I am not suggesting that this colonial history was an actual memory lingering in the French consciousness for an entire millennium. On the contrary, this history was a recent invention. It was constructed in the late fifteenth century when French intellectuals began to reconfigure their history by claiming the Gauls as their ancestors. Until then, the Gauls had been largely forgotten, since the French did not consider the Gauls part of their own history. Thus, France’s medieval chroniclers breathed not a word about them.16 These chroniclers began French history at a much later date, preferring the Franks as ancestors because they had supposedly descended from the Trojans. A Frankish-Trojan ancestry made the French more direct heirs to the Romans, connecting the nation back to the Holy Roman Empire. This lineage enabled the French monarchy to claim greater legitimacy.17 The Trojan myth of descent had predominated up to the sixteenth century.
The Trojan myth paralleled that of Ancient Rome’s legendary founding. In so doing, it forged a kinship between France and Rome by linking their respective cultures, origins, and destinies. According to this myth, France began when Troy was destroyed. Hector’s son, Francus or Francio, escaped and set up a new nation. Eventually he became king of the Franks. This story echoed the Roman founding legend. After Troy’s destruction, Aeneas fled his homeland and lived in exile until he came to Latium, where he founded Rome.18 In short, a Frankish-Trojan lineage was the umbilical cord attaching France to Rome.
Some French intellectuals, however, felt strangled by this cord and wanted to break it. Since all roads seemed to lead to Rome, many of France’s cultured elite felt suffocated, suffering from “a sentiment of national inferiority” and wanted to promote a greater “nationalist consciousness,” as literary scholar Claude-Gilbert Dubois phrased it.19 They turned toward the Gauls and claimed them as ancestors to construct a bypass route and circumvent Rome’s enduring influence. Dubois has characterized the French elite’s pursuit of independence as “an enterprise of cultural de-colonization: classical antiquity had invaded everything and sought to bring back everything to it.”20 While Dubois briefly articulated this colonial dynamic, he never developed this connection. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, however, more powerfully developed a similar insight, arguing that the struggle for the vernacular was “an act of independence in relation to a power that we today would not hesitate to qualify as colonial.”21
Thus in the late fifteenth century several humanists sought to dethrone both the Trojans and the Romans by going back to the graveyard of history to exhume the Gauls and claim them as ancestors to the French.22 Declaring a Gallic ancestry was, for many, an act of declaring independence from Rome. This new genealogy caught on like wildfire in the sixteenth century, stirring up a veritable “Gallomania,” as Christian Hermann has called it.23 Jean Lemaire de Belges, Guillaume Postel, Guillaume Budé, François Hotman, Etienne Pasquier, François de Belleforest, Guillaume du Bellay, Joachim du Bellay, Robert Céneau, Jean Picard de Toutry, Guillaume Le Rouille, Guillaume des Autelz, Claude Fauchet, Etienne Forcadel, Nicolas Vignier, and many others promoted a Gallic ancestry.24 Clearly, the proposed new origin had hit a powerful nerve.
This declaration of independence from Rome impassioned the hearts of many because it resonated with multiple narratives about Rome. As postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe would note centuries later, the power of a colonized past to impact the present depends on how its stories become entangled in a multitude of narratives that “overlay and interpenetrate one another,” and depends less on how long ago this past occurred.25 In sixteenth-century France, the term “Rome” served as a code word for the pope and the Roman Catholic Church.26 Gallican-oriented thinkers such as Etienne Pasquier and Guillaume Postel championed the Gauls in the fight for a “nationalist” French church. Challenging an international Roman Church with a Roman pope at its center, these thinkers preferred a Franco-centered, or Gallocentric, church. Overlaying this meaning was another one, which the religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics triggered, giving a different emotional charge to the word “Rome.” Significantly, many Protestants such as François Hotman were the leaders in proposing the Gauls as ancestors. Their goal was to challenge Papal Rome’s religious authority. Similarly, “Rome” became a code word for those seeking to reduce the Roman influence in law. Followers of the French tradition of law, the mos gallicus, referred back to the Gauls in their pre-Roman times to question the validity of Roman law, especially the tenets that grounded the king’s absolute power. On yet another battlefield, “Rome” stood in for the Italians of the contemporary world, who were threats because they could make a special claim to being the most legitimate heirs of the Roman Empire. Moreover, many French humanists felt dwarfed by Italy’s cultural dominance. Since “Rome” and “Roman” often conjured up a range of targets that merged in the minds of those humanists who pitted the Gauls against the Romans, this colonial struggle was entangled in multiple strands of several different battles, all of which were anti-Roman.
The anti-Roman strain of France’s cultural narrative belongs to what Michel Foucault has called a “counter-history.” Such a history gets cast into the shadows because it is the “discourse of those who have no glory, or of those who have lost it and now find themselves in darkness and silence.” This side of history has been hidden “not only because it has been neglected, but because it has been carefully, deliberately and wickedly misrepresented.”27 Foucault observed that an anti-Roman sentiment in France surfaced in the sixteenth century, challenging the historians of the Middle Ages who never saw “any difference, discontinuity, or break with Roman history and their own history, the history they were re-counting.”28 Literary scholar Philippe Desan also noted a similar break with Ancient Rome in the sixteenth century, but he characterized it differently, as a “crisis of humanism.” Desan described how French intellectuals increasingly challenged the humanist ideal of a Greco-Roman universalism from the mid-sixteenth century onward. There were almost no new translations of ancient texts toward the end of the sixteenth century, which reflected, according to Desan, the elite’s desire to promote a “nationalism by writing in the vernacular.” These intellectuals rejected Greek and Roman models for not corresponding to their everyday life experiences and thus cultivated a “mode of thought that would correspond more fully to their national and cultural specificity.”29 Desan discerned multiple “axes of crisis” for humanism, which he likened to a golden apple with a beautiful form that nevertheless contained a worm within, eating away and emptying its core.
One worm in French humanism was that many French intellectuals embraced a Gallic ancestry to escape the suffocating force of a Greco-Roman universalism. However, to liberate France from Latin and Ancient Rome by planting the Gauls at the root of France’s family tree proved difficult. France’s men of letters did not have any historical documentation to buttress their proposed new lineage and thus had to rely on mythical stories. As a result, the more established myth of a Trojan descent still held sway during much of the sixteenth century.30
The anti-Roman strain reached a decisive moment when Etienne Pasquier published the first few volumes of his monumental six-volume Recherches de la France in 1562. His research played a crucial role in legitimizing the Gauls as ancestors. This jurist and historian devoted almost sixty years to documenting France’s Gallic ancestry. The full set of volumes was printed in final form six years after his death in 1615.31 Pasquier’s text commanded such authority and interest that it was reprinted in 1607, 1621, 1633, 1643, and 1665.
In documenting this new lineage, however, Pasquier encountered a key problem: the Gauls were barbarians colonized by the Romans. Seemingly