As victims (and heirs) of Roman rhetoric, Faret and other French intellectuals understood firsthand the power of language: its force could compensate for insufficient military might, making false perceptions pass as vraisemblable and as historical truth. Faret warned that while the French kings could use physical power to “make their name known and their power dreaded,” such force would be weak “without the help of the Sciences and Arts.” Had the Gauls possessed “the art of making the natural ardor of their conquests well known through their writings,” their glory would not have been erased from history. Because the Gauls did not have their own world of letters, they could not counteract Roman slander. Consequently “the luster of the Gauls’ reputation for greatness faded and [was] finally extinguished [by a reputation] for barbarism.”23 Faret insisted that an academy be founded to cultivate French works of eloquence because only this linguistic art could control how the French elite and their nation would be perceived by others, by themselves, and by posterity.
In sum, France’s colonized past provides a larger context for understanding many of the defenses of the nation’s language and world of letters. The Roman theft of the Gauls’ memory of themselves lay at the root of the dilemma which trapped the French self-understanding within their former colonizers’ disdainful view of them. This dilemma thus motivated the state to institute an academy to ensure that France’s writers would possess a powerful language and world of letters capable of preserving their own memory from their own perspective. By cultivating their language and letters, the French nation would not suffer the same fate as the Gauls. The French Academy thus sought to liberate the nation from understanding itself through the denigrating lens of its former colonizers. Early modern France’s obsession with eloquence thus takes on a very different meaning within this colonial context which frames the Rome-Gaul story as a memory theft.
Internalizing the Threat of Barbarism
The French defenses of their world of letters targeted another problem resulting from the Gauls’ loss of their own historical memory. Unable to construct an independent picture of their own past, the Gauls and their French descendants became trapped in a Romanized hall of mirrors that reflected back to them a demeaning portrait. The Romans, having smashed or stolen all evidence of the Gauls’ greatness, reduced the Gauls to one central image—that of the barbarian other. This image became elite France’s Achilles’ heel. Centuries later, when competitors wanted to scorn France, they taunted it with this image because the invective surrounding it was already charged with venom and could reopen old wounds.
The fear of barbarism hung like a dark cloud over the sixteenth-century humanists’ efforts to shape and defend their own world of letters.24 Many outsiders accused the French of barbarism. The shrillest accusations came from the Italians, France’s chief rivals in a quest for political and cultural hegemony that dated back to the early part of the century and before. In 1507 François Tissard defended the French language and world of letters against the Italians’ charge of barbarism in an address to the students at the University of Paris. He formulated the issue by mimicking the snicker of a haughty Italian who taunted the French from the towering heights of his nation’s supposed cultural superiority: “So? … a good Frenchman hopes to pull his country out of barbarism and to prove its worthiness? … Do you [French] really hope to outshine those in our country [Italy], so famous, so eloquent, so polished? You who are barbaric and uncultivated? … Who are those people in nations beyond the mountains who have no knowledge of human letters, neither Latin nor Greek?”25 Adding to the Italians’ scorn of the French world of letters was a chorus of other Europeans. Erasmus, in De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio, devalued the French language by claiming that even a simple German boy could learn French in a few short months without much effort. He could do it “quite unconsciously while absorbed in other activities.” Moreover, French was “barbarous and irregular … [its] spelling does not agree with pronunciation, and [its] harsh sounds and accents … hardly fall within the realm of human speech.”26
The most serious and insidious accusation, however, came not from the outside but from the inside. Many French humanists themselves had internalized this charge of barbarism. When Tissard countered the Italians’ accusations of barbarism, he did so by accepting the belief that French was indeed barbaric. Conceding the current inferiority of France’s world of letters, his defense was based on the promise of a more glorious future. Speaking of the new path to greatness that was opening up in France, Tissard wrote: “To this enterprise is promised an easy and imminent success. Let us then work together.”27 He had internalized the perception that French was barbaric because he accepted the Greco-Roman definitions of barbarism and civilization. The Greco-Romans defined civilization as possessing a knowledge of their languages and their world of learning. Correspondingly, they defined barbarism in terms of its lack. What Tissard meant by “pull[ing] his country out of barbarism” was that the French elite should follow the same path as the Greeks and Romans, imitating their trajectory to narrow the gap separating them from their classical models.
Like Tissard, many humanists agreed that French was barbaric and defective; their defense consisted in repairing the language. Conceding that French was deficient and in need of reform, Etienne Dolet, in La Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en une autre (1540), proposed that the French civilize their language and themselves so that “foreigners will no longer call us barbarians.”28 Du Bellay’s Défense explicitly addressed those French humanists who had internalized the accusation that the vernacular was indeed barbaric. The Roman memory theft caused the good memories of the Gauls’ deeds to fall into oblivion, forcing the French and their Gallic ancestors to adopt 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.” Even though the Romans were dead, their power was so great that it transcended their graves. The ghosts of Romans past took up residence inside French souls and caused the French to keep alive the Roman disdain and turn it inward. It made the French themselves “view [their language] as barbarous and irregular, incapable of that elegance and fecundity which are in the Greek and Roman [language],” as Du Bellay put it.29 Thus many French humanists assumed, he wrote, that “our tongue is too vile and barbarous to deal with such lofty subjects as philosophy” and believed that French was “incapable of all good letters and erudition.”30 Du Bellay then added: “I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance and temerity of some of our fellow countrymen who, taking themselves for nothing less than Greeks or Romans, despise and reject with a stoic, haughty raised brow everything written in French. And I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opinion of some learned men, who think that our vulgar tongue is incapable of all good letters and erudition.”31 If many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries rejected “with a stoic, haughty raised brow” all that was written in French, where did their scorn come from? On what ground did these accusers stand? Clearly they stood not on a solid French ground but on one of an imagined alliance with the Ancients, at least a partial one. From these lofty heights, they saw their own language through the Ancients’ imagined perspective, which dwarfed their own stature as French. Many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries revealed such a self-deprecating stance. Guillaume Budé feared that his fellow countrymen were “unsuited to letters, in contrast to the Italians, whose sky and soil enabled even infants to wail with eloquence and poetry.”32 According to Guillaume du Vair, French eloquence “degenerates from Ancient Greek and Roman,” and “we do not have as many great masters and practitioners of eloquence as Greece and Rome.” He feared that French was