The Romanized/Colonized Gauls
By contrast, the ancients understood France’s relationship to imperial Rome very differently. They began their construct of French history with a later set of Gauls—those who were being transformed into civilized, Romanized beings. Their construct accepted the Greco-Roman representation of their ancestors as true. To grasp what this internalized version meant, I would first like to return to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman portrait of the Gauls and of their civilizing process. I offered a glimpse of this portrait in the preceding chapter, and we should remember that it is not an accurate historical account of what actually happened but is simply the Greco-Roman representation of the Gauls’ past. As Greg Woolf has stressed, the Romans’ historical and literary accounts of their colonization of Gaul were quite distorted, as the process was much longer and more complicated than the Romans wanted to admit.70 In point of fact, the establishment of a Roman order in Gaul was punctuated with many reversals and violent revolts, with the Gauls mounting great resistance. Nevertheless, I emphasize the dominant Greco-Roman discourse because it, more than the historical reality, shaped the French discourse about their ancestors and themselves. Ultimately this discourse would shape the nation’s own projects as colonizers in the New World and also its nineteenth- and twentieth-century endeavors in Africa and Asia.
Many Hellenistic Greeks and Romans wrote about the Roman colonization of Gaul, describing it as what could anachronistically be called a “civilizing mission.” This term was invented in the nineteenth century to describe the French efforts to civilize and colonize the indigenous inhabitants of their African and Asian territories. However, the concept existed long before the term’s invention, dating back to the Roman colonization of Gaul. The Roman understanding of this concept differed from that of the French since it openly conceived of their civilizing and colonizing missions as fused, as two sides of the same phenomenon. The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that the gods had chosen them to conquer, rule, and civilize the world.71 They thought colonization was beneficial because it brought civilization to the barbarians. The Romans used their civilization as an instrument of colonization, spreading humanitas throughout their empire.72 Humanitas provided the condition for human beings to realize their full potential as humans by becoming civilized.73 Pliny the Elder wrote that Rome, “the capital of the world … is the nursling and the mother of all other lands, chosen by the providence of the gods to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make manners gentle, to draw together in converse by a community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of so many nations, to give mankind civilization (humanitatem homini daret), and in a word to become throughout the world the single fatherland of all the races.”74 Although the Greeks had invented the concept, the Romans spread humanitas throughout the world. In so doing, they believed they were performing a great service to humankind, transforming the barbarians of the world through civilization, making their “manners gentle,” and uniting them in the Roman civitas.
The Romans adopted a “soft” mode of domination, as the sixteenth-century French humanist Geofroy Tory described it. He distinguished between two forms of force, between cultural and military power. Characterizing the first form, he explained that “the Romans, who have dominated the greatest part of the world, have prospered and obtained more victories by their language than by their lance.”75 The Romans used their civilization as a mode of domination, although they also used physical force. Their soft approach to imperial expansion was predicated on the supposition that their civilization was so superior that it would become a magnet for others. Non-Romans, perceiving their own inferiority and wanting to improve their lives, would voluntarily imitate the Romans and cast aside their former ways to become like their chosen models in a Romanizing process.
Many Greek and Roman historiographers portrayed the Gauls as good colonial subjects, intelligent enough to recognize Rome’s superiority. Thus the Gauls eagerly “volunteered” to imitate their conquerors. According to Strabo, they were more eager than other peoples to adapt to the Roman way of life: “Again, the Romans conquered these people much more easily than they did the Iberians.”76 He further commented: “If coaxed, they so easily yield to considerations of utility…. At the present time they are all at peace, since they have been enslaved and are living in accordance with the commands of the Romans who captured them.”77 Similarly, Caesar praised them for their ability and eagerness to imitate the Romans: “They are a nation possessed of remarkable ingenuity, and extremely apt to copy and carry out anything suggested to them.”78 Their supposed eagerness to adapt to the Roman way of life was part of what made the Gauls great, according to Caesar and Strabo.
As good colonial subjects, the Gauls became so fully Romanized that they purportedly forgot their own past, and even forgot their own language. As Strabo wrote: “[They] have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more. And most of them have become Latins, and they have received the Romans as colonists, so that they are not far from being all Romans. And the present jointly-settled cities, Pax Augusta in the Celtic country … manifest the change to the aforesaid civil modes of life.”79 Once the Gauls “received the Romans as colonists,” they abandoned their former life as “barbarians.” Gradually they formed cities and followed a more restrained, civilized way of life. After becoming sedentary, they turned to farming, and some even studied philosophy and eloquence. Strabo recounts that the Gauls in Marseilles, the Massiliotes,
became more and more subdued as time went on, and instead of carrying on war have already turned to civic life and farming…. For all the men of culture turn to the art of speaking and the study of philosophy; so that the city, although a short time ago it was given over as merely a training school for the barbarians and was schooling the Galatae to be fond enough of the Greeks to write even their contracts in Greek, at the present time has attracted also the most notable of the Romans, if eager for knowledge, to go to school there instead of making their foreign sojourn at Athens…. Seeing these men and at the same time living at peace, the Galatae are glad to adapt their leisure to such modes of life.80
Over time, the Gauls became Romans. Describing one group of Gauls, the Cavari, Strabo wrote: “The name of the Cavari prevails, and people are already calling by that name all the barbarians in that part of the country—no, they are no longer barbarians, but are, for the most part, transformed to the type of the Romans, both in their speech and in their modes of living, and some of them in their civic life as well.”81 Given that Strabo found the Gauls “transformed to the type of the Romans” in the Augustan Age, shortly after the conquest, H. D. Rankin concluded that the Gauls did in fact assimilate very rapidly into Roman culture.82
Moreover, the Gauls assimilated voluntarily and happily, at least according to many Greek and Roman accounts. These colonial subjects identified with their Roman colonizers because they perceived the benefits of Roman rule. Far from feeling oppressed, the Gauls supposedly felt happy and expressed gratitude, not resentment. As Strabo wrote, “Along with the happy lot of their country, the qualities of both gentleness and civility have come … to the Celtic peoples.”83 The Gauls were “glad to adapt their leisure to [the Roman] modes of life.”84 As a result, their quality of life improved vastly. Strabo praised the Gauls for being intelligent enough to welcome the Romans with open arms.
The Romans saw themselves as liberators, freeing the barbarians from their ignorance. Motivated by love and generosity, the Romans saw themselves not as usurpers or conquerors but as friends, nurturing the less fortunate and treating them like family. These “friends” saw their colonizing mission as so soft that it merged with their civilizing mission and could not be reduced to a power dynamic of military conquest. The Romans wanted to believe that they did not impose their will on barbarians through brute force. The Gauls voluntarily chose Roman rule as a form of self-improvement.
In viewing themselves as the Gauls’ liberators, the Romans used an interpretive lens that reflected their own responses to