Jean Savaron’s defense, Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement des rois et de l’Etat (1611), for example, used the primitive scene of the Gauls’ struggle against the Romans as a backdrop for the Catholic-Protestant controversy. In 1610, Henri IV was assassinated, just twelve years after he had signed the Edict of Nantes. His death raised fears that old wounds could be opened. A year after the assassination, Savaron (1566–1622), a magistrate, advised the new king, Louis XIII, on how to deal with “the barbarousness which has slipped in amongst your subjects,” in his defense of the nation’s world of letters.8 Writing within the larger context of the Catholic League’s efforts to clamp down on Protestant heresy, Savaron used the image of two different Gauls to conjure up France’s internal conflicts: “Nothing as much as letters can be recommended to kings to harness the passionate spirit of the French and confine it within their duty: [letters] provide the opportunity to bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts, [and] we created public spaces for the exercise of letters. The Gallic Hercules surmounted the previously invincible passionate spirit of the Gauls, drawing them to him through golden chains of speech.”9 Savaron aligned France’s murderous rebels with the ferocity of the primitive Gauls, and he projected the image of a civilized, Romanized Gaul onto the forces of order that needed to prevail. He urged that the latter stamp out its barbaric counterpart in order to “bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts.”10 Like their Gallic ancestors in their earliest stage, the wild French dissidents had “the ferocity innate in French minds that was never tempered by the sweetness of letters.”11 The current heretics were like the precolonized Gauls: unruly beasts that needed taming. A Gallic Hercules would bridle their wildness through his eloquent speech.
Savaron thus used the Roman colonial discourse with its conflict between the two Gauls as a frame for France’s internal religious and civil conflicts because it drew upon one of the most primitive and important of French dramas: the supposed barbarism of France’s Gallic past. This archaic story was still very much alive and gained in emotional force by virtue of being interwoven with other dramas in the French consciousness. Savaron’s use of the two Gauls suggested that he had largely internalized the Roman colonial discourse, favoring a civilized Gaul over a more independent but barbaric Gaul.
The French elite’s defenses of their language and world of letters adopted a common defensive strategy; they placed the perceived danger out of range of consciousness.12 This strategy clearly worked, since the fear of barbarism has been eclipsed by the story of its opposite: the nation’s cultural greatness. But the threat never vanished completely; barbarism continued to haunt the collective psyche of the nation’s world of letters. The very fact that the defense became such a prevalent genre was itself significant. The defenses took on such a strong emotional charge because they struggled against the enduring effects of the nation’s submerged colonial past.
A Memory of Their Own
The French defenses of their nation’s language and world of letters endeavored to respond to a key legacy of the nation’s colonized past: the lack of any written documents to record the Gauls’ history from their own perspective. Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) was a defense of the vernacular which addressed the feared perception that the Gauls were illiterate and thus barbaric. Tory anchored his defense in the troubling story of the Romans who, as part of their deceptive colonizing strategy, had maliciously stolen from the Gauls their favorable memory of their past. The Romans wrongly painted the Gauls as illiterate, he argued. France’s ancestors had already had a “working knowledge of reading and writing … long before Julius Caesar came to France.”13 However, their world of letters became vulnerable to a Roman theft because it was insufficiently developed. Their Roman conquerors could thus easily snuff it out and impose a cultural amnesia on the Gauls, “destroy[ing their] laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers.”14 These conquerors then substituted their own Romanized memories for those of the Gauls themselves, forcing the Gauls to celebrate Roman “victories and achievements … recorded in their own Latin letters.”15 Tory argued for developing the French language in this colonial context: to guard against another similar loss of the nation’s own memory. Having a history of their own meant that the Gauls/French would not have to look at themselves through the Greco-Roman portraits that cast them as the barbarian other.
Du Bellay’s Défense was of course the most famous and important of all the defenses. Like Tory before him, Du Bellay situated his defense of the vernacular within the context of the Gauls’ colonized past. He began his defense by casting the Romans as an imperial, self-aggrandizing “them” who self-consciously stole the Gauls’ memory in a deceptive and calculating plot. Conjuring up the specter of the Gauls’ remote colonial history, Du Bellay recounted how the Romans had engaged in a psychic and cultural warfare to deprive the Gauls of their own memory of themselves: “The Romans’ envy [of the Gauls] caused them to plot a conspiracy against us and weaken, as far as they were able, our warlike glory, whose brilliance they could not tolerate…. Not only have they done us wrong thereby, but, to make us seem yet even more contemptible, they have called us brutal, cruel, and barbarous.”16 Without a memory of their own, the Gauls and their French descendants were forced into internalizing their former colonizers’ perceptions of them:
The Romans called us Barbarians, seeing that in their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory, they sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject in comparison with them: principally the Gauls, from whom they suffered more shame and hurt than others. In this connection, reflecting often on why the Romans’ deeds are so celebrated throughout the world, nay, more highly preferred than those of all other nations taken together, I find no greater reason than this: that the Romans had a great multitude of writers so that most of their deeds … over many years, their ardour in battle … has been preserved entire until our times. On the contrary, the actions of other nations, especially the Gauls, before they fell into the power of the French, and the actions of the French themselves since they gave their name to the Gauls, have been so ill collected, that we have almost lost not only the glory of them, but even the memory of them. [my emphasis]17
The Roman plot against the Gauls prevented them and their French descendants from constructing an independent memory of their own past.
A century later, France’s world of letters was still on the defensive. The French Academy was founded in 1634 largely to guard against a memory theft. Nicolas Faret provided a rationale for the Academy in his Projet de l’académie, pour servir de préface à ses statuts (1634) by first highlighting that the Gauls/French were the victims of Greek and Roman colonial domination and not simply their heirs. Framing the Greco-Romans as jealous cultural imperialists, Faret argued that they had stolen the Gauls’ memory from them in a vicious power struggle. The Gauls had once established an empire so vast and feared that “for all time … [they] made themselves fearsome to the most celebrated Nations on earth, and their Name still reigns amongst several of them as a Trophy to their victories.”18 According to Faret, the Greeks and Romans were militarily inferior to the Gauls and felt dwarfed by them. So powerful were the Gauls that “our Reknown sometimes obscured that of the Greeks, and our Valor triumphed over the Greek People and their Provinces.”19 The Greeks and Romans, to compensate for their lack and give vent to their jealousy, shifted the battleground to their area of strength—the cultural arena. As masters of rhetoric, they marshaled words as important weapons in this war. They used their eloquence to alter how history represented the Gauls, reducing their stature for posterity. The Greeks, “with all their hate and artifice,” sought “to smother the truth [of the Gauls’ greatness] beneath [their] deceptive Histories.”20 Their linguistic weapons succeeded in distorting how history perceived their Gallic adversaries. As for the Romans, “it seems that [they] engaged with the Gauls only to slander them. Sometimes the Romans called them the most terrible and merciless of all Barbarians. Other times, they named the Gauls enormous and ferocious Giants, bloody Colossuses animated by furor alone and by the cruelty that they brought into the world,