Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer

France’s dominant cultural narrative about itself. This narrative enshrines them as the nation’s ancestors of choice, elevating them to such lofty heights that all French school children were once made to recite proudly the phrase “our ancestors the Gauls” in their history lessons. Hence, the unflattering portrait that I have just highlighted might seem jarring and unfamiliar to most of France’s present-day inhabitants. My description refers to an earlier period in the Gauls’ history when they were colonized by the Greeks and then by the Romans. France’s dominant cultural narrative has excluded this past by pushing it into the shadows of a “prehistory.” France’s official story thus began with the Gauls at a later point in their history, after they had been cleaned up and made presentable by the Romans who had civilized them.

      I open with the little-known Greco-Roman portrayal of France’s ancestors as barbaric because it lays the groundwork for the first of two interrelated colonial stories that this book tells. This first story takes us back to the nation’s pre-history and recalls that the Gauls were once a colonized people, with the Greeks and Romans as their colonizers. I do not mean to imply that this fact was unknown; rather, it was simply muted by an alternative version that downplayed the significance of this earlier colonial relationship. This earlier past will reveal that the French elite had a much darker and conflicted connection to the Ancient World than its literary history has acknowledged.

      This book’s second story is about France’s colonial relationship to the New World. Here, the French were the colonizers seeking to civilize the New World “barbarians.” (I will henceforth use the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” without quotation marks, although I do not mean to imply that the Amerindians were in fact barbaric or sauvage. See chapter 3 for a discussion of my reasons for using these problematic terms and for preferring the French word sauvage over its English counterpart.) Echoing the Greco-Roman accounts of the Gauls, the French represented the Amerindians as barbarians, repeating a similar profile of otherness. The French colonizing strategy in the New World borrowed the Roman colonizing strategy toward the Gauls. In sum, these two stories mirrored each other. In the first, the Gauls/French were the colonized other, who were then civilized by the Romans. In the second, France became the colonizer, assuming the same role as the Greco-Romans before them by civilizing the New World inhabitants. By creating a “New France” in the Americas, France would become the “New Rome.”

      After describing these two different colonial relationships, I weave them together to show how they shaped the French elite’s cultural self-understanding. The dominant paradigm for early modern French culture has severed colonization from its cultural discourse about itself, as if it belonged on a different planet. I propose to show, however, that culture and colonization were always conjoined, so interdependent that each enabled and shaped the other. The Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns constitutes the primary locus where the nation’s colonial and cultural discourses merged. (I understand the Quarrel in its broadest sense, extending from the late fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, as the next chapter will discuss.) The Quarrel’s literary and cultural debates did not exist in a vacuum. They were connected to the nation’s colonial discourse of the relations de voyage, which were wildly popular travel reports about the French encounter with the Amerindians of the New World (and with peoples of other lands). The relations framed the nation’s colonization of the New World as a mirror of its relation to the Ancient World. In so doing, France’s colonial discourse pumped new life into the emerging memories of the nation’s distant past as Gauls, establishing parallels between the two stories. This book, then, seeks to show how early modern France carved out its emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, emphasizing the colonial/cultural dynamics that have marked both relationships.

      France’s First Colonial Story: The Nation’s Relation to Ancient Rome

      The first colonial story that this book unearths can meaningfully qualify as “postcolonial.” This term derives from recent scholarship on formerly colonized, so-called third world nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, especially in their twentieth-century struggles for independence and dignity. Their self-understanding becomes embroiled in a mix of pride and shame visà-vis their former colonizers. This concept, however, has an application much broader than most theorists have realized. Since colonialism is as old as recorded history, it stands to reason that its twin concept of a postcolonial phase would be of equally ancient origin. The concept refers not merely to a political condition of independence after the colonial period but also and especially to a cultural condition in which the nation’s self-understanding is anchored in the experience of a prior historical period of direct colonial rule.¹²

      Because the term “postcolonial” was coined in a modern context, it may seem recklessly anachronistic to apply it to early modern France. Many literary critics bristle at any use of anachronistic concepts, consigning them to the realm of bad scholarship and sloppy thinking. However, Yves Citton in Lire, interpréter, actualiser, has powerfully defended the anachronistic by showing how contemporary categories of thought, if applied with careful attention to relevant historical specificity, can create a meaningful dialogue between past and present.¹³ In what he calls “une lecture actualisante,” Citton urges that the past be reframed to make it more relevant and meaningful for the present. Much of that past is inaccessible except through a more modern lens since many phenomena can only be understood retrospectively. Anachronisms provide a retrospective lens, enabling us to see more clearly what was less evident at any earlier time.

      A number of medievalists began to use postcolonial theory in 2000 to bring out important dimensions of the Middle Ages which have otherwise been obscured.¹⁴ They convincingly demonstrate that postcolonial theory is not a one-size-fits-all methodology, but can be adapted to fit earlier times and places. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor of the foundational Postcolonial Middle Ages, emphasized that the fit will never be exact and that this lack of fit was a virtue. It forces scholars to reflect more upon the historical specificity of the relevant cultural contexts for both modern and pre-modern eras. While pre-modern scholars have much to learn from postcolonial theory, postcolonial theorists also have much to learn from pre-modern scholarship about the history that informs their own era and about the nature of the theory itself. The postcolonial, then, is a capacious, heterogeneous mode of thought that can be meaningfully configured to illuminate the particularities of different historical moments.

      Since this book is concerned with early modern France, I interpret the postcolonial very differently than do both medieval and modern scholars. I ground my understanding of this concept in the historical and cultural circumstances most relevant for the early modern context. Historically, that context is the period when both the Greeks and the Romans literally colonized the Gauls. The Romans, of course, played a much more significant role because they were the more recent colonizers and their legacy was also more long lasting. Their law, language, and culture still dominated the world of early modern France. The Romans had colonized the Gauls beginning in 121 B.C., when they conquered and annexed the southern reaches of Gaul, founding their first colonia at Narbo Marius (Narbonne) in 118 B.C. Julius Caesar then enlarged the Roman stronghold in Gaul, through a military conquest during the Gallic Wars of 58–51 B.C., bombarding the Gauls with eight successive campaigns. Caesar’s conquest culminated in Vercingetorix’s defeat in 52 B.C. Later, Augustus used a softer touch to bring the Gauls under the empire’s hegemony. He “civilized” these barbaric tribes, transforming them from Gauls into Romans.

      At this point, the story gets murky. How deep and how permanent was this transformation? Did the Gauls ever achieve independence? According to historians of today, the Gauls never really achieved independence because they became Latin-speaking peoples, or Gallo-Romans.¹⁵ However, France’s early modern writers such as François Hotman, Honoré d’Urfé, and Scipion Dupleix presented the Franks as having liberated the Gauls from the Romans. This confusion about the Gauls’ independence is at the heart of the postcolonial dilemma I will be exploring.

      This literal, historical context is not sufficient to qualify as postcolonial. The mere fact that the French once experienced colonial rule would not automatically mean they suffered from postcolonial trauma. The historical fact of colonization needs to be