Third, I use term “assimilation” because no single, good seventeenth-century alternative exists. France’s writers referred to this phenomenon by a constellation of related terms: “civiliser,” “humaniser,” “éduquer,” “aider,” “convertir,” “franciser,” “coloniser.” The first few terms—“civiliser,” “humaniser,” “éduquer,” and “aider”—are deceptive, as they come from a discourse of politeness that camouflages the fact that colonization is at issue. This rhetoric of politeness has been so effective that to this day many literary scholars of seventeenth-century France, and even some cultural historians, simply pay lip service to colonization and do not recognize it as a central concern. The other alternatives, “convertir,” “franciser,” and “coloniser,” raise the problematic church-state relationship. The term “convertir” is confined to a religious context; “franciser” suggests a political or cultural context, as does “coloniser,” thereby separating the religious from the political. I need, however, a larger, umbrella term to designate the fact that both the church and the state pursued a policy in the New World to transform sauvages into French Catholics. Under this umbrella term, I include the church’s primary goal of evangelizing, and the state’s primary goal of colonizing/Frenchifying and civilizing. While these objectives were different, and often conflicted, they also overlapped in many instances. I thus take the term “assimilation” to mean a combination of evangelizing, colonizing, Frenchifying, and civilizing, since each did not constitute an entirely distinct phenomenon.
Using such an anachronistic term is, of course, not without its dangers. The first danger is that the nineteenth-century concept of assimilation might cause us to view the seventeenth-century policy retrospectively through the lens of France’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century endeavors in Asia and Africa, which were very different. These later colonial efforts forbade intermarriage, fostered segregated communities, and discouraged most forms of intersocial or intercultural contact. By contrast, the seventeenth-century church and state aggressively promoted the most intimate forms of contact with the Native Americans, including intermarriage. Thus, the danger in looking at this seventeenth-century phenomenon through the frame of its modern, better-known counterpart is that we risk dulling its edge. It is essential to sharpen that edge because it heightens the clash between the nation’s colonial discourse of expansion and its cultural ideals of containment and purity.
Altering the Paradigm of French Literary History
This clash suggests that the traditionally accepted cultural paradigm for early modern France must be reconfigured to account for the nation’s colonial politics of expansion. This book challenges the most fundamental and unexplored assumptions of the standard cultural paradigm and proposes a new one in its place. The first assumption is that France defines the nation’s cultural identity only in a dyadic relationship to classical antiquity. The standard labels for French history reflect that relationship. The term “Renaissance” placed the Ancients at the source of France’s rebirth in the sixteenth century. By implication, prior to her “rebirth,” France was in the “Dark Ages,” a label that was once (erroneously) common for the Middle Ages. Scholars frame the seventeenth century as the classical age in France, characterizing this period as a revival of Greek and Roman learning. Quite strikingly, they rarely use the term “neoclassical” as in the case of its English counterpart. Eliminating the “neo” tightens the bond between France and classical antiquity yet further.
A second, related assumption of the prevailing paradigm is that France’s humanist-educated elite aligned themselves with the Greco-Romans as an “us,” placing themselves in a corresponding position of dominance. This assumption of similarity with the Ancients comes from the well-known story of a civilizing process in which the French were bonded with these “fathers” who, through a special kinship, would help their “heirs” on their journey to civilization. This story is rooted in the medieval myths of the translatio studii and the translatio imperii, both of which expressed that kinship. These myths proclaimed the Greeks and Romans as the French nation’s true ancestors and rejected its more proximate kin in its own medieval past. In this imagined relationship, the Greeks transferred (translatio) their learning (studium) and their political power or legitimacy (imperium) first to the Romans and then to the French. According to this fictive construct, the Greco-Romans chose the French to carry forth their cultural patrimony, thus conferring on them the right, as well as the duty, to bring enlightenment to the world’s barbarians. Given such an illustrious legacy, the French elite imagined themselves as selfconfident subjects who occupied equivalent positions of strength and power, akin to the Ancients.
My book challenges both assumptions. I ask the Ancients to make room for the New World sauvage in a larger, triangulated model for France’s literary and cultural history. I argue that France’s elite carved out their nation’s emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, situating it between barbarism and civilization. However, elite France’s relationship to both worlds was double.
Although the French elite wanted to view the Greco-Romans as an “us,” imagining themselves in the same dominant position of imperial greatness as their supposed ancestors, this image is only partial. The standard paradigm has left out the second half of the dynamic: many intellectuals also resented the Ancients as their former colonizers, an imperial “them” from whom they struggled to separate themselves. As much as the elite longed to identify with the Ancients as an “us” and claim a fundamental similarity, they also found themselves falling off this pedestal and into the position of the other. Their otherness came from two opposing impulses. On the negative side, the elite feared that their differences from their models signaled their inferiority. More positively, the elite defiantly asserted their differences to claim their independence. And yet, their struggle for liberation was troubled by the fact that they also admired the Ancients, from whom they longed to inherit the language of power, authority, and civilization. (Early modern France thus faced many of the same dilemmas that France’s former African and Asian colonies confronted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) In brief, this book’s new paradigm casts elite France in a love-hate relationship toward the Ancients, depending upon whether the nation imagined itself as a fellow colonizer or as the colonized.
Similarly, elite France’s relationship to the New World was also double. On the positive side, the relations de voyage portrayed France as a colonizer akin to the Greeks and Romans who was civilizing the Amerindians as the barbarian other. But these texts also slipped into a negative dynamic, representing the Amerindians too as an “us,” as kin resembling the Gauls in their most primitive stage of existence. The relations recounted many stories that reversed the power dynamic, expressing the French fear that they were backsliding into barbarism and being colonized by the New World Indians. This fear of being akin to the Amerindians as the colonized other tapped into the French elite’s nascent doubts about themselves due to their own more archaic drama when their ancestors were the colonized other in relation to the Romans and Greeks. In sum, the dilemmas of both stories mirrored each other in that the Amerindians were both a “them” and an “us,” just as the Romans were also both an “us”