In fact, however, this discourse did not convey the complexity of the Roman-Gaul encounter. As Greg Woolf has pointed out, the concept of “Romanization” is erroneous, for several reasons. First, it presupposes that there was a preexisting notion of a pure Roman culture. But actually “there was no standard Roman civilization against which provincial cultures might be measured. The city of Rome was a cultural melting pot and Italy experienced similar changes to the provinces.” Second, Romanization did not “culminate in a cultural uniformity throughout an empire.”87 Third, this oversimplified discourse did not account for a high level of Gallic resistance.
Nevertheless, the idealized Roman discourse prevailed—and on a grand scale. So much so that long after the Roman Empire had disappeared, its supposedly friendly ghosts still lived on, taking up residence inside France’s collective psyche. When early modern French intellectuals looked back on their own past, they identified to a large degree with the Romans against the earlier, independent Gauls. Writing at the very end of the seventeenth century, Charles Rollin, a highly distinguished historian and educator, praised the Roman colonial strategy. He lauded its policy of colonizing through love, and blurring the “us-them” distinction. Unlike most other colonizers, the Romans did not treat “the vanquished as enemies according to the custom of other conquerors, by exterminating them, stripping them of freedom and reducing them to servitude, or in forcing them, by the harshness of oppression, to hate their new government.”88 On the contrary, Rollin thought they treated the Gauls with love, hoping to include them, not subjugate them. The Roman strategy “viewed them as natural subjects, [and] made them live with them in Rome, bestowed upon them all the privileges of previous citizens, adopted their holidays and sacrifices, granted them access to all civil and military employment without a second thought; and in showing them all the advantages of the State’s beneficence, Rome attached them to itself by such powerful and voluntary bonds, that they were never tempted to break them.”89 Because the Romans colonized through love, they were soon loved. The Roman general became a “protector” to the Gauls, much like a father who “treat[ed] them all like … his children.”90 The Roman general “pleaded their cause in the senate, protected their rights and interests,”91 and included the transformed Gauls as naturalized Roman citizens.
According to Rollin, this strategy sought to dissolve the initial Gaul-Roman boundaries by giving the Gauls “all the rights” of the Roman-born and “admitted [some of them] into state government,” thus encouraging them to accept Roman beliefs and values. The “Gauls were full of consulary families,” and they fulfilled “civil and military appointments.”92 The Romans promised that the “us-them” boundary would be stretched to include the Gauls, “without almost no difference between them and their vanquishers.”93 The Roman colonial strategy was supposedly open and inclusive, erasing the initial Rome-Gaul distinction. Once the colonized Gauls were properly educated and transformed by the Roman civitas, they became members of the Roman community.
The Romans’ seductive culture was an instrument of colonial domination: it would stimulate in the Gauls a love for their colonizer, inducing the colonized to imitate the colonizer/civilizer voluntarily, hoping their conqueror’s cultural superiority would rub off on them. The Gauls’ imitation of the Romans would set in motion a seemingly natural Romanization or civilizing process. Roman eloquence was essential to this goal: it was “the art and ability to win [the Gauls’] minds,” enticing them to willingly identify with the colonizer and see them as liberators, not conquerors, and “attach [the Gauls] to [Rome’s] power, to its advantages and glory.”94 Lured into fully associating themselves with Roman prestige and power, the Gauls no longer claimed a separate identity.
The Romans thus dissolved the “us-them” barrier by making both the colonizer and the colonized forget the divide separating them. Admiring this approach, Rollin observed that the colonizer “forgot its status as a vanquisher,” and the colonized forgot that they were ever colonized: “one did not see any freed slave who did not prefer this new country to his native land and his family.”95 To prefer the new country meant that the colonized forgot their old habits and customs. The Gauls became attached to the Romans “by bonds so powerful and voluntary that they were never tempted to break them,” continued Rollin.96 The Romans treated the Gauls as if they “were born and sprang from the earth,” and thus the colonized forgot their first birth.97 And so did posterity in France looking back on the Romanized Gauls. Tacitus is an example of this phenomenon. As H. D. Rankin points out, it was widely believed that Tacitus was a Gaul, born in Narbonese or Cisalpine Gaul, who became so much like a Roman that he is often thought of as Roman. But his origins were difficult to prove.98 Forgetting thus played a key role in the Romans’ colonizing/civilizing mission. The colonized identified with the colonizer, forgetting the original power dynamic by viewing their masters as civilizers and liberators.
The “Ancients” Win the Memory War
The ancients won the memory war. The officially accepted story of France has relegated the colonized past of its nation’s ancestors to a prehistory. French history began when the Gauls were already subject to the Romans’ civilizing mission and were benefitting from it. In this version, the Gauls were dutiful subjects, as were their French descendants. Or rather, the Gauls were not colonial subjects but successors, transformed from a “them” into an “us” with their former masters, becoming their heirs and inheriting the same role as their masters.99
The outcome of the memory war over the two Gauls had three decisive consequences for French literary and cultural history. First, it grounded the disjunction between the nation’s own cultural and colonial stories. The cultural story framed the Roman colonization of Gaul as a civilizing mission. This frame obscured what was true for the Romans: they acknowledged that their colonizing and civilizing missions were two sides of the same phenomenon. The French cultured elite, however, needed to separate them to preserve their own dignity and pride. In severing the role of the Romans as civilizers from their role as colonizers, the French elite sought to avoid the problems of imitating and identifying with colonizers who had oppressed them. Given the glory and greatness of Rome, it is not surprising that the French church, state, and “artisans of glory” chose to identify with it rather than against it. In so doing, the ancients replaced the story of resentment against Roman domination with the story of love and of gratitude for the gift of civilization. This winning narrative thus illustrates what the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o observed centuries later in Decolonizing the Mind (1986): “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues” and telling the colonizer’s