Colonizer or Colonized
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Sara E. Melzer. Colonizer or Colonized
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Colonizer or Colonized
SARA E. MELZER
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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?
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