Understanding the “post” phase of the postcolonial is more complicated, especially in the context of early modern France. The split between direct colonial rule and its aftermath is not anchored in a specific, limited historical moment. There are no clear temporal boundaries, especially since the Gauls never formally decolonized themselves. These ancestors never officially achieved independence; they simply became Romanized, and then the Roman Empire itself disappeared.
The “post” in “postcolonial” does not necessarily mean that the effects of colonization were over after the political colonial moment had passed. Decolonization still remains a struggle in the “post”-colonial phase because the dynamics of the original colonial relationship “can be duplicated from within,” as Ania Loomba has observed.32 The real struggle begins after political independence. Many cultural bonds still remain, since they have become part of the hearts and souls of the colonized, who have internalized their former masters’ values. The colonized thus voluntarily repeat the initial colonial dynamic, unwittingly imitating the colonizers’ modes of thought. In so doing, the colonized often engage in a “neocolonization” that makes it hard to separate out colonizer and colonized.33 This situation, where the colonized reconstitute a colonial mentality within their own hearts and minds, aptly describes the dilemma of early modern France. As Lorenzo Valla famously wrote centuries earlier in his Elegantiae (1471), the Roman Empire existed “wherever the Roman language was spoken,” and this extended far beyond its original political and religious dominion.34 And far beyond its time. In early modern France, the prestige of the Roman language, law, and civilization ensured that Roman modes of thought not only endured but also shaped the French struggle to escape from those very thought structures.
Implausible as it may seem, the nation’s dark and distant colonized past continued to haunt France’s educated elite many centuries after its colonizers had died and the Roman Empire had faded away. The most important evidence for this haunting phenomenon is located in the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, a series of cultural debates about France’s relation to the Ancient World. The term “ancients” is confused because it refers to two different groups: 1) to France’s early modern writers who championed the classical world as the apogee of all worthwhile knowledge, and 2) the Greeks and Romans themselves. I therefore use the term “ancients” with a small a to refer to France’s early modern writers and the term “Ancients” with a capital A to designate the Greeks and Romans, following Terence Cave’s convention.35
The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns continually raised the specter of the nation’s colonized past when many early modern intellectuals returned to the graveyard of history, disinterred the dead bodies of the Ancients, and infused them with new life by writing imagined dialogues with these ghostly figures. Some of these dialogues were explicit, as in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1680) and Dialogues des morts (1683), but most were implicit. When these dead souls returned, however, their apparitions did not always wear a kindly face professing solidarity and support of their “sons.” Nor did they necessarily even claim the French as sons. Rather, these phantom figures often returned with a vengeance, carping at the French for their insufficiency, taunting them with the label “barbarian,” continuing to wage another version of the original battle. The ghosts of this past were threaded in and around the Ancients’ language and logic that France’s intellectuals were imitating. These phantom figures fueled the French elite’s fears about themselves.
In short, the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was a massive, enduring colonial battle that took place in the psyche of France’s humanist-educated elite. Struggling to decolonize themselves from the Greco-Romans, both the “ancients” and the “moderns” sought to forge the French nation’s own emerging independent, cultural identity, albeit in different ways. But both found Greco-Roman universalism stifling because it dwarfed their own stature. Their revolt was complicated, however, because they also admired the Greeks and Romans and viewed their discourse as that of authority, power, and civilization, thus making independence very difficult. While many intellectuals struggled to decolonize the French mind from the Greco-Romans, many also unwittingly reinstituted the initial colonial relationship, except that they called these bonds “civilization” and greatness.
France’s Second Colonial Story: Creating a New France in the New World
Mirroring France’s foundational relationship to the Ancient World was a second colonial story that focused on the New World. This second story began in the sixteenth century when many French explorers sailed across the Atlantic, hoping to establish colonial settlements. But those initial efforts were ill conceived and failed, especially since the nation was hampered by its internal religious wars.36 But nonetheless, many of those travelers, such as Jacques Cartier and Jean de Léry, published important accounts of their voyages, which stirred the reading public’s imagination and created interest in the Americas. In 1598, after Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, the church and, to a lesser extent the state had more energy and resources to expand their spheres of influence outward. They turned in two major directions—toward the Americas and the Levant.37 France’s interest in each was quite different. In the New World, the French sought to establish settlements and hoped to transform this area into an extension of itself as a New France. French travelers projected the image of a New France onto different parts of the Americas, not simply what are now Québec and the Maritime Provinces.38 By contrast, the French were mostly interested in the Levant as a place to establish ports for their commercial activities. This part of the world did not really convey the promise of a New France.
The story that I will present of the French encounter with the New World highlights France’s colonial strategy of assimilation. Although the French church and state painted the Amerindians as barbarians, these institutions nevertheless sought to assimilate them and have them form “one people” with the French, to borrow a recurring phrase from the relations de voyage. Official French policy urged the French and the Native Americans to live together, work together, pray together, and be educated together. This policy went so far as to promote intermarriage. To help colonize the New World, Louis XIV’s minister Colbert urged that the Native Americans be made capable “of being admitted into the common life of the French,”39 to form “a single people and a single blood.”40 He instructed that dowries be offered to French Indian couples as an incentive to marry and to remain in the French, Catholic community. Intermarriage was an ideal throughout most of the seventeenth century, even though few marriages were actually concluded. This policy began as early as the first decade and lasted almost to the century’s end.41
The relations de voyage reported several stories about intermarriage between the French and the Amerindians. In one striking account, a French colonist named Michel Accault sought to marry a Christianized Native American woman, Aramepinchieue, daughter of the Kaskaskia chief who lived near what is now Peoria, Illinois, in 1694. Although the Frenchman was a tireless suitor, he did not have the fabled Gallic charm that would sweep her off her feet. She rejected his many advances, as she preferred God over what she saw as a debauched Frenchman. Nevertheless, her unchristianized parents were eager for the match, in order to promote trade relations. They pressured her, even resorting to stealing her modest but fine French clothes. Their harassment led to a massive argument in which she shouted at the Frenchman “I hate you”