France’s inheritance from the Greeks and the Romans was thus a double liability and a double bind. To imitate either would not really help the French elite to defend themselves effectively against the legacy of their colonized past, since both models led into versions of a vicious circle. The French elite’s effort to rid themselves of the label “barbarian” only caused that glue to thicken. In its most basic structure, the vicious circle was about the struggle between similarity and difference, between civilization and barbarism. The French were in fact very different from the Ancients and feared that their differences signified that they were actually barbaric. Seeking to erase these differences, the French elite clung all the more doggedly to the Ancients, imitating them and celebrating myths of similarity with them, as if they were all kin. However, the thought structures the elite imitated reminded them of their differences, casting them out into the cold and leaving them to wonder if they could ever measure up. This cycle would then perpetuate itself without end. Imitation became a problem in itself because the underlying beliefs, values, and assumptions of the models they were imitating offered the French no stable home within them.
In summary, then, by reframing the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, we see how the genre of the defense and its obsession with imitation need to be understood within the larger context of France’s submerged history about the Greco-Roman colonization of Gaul. Imitation acquires more complex and different meanings depending upon the imitator’s imagined relation to its models. To the extent that the imitator views the model as an “us,” whose basic interests and ideals are similar, imitation is not necessarily problematic, because it serves as a civilizing process. But to the extent that the imitator views the model as a “them,” especially a colonizer once bent on subjugation, imitation becomes fraught with great danger. This mimetic dynamic is even more perilous when the imitator forgets that the model was a colonizer and insists on a fundamental sameness between imitator and model despite their obvious underlying differences. This chapter has brought out the latter scenario, where imitation risks trapping the imitator in a vicious circle: what the French were copying were thought structures that were implicitly hostile to them as imitators, continually relegating them to the position of the outsider, the barbarian other.
How could the French elite escape this vicious circle and cultivate an independent, dignified French world of letters to ground their emerging cultural identity? This question was central to the Quarrel and to the elite’s struggle to decolonize the nation from the Ancients and escape their influence. I examine three different proposed escape routes in chapters 6 to 8. Each of those pathways, however, involves a triangulated journey, since France situated itself between both the New World and the Ancient World. The Quarrel’s frame, I contend, thus needs to be expanded to include not simply the French decolonization from the Ancient World but also the French colonization of the New World, as chapter 5 discusses. But before exploring these triangulated routes, I need to address how the New World entered into the French imagination and how the reading French public imagined their colonial relation to the Amerindian barbarian. In chapter 3, I show how the information about the Americas became so widespread that the New World constituted an important pole opposite to that of the Ancient World. In chapter 4, I discuss France’s assimilationist stance toward the Amerindians: were they an “us” or a “them”?
PART II
France’s Colonial Relation to the New World
CHAPTER 3
Relating the New World Back to France
The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage
The Popular Success of the Relations de Voyage
Because colonization has been excluded from the paradigm of France’s cultural self-understanding, one might reasonably conclude that the seventeenth-century French reading public was kept in the dark about its own policy of assimilation. Logically speaking, the nation’s colonial contact with sauvages in the New World could have been kept entirely secret because it took place on the far side of the Atlantic. After all, as Marc Lescarbot put it in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, the two nations were “separated … by a sea so wide that men have apparently never had either the ability or the daring to cross it to discover new lands until these last centuries.”1 Given this distance, one might assume that the sauvage was consigned to the margins of French thought. But in fact quite the opposite occurred. The French church and state aggressively diffused information about the nation’s colonial contact with the New World, eager to make the reading public aware of what was happening in remote lands.2
The relations de voyage were pivotal texts in bringing the New World sauvage into the French reading public’s imagination. This chapter examines the relation de voyage as a genre, emphasizing its relational goal of bringing news about the colonial encounter back home to the motherland. In showing how the French reading public was aware of the nation’s colonial endeavors, the chapter grounds this book’s overarching argument that the nation’s colonial discourse was finely interwoven with its cultural debates, and helped shape France’s emerging cultural self-understanding. Moreover, this chapter helps ground my claim that the New World constituted an important pole in opposition to the Ancient World.
The relations de voyage were relational, in the religious sense of religare, with a Latin root meaning to fasten or tie together.3 A relation can be a report about events as disparate as wars, theatrical productions, or conversations. But Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defined the relation primarily as travel reports.4 Furetière observed that more than thirteen hundred relations about travel were in print by the late seventeenth century.5 Hundreds described the New World, although the bulk of them were devoted to other parts of the world. While many writers entitled their travel reports relations, others simply called them “histories” or “voyages,” as in the history of a mission or of a voyage.6
France’s relations de voyage were expressly designed to capture the reading public’s imagination and became widely diffused among the cultivated elite. The relations offered a developed narrative style, with detailed portraits of the Native Americans’ psychology and sociocultural customs. These reports often sketched scenes that read like a novel, with human interest stories that gave a human face to the other, alive with dialogue, character development, and action. The story about the Frenchman who pursued a Native American woman in marriage that I mentioned in the introductory chapter exemplifies one of the most sophisticated narratives. The readability of the French relation differentiated it from its counterparts in England, Spain, and Holland, which were not generally written