It was a reference to this French colonial policy of intermarriage that sowed the seeds for this book. About twelve years ago, I stumbled across a footnote about Colbert’s policy. After reading it, I was so amazed to learn that the French church and state encouraged mixed communities and intermarriage that I had to reread the footnote a few times to make sure I had understood it correctly. How was it possible that I had never even heard of this policy? I then conducted an informal survey of numerous seventeenth-century literary scholars, including historians of France, phoning and e-mailing them in the United States, France, and England. No one else had heard of this policy either. In fact, some of the scholars even doubted its veracity.
My colleagues and I reasoned that if such a policy had existed, it would have been kept a dark secret, hidden from the awareness of the general French public. Given that such a phenomenon occurred on the far side of the Atlantic, all knowledge of it was probably restricted to those distant shores. After all, it is not uncommon for political regimes to promote policies on foreign soil that would be unacceptable at home. This secrecy might explain why literary scholars were unaware of this history—it would not seem to have had any influence on France’s own culture.
I soon discovered, however, that this colonial policy was by no means a secret. Indeed, it was common knowledge to the French reading public of the seventeenth century. While the church and state could easily have pursued this policy under the table, they chose to put it on the table and even make it the centerpiece. They eagerly advertised it as a public-relations campaign to promote their expansionist endeavors, and even brought several Native American men from Brazil to Paris in 1613 to be baptized and married to French women before Louis XIII and all of Paris.44 But besides this dramatic spectacle, the church and state encouraged travelers to the New World to write relations de voyage that described their intimate encounters with the Amerindians.
And yet, despite this publicity, it is not completely surprising that neither I nor my colleagues knew of this policy, because it runs directly counter to the paradigm that most literary scholars and cultural historians have constructed for the seventeenth century. Dubbed “classical,” this period is the one moment in French history in which one would least expect to find a policy promoting marriage with sauvages. The master discourse for this so-called classical era has emphasized France’s closing of borders, tightening of ranks, and promoting of greater constraints, exclusivity, and homogeneity in the name of purity and civility. John Rule has observed that the French state at this moment developed an increasingly specialized vocabulary to describe its borders: “limites,” “cordon défensif,” “régions frontières,” “frontières fortifiées,” “les côtes de France,” “portes,” “frontières naturelles.”45 Henry Phillips has shown how the Catholic Reformation sought to tighten boundaries between different forms of space to protect an imagined inside space from a contaminating outside.46 He argues that an increasingly rigid inside/outside divide characterized France’s literary culture and its aesthetic values. Mitchell Greenberg has analyzed French classical theater in terms of an ever-tightening family circle, describing how the literary canon was linked to how individuals constituted themselves as subjects within as closed a system as possible.47 As is well known, when Richelieu founded the French Academy, he restricted what could be said in order to “purify” the French language and literature. Its rules for drama reduced the action on stage to one place, one plot, and one day. Philosophically, Descartes’ categories of clear and distinct ideas emerged as rationalized boundaries to order and classify the world, as Foucault has analyzed.48 At court, sartorial codes limited physical movement. The aristocracy became increasingly encumbered with ribbons, lace, and multiple layers of clothing; Louis XIV sported red high-heeled shoes and cascading wigs. The rules governing aristocratic behavior grew exponentially to assure ever more refined levels of civility.49
Given these core values of containment, purity, refinement, and order, it seems inconceivable that the French state and church would have promoted its diametrical opposite. How could these institutions have also engaged in a politics of expansion that blurred the boundaries between self and other? How could they have encouraged intimate relations with sauvages who lived in the woods, dressed in animal skins stitched together with intestinal gut and, some said, ate human flesh? How could the church and the state have welcomed intimate contact with people deemed crude, filthy, and barbaric? The nation’s politics of assimilating sauvages thus seemed implausible, invraisemblable, because it was so contrary to the dominant cultural paradigm.
Historians of France’s colonies in the Atlantic world, however, had been illuminating this colonial encounter for well over a century. For these historians, France’s policy was hardly a secret. In fact, it was common knowledge. In 1896, Reuben Gold Thwaites made the Jesuit relations de voyage available in a modern, bilingual edition. Other historians unearthed a trove of archival materials documenting France’s colonial contact with the New World. In more recent decades, historians of the Atlantic world, such as Saliha Belmessous, Allan Greer, Philippe Jacquin, Cornelius Jaenen, Gilles Havard, Cécile Vidal, and Richard White, have produced an impressive mass of research devoted to early modern France’s colonial endeavors.50 And yet this historical research has made only a small dent in the nation’s self-understanding, as Havard and Vidal have acknowledged. Most scholars of France still view colonization largely as peripheral to France’s own cultural identity, which is seen as enclosed within an insular, self-protective bubble. How, then, to understand this resistance to including colonization as central to early modern France’s own story about its culture and history?
Clearly, a disciplinary divide separates what is known to most scholars of France as opposed to scholars of its former New World colonies. This split reflects the dilemma of what Clifford Geertz has called “local knowledge,” where the most basic knowledge of one discipline may be completely unknown in another.51 The disciplinary divide cuts more deeply than usual in this particular case, since it breaks down along the colonizer/colonized axis. As in any power relationship, the subordinate often has knowledge of the master that the master himself may choose to ignore, as Hegel analyzed in his famous master-slave discussion. In this instance, scholars who focus on the Franco-Amerindian encounter from the perspective of the colonized have a knowledge of the colonizer that is unknown to most of its significant specialists. This colonizer/colonized axis appears to be more important than the literature/history divide, since many cultural historians of France have been almost as unfamiliar with this colonial policy as literary scholars have been.
My book seeks to bridge the disciplinary gap. Scholars focused on the colonizer’s side of the divide have been limited by France’s dominant cultural paradigm which has shaped what they know and are not permitted to know. This paradigm is characterized by what I call a cultural poetics of containment. The nation’s colonial politics of expansion are made to seem invraisemblable because it clashes so strongly with the dominant paradigm. Influenced by the classical period’s ideal—not to say fetish—of unity, homogeneity, and purity, this paradigm has been virtually silent about colonization, sealing off the nation’s cultural identity as self-sufficient, allowing no role for its external colonial endeavors. The seal has been so tight that even though numerous Atlantic world historians have already amply documented France’s colonial activities for many decades, this research has barely scratched the surface of the nation’s cultural self-image. It is as if France’s colonial contact with the barbarian other had little importance for its cultural self-understanding.
The growing body of research from scholars focused on the colonized side of the divide suggests that colonization was a much more significant phenomenon than France’s cultural paradigm has allowed for. We thus