This book challenges the dominant paradigm in yet another way. The paradigm’s master narrative was virtually silent about colonization. But this silence does not mean that colonization was insignificant for the nation’s selfunderstanding. Rather, this silence reflects the nation’s official rhetoric, which obscured its colonial dynamics. This rhetoric loudly trumpeted the nation’s imperial greatness through various spectacles, monuments, buildings, literary texts, art forms, and theatrical and musical events, as numerous scholars have detailed. This rhetoric presented France as if it were the New Rome and the New Athens rolled into one. But as Orest Ranum has shown in Artisans of Glory, the official discourse should not be taken at face value, because it simply repeated the cultural topoi and rhetorical commonplaces of heroic kingship.70 Its conventions were, in effect, a political and cultural slant that did not represent the historical reality since it excluded lesser events or fears as unworthy of the nation’s elevated status. This rhetoric expressed the church and state’s hopes for greatness, just as the political press releases coming out of the White House in the United States or the Elysée Palace in France reflect not the historical or political reality but the particular angles the respective heads of state wish to promote. Thus, when France’s educated elite launched their relentless barrage of self-aggrandizement, they did so not necessarily out of self-confidence or a firm belief in their position as the true heirs to the Ancient World. They also did so out of a contrary and compensatory impulse: an anxiety about barbarism that made the elite fear they might be more akin to the New World sauvages than to the Ancients.
Early modern France’s massive image-making campaign accomplished its goal: scholars have subsequently dubbed the seventeenth century “the great century” (“le grand siècle”), and commonplace phrases such as “the glory of France” and “the genius of the language” have been repeated so often that they are considered indisputably true. France’s journey to civilization has come to seem like a destiny so natural and fully realized that nation’s beginning point in barbarism has dropped out of the picture, and replaced by the image of eternal greatness. With such a grandiose narrative firmly in place, it now seems implausible to think that the French cultured elite could have seriously feared that they were barbaric, and that the memory of their colonized past could have had any genuine hold over them. The story I will be telling may at first seem invraisemblable because the nation’s cultural story has been so completely detached from its colonial story. My goal is to reattach the two stories to show how the nation’s dominant cultural discourse has told only one half of the full story.
In including colonization within the nation’s dominant cultural narrative about itself, I am building on the important work of Hélène Merlin-Kajman in La langue est-elle fasciste? She is the first literary scholar to accord the Roman colonization of the Gauls the central place that it deserves within French cultural history for the seventeenth century. Focusing on the elite’s struggle to defend the vernacular, she astutely argues that this struggle was a war of independence from France’s former colonizers in order to create their own, independent cultural identity.71
After bringing France’s colonized past into the picture, however, Merlin-Kajman argues that the early modern lettrés transcended their troubled political relation to the Romans. They were able to view Latin as a cultural model separate from a political one. After the Roman Empire disappeared, French intellectuals were able to detach Latin’s power from the historical moment of colonial domination. Because Latin was associated with Christianity, French intellectuals divested Latin of its original power dynamic.72 As the language of the church, Latin could create new social bonds that differed from a colonial subjection to Rome.
Objectively speaking, Merlin-Kajman is correct. France’s world of letters transcended the nation’s colonized past by creating a powerful language and a truly great world culture. That is clear. But subjectively speaking, the intellectuals’ transcendence of this past was only partial. Their obsession with imitation was a symptom of an underlying insecurity, reflecting an anxiety that they did not yet measure up to a standard that the Greeks and Romans represented. Thus, what Merlin-Kajman sees as success, I see as a site of struggle. As much as the elite sought to transcend their problematic colonial relation to Ancient Rome, they were unable to completely erase this past. Its vestigial traces exerted a strong undercurrent that became obsessive in its pull and shaped France’s literary culture from below. The dominant, winning narrative was aimed at transcendence—it pushed the nation’s colonized past into the shadows by focusing on France’s upward progression toward civilization. The latent memory of the losing narrative, however, kept pulling the elite consciousness downward, with the nation’s most basic anxieties about the original colonial dynamic seeping back in through the dark alleys of the mind. This tension will be central to my analysis.
In bringing the darker side of the nation’s literary and cultural history to the surface, I do not mean to diminish France’s remarkable cultural and political achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although many French writers were haunted by their nation’s barbarian past, their fears did not hinder their ability to produce some of the greatest works of world literature. Indeed, it is likely that these fears gave them a heightened sensibility and a sharpness of insight that made this extraordinary flourishing of genius possible. The greatness of these works themselves is thus not in question. I am concerned rather with the anxieties that these writers experienced (and that their texts reflect). As is well known, a disjunction often separates one’s accomplishments as seen from the outside from how one feels about them from the inside.73 Objectively, one would think that France’s writers would have felt very self-confident given their outstanding accomplishments. But subjectively, they experienced fears that may not seem rational to us now. This subjective experience was important, however, because it covertly shaped the development of France’s literature, culture, and history from below the threshold of awareness.
In offering a new paradigm for the early modern period, this book also provides an important foundation for understanding contemporary France. Many of the same questions are still very much alive today and are illuminated by this earlier history, as my concluding chapter will explore.
Organization of the Book
This book is divided into three parts. Part I develops France’s colonial relation to the Ancient World by exploring the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Chapter 1 explores why the French imitation of the Greco-Romans was so explosive that it stimulated heated debates for almost three hundred years. I argue that hidden behind these debates was a colonial history about the Romans as the nation’s former colonizers. The Quarrel’s foundational debate was a “memory war” about whether the Romans were an “us” or an imperial “them.” Were they civilizers or colonizers? As a consequence of this war, the memory that the Romans were colonizers faded from view and they were framed as civilizers. Chapter 2 shows that the memory of the nation’s colonized past did not completely disappear. The latent memory of this past resurfaced in the genre of the “defense.” The nation’s elite mounted a defense against the legacy of the nation’s colonized past.
Part II analyzes France’s colonial relation to the New World through a study of the relations de voyage. Chapter 3 discusses the status of these texts. They were widely circulated in early modern France as part of a publicity campaign because they were an arm of the Catholic Reformation. Paradoxically, were it not for the Catholic Reformation, the image of the New World sauvage would not have sunk its claws as deeply in the French imagination as it did. As