Much has changed in the years since I began my research. Early modern French scholars have increasingly explored the nation’s colonial contact with the Americas and other parts of the world.52 But most of these scholars examine either France’s justification for colonization or the colonizer’s impact on the colonized. My book reverses the predominant trajectory to ask how colonization shaped the colonizer. How did France’s colonial relation to the New World matter for understanding France and its emerging cultural identity in the early modern era?
In asking this question, I join the work of a growing number of scholars, most of whom have explored the problematics of colonization beginning with the eighteenth century, but concentrating mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.53 These scholars have shown how the nation’s imperial projects shaped France as much as they shaped the colonized. Only a few studies have focused on the early modern era, although that number is now growing. Several studies have been exemplary. Bill Marshall’s The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History, reaches back to this earlier period to argue that Frenchness needs to be understood in relation to France’s contact across the Atlantic.54 He challenges the paradigm that treats “France” as totally separate from and antithetical to “America.” Olivia Bloechl’s Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music shows how the music of France and England were affected by their colonial contact with the New World.55 Brian Brazeau’s Writing a New France explores how the travel literature about New France shaped the emerging sense of Frenchness from 1604 to 1632.56 Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal’s Histoire de l’Amérique Française and Richard White’s The Middle Ground trace the reciprocal exchanges that took place between the nations on opposite sides of the Atlantic.57 The important articles of Saliha Belmessous and Guillaume Aubert have examined the implications of this colonial policy for the French concept of race.58 More broadly, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald, shows how the very center of French literary history was always shaped by boundary crossings between the national and other places on the globe. Christopher Miller’s French Atlantic Triangle explores how the nation’s identity was shaped by a triangulated relationship to Africa and the Americas.59 My book is in this vein.
Including the New World Within the Paradigm About Early Modern France
To reverse the standard line of argumentation and claim that colonization shaped the colonizer is particularly thorny in France’s case. The evidence for such a reverse influence is not obvious because the nation’s canonical literature contains few direct references to the New World.60 This scarcity of references has, I suspect, caused most literary scholars to assume that France’s colonial endeavors were completely disconnected from its internal concerns. By contrast, Spanish literature and British literature overtly reflect their national colonial enterprises. It is thus not surprising that most of the scholarship discussing the impact of the New World on the Old has concentrated on Spain and England, with relatively little analysis of France prior to the eighteenth century.61
Confronted with the paucity of direct references to the Americas in France’s canonical literature, I had to reconceptualize the notion of evidence. What constitutes proof? Following the leads of historians Anthony Pagden and Anthony Grafton, I realized that evidence is not necessarily measured through the number of direct references.62 Nor does it manifest itself through a simple cause-and-effect relationship, since the proof does not always exist on the surface of easily observable, external events.63 Rather, one needs to look for indirect evidence by considering how information about the New World intersected with other events and thought structures in France.
Accordingly, I situated the European “discovery” of the New World in relation to another key “discovery” that occurred at roughly the same time—that of the Ancient World. Because the news of the Ancient World was so momentous, it tended to overshadow the news of the New World, which came in its wake. Yet both events need to be viewed as twin phenomena. Although France’s relation to the Ancient World and the New World were separate, many of its intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries repeatedly linked them. They situated both worlds on a single evolutionary continuum from barbarism to civilization. They wove these worlds together through an underlying cultural narrative that assumed all of humanity was on the same upward journey.64 The Ancient Greeks and Romans, having arrived at “civilization” first, graciously held up the torch of enlightenment to illumine the path for the world’s barbarians. Having civilized the French, these Ancients passed their torch to them as their heirs, like a baton in a relay race—or so the French argued. The Ancients entrusted the French with their cultural patrimony, to spearhead the same mission and carry it overseas to the New World.
The Romans, more than the Greeks, figured in that story, since they provided the model for France’s colonization of the New World. The members of France’s cultured elite imagined that the Romans named them as their successors, so that both were aligned as fellow colonizers/civilizers, fused as a composite “us” against a barbarian “them.” As Pagden has rightly observed, all European colonizers of this period borrowed the Greek and Roman discourses of empire, for “the theoretical roots of the modern European overseas empire reached back into the empires of the Ancient world.” Rome in particular “provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium Romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of Western Europe.”65 France thus defined itself by playing the same role for the barbarians of their own world that the Ancients had played for them. In sum, the Ancients were for the French what the French were to be for the Native American barbarians.
This French imperial narrative, however, had a darker side: the barbarian lurked in the shadows of France’s relationship to the Ancient World. While French intellectuals tried to align themselves with the Greeks and Romans as civilized colonizers, they repeatedly found themselves slipping into a position analogous to that of the New World barbarian other, as I will show. When France’s travelers and historians reflected on the Native Americans, they conjured up the memories of their own past when they were “barbaric” Gauls whom the Romans and Greeks had civilized. France, situated in the murky middle ground between barbarism and civilization, occupied an ambiguous position. The French were threatened by barbarism from below, and it was not entirely clear how far they had progressed toward civilization. Where to situate France was a key question at the heart of the nation’s cultural debates. Some intellectuals even feared a regression—they could be pulled back into primitivism. The Native Americans embodied what the French could revert back to if they failed to emulate the Ancients sufficiently, and thus the shadows of these primitive creatures hovered over the debates about the French imitation of the Greeks and Romans. The nation’s cultural narrative occasionally aligned the French with the New World barbarians. The relationship could be reformulated as follows: the French were to the Ancients what the New World barbarians were to the French.
In describing France’s colonial relations to both the New World and the Ancient World, I use the term “assimilation,” which is an anachronism. Understood in its specific colonial usage, this term was not coined until the nineteenth century.66 Nevertheless, I use the term for three reasons. First, assimilation is a general term that enables me to connect the seventeenth-century story back to its foundation in Ancient Rome. The French sought to transform sauvages into French Catholics, just as the Romans had transformed the Gallic barbarians into Romans. France’s model was romanization, the Roman version of assimilation.67 Second, the term “assimilation” also enables me to gesture forward to the modern era, emphasizing that the seventeenth-century policy marked a foundational moment in the history of what would become France’s most enduring stance toward the other. The seventeenth-century transformation