle des Français (1598), written by Henri de La Popelinière who was also a Protestant, like Hotman. The other major proponents of a new history were Bodin, Budé, Le Roys, and Vignier, although Pasquier was its most successful practitioner, in George Huppert’s estimation.48 This new history proposed what Foucault would centuries later call a “counter-discourse,” a designation that postcolonial theorists have subsequently used.49 Pasquier’s new history challenged the authority of Greek and Roman historians such as Diodorus, Strabo, Livy, and even Caesar to tell the story of France’s ancestors. It did so by emphasizing that the Hellenistic Greeks and Romans were either ignorant or liars, biased against the Gauls.50 Pasquier charged that “the Roman historiographers” sought to “downplay our virtues that they could not steal from us” by making up false accusations, such as that “the Gauls were enticed by the sweetness of Italy’s wines.”51 To get beyond the Romans’ bias, he proposed that French writers choose their sources carefully, since some Greeks and Romans were less prejudiced than others. Julius Caesar should be the main source because he was the most respectful: “I have noticed in reading [Caesar] that the word ‘barbarian’ has escaped from his pen only twice in referring to us.”52 Pasquier’s new history thus raised the problematic issues of the proper sources for reconstructing France’s past.
Pasquier also proposed a new interpretive strategy that read Greek and Roman historiographers against the grain. He devised techniques to move beyond “the calumnies of some [Greek and Roman] authors who … sought to tarnish our victories.”53 This new kind of reading would look between the lines to tease out some facts and events that the Ancients presented, but then reject their interpretations. It would focus on the contradictions in the Ancients’ texts. If French historians pursued their implications, these texts would suggest the very opposite of what their Greek and Roman authors intended:
Given that the authority of some Latin authors has, over the long passage of time, insinuated itself or, more precisely, refined itself such that it is reputed to be true, it is difficult to uproot the commonly accepted opinion, especially when our understanding remains within the limits of a single narrator. We cannot correct such authors because we also learn from them. But sometimes, wishing to denigrate our victories to aggrandize their own, [the Latin authors] do not realize that they contradict themselves; that is to say, they portray events to make us look bad. Nevertheless, whoever would fit all the pieces of their narrative together will find that they show the exact opposite.54
After examining what made Caesar, Suetonius, and Tacitus conclude that the Gauls were frivolous and inconstant, Pasquier then turned their logic on its head. In his alternative logic, he showed that the Gauls had adopted a clever ruse to make their behavior appear inconstant in order to outsmart the Romans. In his view, “the Gauls’ excessive frivolity did not stem so much from an ‘ill-formed’ brain as from the desire to recover this first liberty, which Caesar has confirmed: their aim was freedom or at least freedom from foreign servitude.”55 To recover their freedom, the Gauls cleverly used the Romans’ own strategy against them.
Pasquier’s new reading strategy accounted for the absence of any Gallic writings. According to his alternative logic, the Gauls did not have any written accounts of their history because they purposely chose not to record any. This lack did not signify that they were illiterate. Their priests, the Druids, were highly literate, Pasquier claimed, but they were suspicious of putting their knowledge into writing for many of the same reasons that Plato’s Phaedrus articulated. Basing his argument on Caesar,56 Pasquier insisted that “the Druids were so stingy about committing anything to writing … [they were] so skeptical of how posterity might use [this knowledge] that they kept the actions and events of our kings within their own memories.”57 But their guardedness made them vulnerable to a memory theft. The Greeks and Romans stole the Gauls’ memory of themselves, Pasquier asserted. The Druids’ strategic logic was unfortunately turned against them. The Gauls did not protect their memory of themselves because they were preoccupied by war, religion, and justice. Their humanistic letters lagged far behind because the Gauls were more interested in performing “good deeds than in writing about them.”58 Joachim du Bellay made the same argument in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) when he addressed why “our language is not as abundant or as rich as Greek and Latin.” He explained it was due to the “ignorance of our ancestors,” who held “well-doing in higher esteem than fair speaking.”59
The absence of any Gallic texts to tell the Gauls’ own history was at the heart of France’s colonial dilemma. This lack forced many French writers to accept a Greco-Roman interpretation of their own past, which saw the Gauls as illiterate and hence barbaric. Geofroy Tory and others, however, interpreted this absence of writing differently. Based on their reading of Caesar, they argued that the Gauls did have writing. But the Greeks and Romans, fearful and jealous of the Gauls, sought to subjugate them by stealing the sources of their self-understanding. In his Champ Fleury (1529), Tory argued that the Gauls had a “working knowledge of reading and writing. Long before Julius Caesar came to France, philosophers named Druids … taught all those who came to memorize countless verses. I cannot say with certainty in which alphabet they taught: if it was in Hebraic, Greek, Latin, or French.”60 The Gauls’ writings “were abolished by Julius Caesar. He and the Romans were such greedy seekers of glory” that the Romans, like the Greeks, could not stand sharing the limelight with the Gauls.61 The Romans forced a cultural amnesia on their colonial subjects, “destroying laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers,” Tory wrote.62 By erasing the Gauls’ version of their own past, the Romans could then substitute their alternate version, which vaunted Roman “victories and achievements … recorded in their own Latin letters.”63
Joachim du Bellay also accused the Romans of memory theft. In his Défense, Du Bellay argued that the Romans, not satisfied with simply subjugating the Gauls militarily, sought to render them “vile and abject in comparison” by joining together “to conspire against us” to make the Gauls’ great deeds “so poorly preserved, that we have nearly lost not only the glory of them but their very memory.”64 So successful was the Roman campaign that the Gauls’ writings fell irretrievably into oblivion.
Without a written history of their own, the Gauls’ descendants had to see themselves through the distorted Greco-Roman memory of them, which was subsequently passed down to posterity, and came to seem true. Du Bellay railed against the Romans, who “to render us still more odious and contemptible, called us brutal, cruel and barbarous.”65 Incensed that the “Romans called us barbarians, given their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory,”66 the poet accused both the Greeks and the Romans of being liars. Thus, at the end of his Défense, Du Bellay castigated the Greeks as “that lying Greece,”67 and he incited his fellow humanists to smash the Greek and Roman treasures on their own altars. “Greek liars” became a rallying cry that other humanists, such as Jodelle, also invoked. This phrase had a Roman counterpart: “the charlatan Romans.”68 As liars, both the Greeks and Romans had invented an alternative past for the Gauls, a humiliating one that painted them as barbarians to make themselves look good. In short, the moderns’ counter-discourse argued that if the Gauls now appeared to be without writing, it was not because they were illiterate. Either the Gauls chose not to write, or if they did, the Romans plotted to erase all traces of those writings. Mainly, the Romans sought to steal the Gauls’ memory from them.
The Gauls were targets of theft because their greatness was so monumental and fearsome that the Greeks and Romans became jealous, waging a memory war to wipe them off the map of history. History was thus a major site of the battle between the ancients and the moderns. The moderns accused the Greeks and Romans of forcing the Gauls/French to see themselves and their descendants through their colonizers’ eyes. The