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CHAPTER 2

The Return of the Submerged Story About France’s Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation

One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly in the trains of reasoning.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Were the Greco-Romans an “us” or a “them”? This question was central to the memory war about how French history would be constructed, as we saw in Chapter 1. The ancients won this foundational conflict of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, and thus French history was considered to have begun with the Romans as an “us” who helped civilize the Gauls. The effects of this memory war have been long lasting, because the nation’s dominant narrative aligned France with the Ancient Romans. In so doing, this narrative forced underground the competing alternative, which highlighted the nation’s colonized past. In this losing version, the Romans were a “them”—colonizers and invaders who deprecated the Gauls as barbarians.

The narrative about France’s colonized past did not disappear, however, even if the national memory bank excluded it. Shards of it remained. Because any representation of history is always partial, historiographers have to eliminate large portions to make it cohesive and intelligible, noted Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History. But whatever one excludes and “holds to be irrelevant … comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies,” he astutely observed.¹

This chapter will show how the nation’s excluded history about its colonized past came back indirectly, “despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies.” It returned in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation and about the nation’s world of letters. However, when this memory resurfaced, it did not return in a rational or coherent manner. Rather, it erupted in a disguised, fragmentary form that produced strange inconsistencies in texts that discussed the nation’s past. These fragments had a strange, in-between status. They left enough traces to prevent the nation’s colonized past from being completely erased. But those traces were relatively weak, so they never cohered into a sustained, fully defined logical construct. Had they been stronger, the traces would have been easier to combat. It was as if the cultured elite were boxing with shadows.

These shadows were what gave the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns its strange and amorphous power. Having explored the Quarrel’s foundational battle as a memory war in the previous chapter, let us now consider how the remnants of that battle erupted in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation. I contend that what was really at stake in these debates was a quarrel over decolonization.

Defending the French Language and French Culture

The latent memory of France’s colonized past resurfaced in a special class of writing known as the “defense.” This genre was the most important site for the nation’s struggle to decolonize from the Ancients. While the defense was a mode of discourse that had many different purposes, my discussion will focus on the humanist-educated elite’s struggles to defend the vernacular and the nation’s own world of letters.² Du Bellay wrote the most important and famous of the defenses, La défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). He was hardly alone, however. Hundreds of writers rallied round this same cause in the early modern era, although they often did not use the word “defense” in their titles. For example, the French Academy was founded in 1634 as a defensive structure: its primary mission was to defend the nation’s world of letters.³ To cite another example, Dominique Bouhours defended the French language in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671). France’s world of letters was not the only thing that needed a defense. Estienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France was a “historical defense and illustration of the French nation,” as Danielle Trudeau has remarked.⁴ Pasquier sought to defend the nation’s independence in the political, religious, and literary domains. The defense thus was a vast and important category of writing.

Yet the defense has received surprisingly little attention as a genre, with the notable exception of Margaret Ferguson’s excellent study.⁵ While examining the defenses, most scholars have zeroed in on the concept of imitation, concentrating largely on the formal or theoretical issues of mimesis.⁶ For the most part, scholars ignore or minimize the fact that imitation was frequently raised within the specific discursive context of the defense. As a result, the unstated assumption of most scholars is that imitation was charged with the role of helping the French elite to achieve its highest goal: becoming civilized. They have generally neglected what imitation was defending against. The genre of the defense, however, needs to be taken literally, since its distinctive mode of discourse profoundly shaped the dynamics of imitation and broadened its meanings. A defense looks downward to defend against something as well as looking upward to argue for something. In the context of the Quarrel, imitation was concerned with both. Its most well-known function was to enable French intellectuals to progress upward toward civilization by emulating Greek and Roman models. However, imitation had a second, counterbalancing function: to defend against regression into barbarism.

Ferguson’s analysis illuminated the nature of the literary defense, showing how it followed structures similar to those of a psychological defense, as Freud would later develop it. She observed how Freud often used the concepts of defense and repression in overlapping ways. The goal of both, she argued, was to guard against two different kinds of danger. The first was an external danger that was real and very much in the present moment; the second was felt within the psyche from a remembered danger that was replaying an archaic, primitive drama. Often the sources of both dangers became conflated, with one substituting for the other.

As for the danger present in early modern France, the state was struggling with many different issues, too numerous to elaborate here. Broadly speaking, the state wanted to develop and fortify its monarchical powers, and it was also preoccupied with the ongoing tension between Catholics and Protestants, which continued well after the Edict of Nantes, which officially ended the religious wars. Hélène Merlin-Kajman and Marc Fumaroli have described how the French language developed in the context of both struggles.⁷ Both scholars are mostly concerned with the positive ideals that the defenses were aiming at, whereas I am concerned with what these texts were defending against. Both scholars examine the explicit political and cultural contexts of the defense, whereas I wish to explore the unstated, archaic dramas that were buried beneath this genre’s surface.

Jean Savaron’s defense, Traité que les lettres sont l’ornement des rois et de l’Etat (1611), for example, used the primitive scene of the Gauls’ struggle against the Romans as a backdrop for the Catholic-Protestant controversy. In 1610, Henri IV was assassinated, just twelve years after he had signed the Edict of Nantes. His death raised fears that old wounds could be opened. A year after the assassination, Savaron (1566–1622), a magistrate, advised the new king, Louis XIII, on how to deal with “the barbarousness which has slipped in amongst your subjects,” in his defense of the nation’s world of letters.⁸ Writing within the larger context of the Catholic League’s efforts to clamp down on Protestant heresy, Savaron used the image of two different Gauls to conjure up France’s internal conflicts: “Nothing as much as letters can be recommended to kings to harness the passionate spirit of the French and confine it within their duty: [letters] provide the opportunity to bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts, [and] we created public spaces for the exercise of letters. The Gallic Hercules surmounted the previously invincible passionate spirit of the Gauls, drawing them to him through golden chains of speech.”⁹ Savaron aligned France’s murderous rebels with the ferocity of the primitive Gauls, and he projected the image of a civilized, Romanized Gaul onto the forces of order that needed to prevail. He urged that the latter stamp out its barbaric counterpart in order to “bridle the raw and ferocious nature of our former Celts.”¹⁰ Like their Gallic ancestors in their earliest stage, the wild French dissidents had “the ferocity innate in French minds that was never tempered by the sweetness of letters.”¹¹ The current heretics were like the precolonized Gauls: unruly beasts that needed taming. A Gallic Hercules would bridle their wildness through his eloquent speech.

Savaron thus used the Roman colonial discourse with its conflict between the two Gauls as a frame for France’s internal religious and civil conflicts because it drew upon one of the most primitive and important of French dramas: the supposed barbarism of France’s Gallic past. This archaic story was still very much alive and gained in emotional force by virtue of being interwoven with other dramas in the French consciousness. Savaron’s use of the two Gauls suggested that he had largely internalized the Roman colonial discourse, favoring a civilized Gaul over a more independent but barbaric Gaul.

The French elite’s defenses of their language and world of letters adopted a common defensive strategy; they placed the perceived danger out of range of consciousness.¹² This strategy clearly worked, since the fear of barbarism has been eclipsed by the story of its opposite: the nation’s cultural greatness. But the threat never vanished completely; barbarism continued to haunt the collective psyche of the nation’s world of letters. The very fact that the defense became such a prevalent genre was itself significant. The defenses took on such a strong emotional charge because they struggled against the enduring effects of the nation’s submerged colonial past.

A Memory of Their Own

The French defenses of their nation’s language and world of letters endeavored to respond to a key legacy of the nation’s colonized past: the lack of any written documents to record the Gauls’ history from their own perspective. Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) was a defense of the vernacular which addressed the feared perception that the Gauls were illiterate and thus barbaric. Tory anchored his defense in the troubling story of the Romans who, as part of their deceptive colonizing strategy, had maliciously stolen from the Gauls their favorable memory of their past. The Romans wrongly painted the Gauls as illiterate, he argued. France’s ancestors had already had a “working knowledge of reading and writing … long before Julius Caesar came to France.”¹³ However, their world of letters became vulnerable to a Roman theft because it was insufficiently developed. Their Roman conquerors could thus easily snuff it out and impose a cultural amnesia on the Gauls, “destroy[ing their] laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers.”¹⁴ These conquerors then substituted their own Romanized memories for those of the Gauls themselves, forcing the Gauls to celebrate Roman “victories and achievements … recorded in their own Latin letters.”¹⁵ Tory argued for developing the French language in this colonial context: to guard against another similar loss of the nation’s own memory. Having a history of their own meant that the Gauls/French would not have to look at themselves through the Greco-Roman portraits that cast them as the barbarian other.

Du Bellay’s Défense was of course the most famous and important of all the defenses. Like Tory before him, Du Bellay situated his defense of the vernacular within the context of the Gauls’ colonized past. He began his defense by casting the Romans as an imperial, self-aggrandizing “them” who self-consciously stole the Gauls’ memory in a deceptive and calculating plot. Conjuring up the specter of the Gauls’ remote colonial history, Du Bellay recounted how the Romans had engaged in a psychic and cultural warfare to deprive the Gauls of their own memory of themselves: “The Romans’ envy [of the Gauls] caused them to plot a conspiracy against us and weaken, as far as they were able, our warlike glory, whose brilliance they could not tolerate…. Not only have they done us wrong thereby, but, to make us seem yet even more contemptible, they have called us brutal, cruel, and barbarous.”¹⁶ Without a memory of their own, the Gauls and their French descendants were forced into internalizing their former colonizers’ perceptions of them:

The Romans called us Barbarians, seeing that in their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory, they sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject in comparison with them: principally the Gauls, from whom they suffered more shame and hurt than others. In this connection, reflecting often on why the Romans’ deeds are so celebrated throughout the world, nay, more highly preferred than those of all other nations taken together, I find no greater reason than this: that the Romans had a great multitude of writers so that most of their deeds … over many years, their ardour in battle … has been preserved entire until our times. On the contrary, the actions of other nations, especially the Gauls, before they fell into the power of the French, and the actions of the French themselves since they gave their name to the Gauls, have been so ill collected, that we have almost lost not only the glory of them, but even the memory of them. [my emphasis]¹⁷

The Roman plot against the Gauls prevented them and their French descendants from constructing an independent memory of their own past.

A century later, France’s world of letters was still on the defensive. The French Academy was founded in 1634 largely to guard against a memory theft. Nicolas Faret provided a rationale for the Academy in his Projet de l’académie, pour servir de préface à ses statuts (1634) by first highlighting that the Gauls/French were the victims of Greek and Roman colonial domination and not simply their heirs. Framing the Greco-Romans as jealous cultural imperialists, Faret argued that they had stolen the Gauls’ memory from them in a vicious power struggle. The Gauls had once established an empire so vast and feared that “for all time … [they] made themselves fearsome to the most celebrated Nations on earth, and their Name still reigns amongst several of them as a Trophy to their victories.”¹⁸ According to Faret, the Greeks and Romans were militarily inferior to the Gauls and felt dwarfed by them. So powerful were the Gauls that “our Reknown sometimes obscured that of the Greeks, and our Valor triumphed over the Greek People and their Provinces.”¹⁹ The Greeks and Romans, to compensate for their lack and give vent to their jealousy, shifted the battleground to their area of strength—the cultural arena. As masters of rhetoric, they marshaled words as important weapons in this war. They used their eloquence to alter how history represented the Gauls, reducing their stature for posterity. The Greeks, “with all their hate and artifice,” sought “to smother the truth [of the Gauls’ greatness] beneath [their] deceptive Histories.”²⁰ Their linguistic weapons succeeded in distorting how history perceived their Gallic adversaries. As for the Romans, “it seems that [they] engaged with the Gauls only to slander them. Sometimes the Romans called them the most terrible and merciless of all Barbarians. Other times, they named the Gauls enormous and ferocious Giants, bloody Colossuses animated by furor alone and by the cruelty that they brought into the world, and often they sought to represent them as Monsters who were born only for the destruction of Cities and for the unhappiness of the human race.”²¹ Even though the Romans told outrageous lies, their crafty rhetoric made their falsities seem true. The truth itself did not matter; only the vraisemblable did. Roman rhetoric determined the perception of truth because the Romans presented their lies “with the most beautiful rhetorical flourishes.”²² Their eloquence convinced posterity that the Gauls were weak and barbaric. Eventually this slander was taken as the truth itself. The Greco-Roman narratives thus shaped how others defined the Gauls. So successful were the Greek and Roman slurs that the Gauls’ greatness was virtually forgotten, almost lost to history. As a result, France’s ancestors were erroneously viewed as barbarians.

As victims (and heirs) of Roman rhetoric, Faret and other French intellectuals understood firsthand the power of language: its force could compensate for insufficient military might, making false perceptions pass as vraisemblable and as historical truth. Faret warned that while the French kings could use physical power to “make their name known and their power dreaded,” such force would be weak “without the help of the Sciences and Arts.” Had the Gauls possessed “the art of making the natural ardor of their conquests well known through their writings,” their glory would not have been erased from history. Because the Gauls did not have their own world of letters, they could not counteract Roman slander. Consequently “the luster of the Gauls’ reputation for greatness faded and [was] finally extinguished [by a reputation] for barbarism.”²³ Faret insisted that an academy be founded to cultivate French works of eloquence because only this linguistic art could control how the French elite and their nation would be perceived by others, by themselves, and by posterity.

In sum, France’s colonized past provides a larger context for understanding many of the defenses of the nation’s language and world of letters. The Roman theft of the Gauls’ memory of themselves lay at the root of the dilemma which trapped the French self-understanding within their former colonizers’ disdainful view of them. This dilemma thus motivated the state to institute an academy to ensure that France’s writers would possess a powerful language and world of letters capable of preserving their own memory from their own perspective. By cultivating their language and letters, the French nation would not suffer the same fate as the Gauls. The French Academy thus sought to liberate the nation from understanding itself through the denigrating lens of its former colonizers. Early modern France’s obsession with eloquence thus takes on a very different meaning within this colonial context which frames the Rome-Gaul story as a memory theft.

Internalizing the Threat of Barbarism

The French defenses of their world of letters targeted another problem resulting from the Gauls’ loss of their own historical memory. Unable to construct an independent picture of their own past, the Gauls and their French descendants became trapped in a Romanized hall of mirrors that reflected back to them a demeaning portrait. The Romans, having smashed or stolen all evidence of the Gauls’ greatness, reduced the Gauls to one central image—that of the barbarian other. This image became elite France’s Achilles’ heel. Centuries later, when competitors wanted to scorn France, they taunted it with this image because the invective surrounding it was already charged with venom and could reopen old wounds.

The fear of barbarism hung like a dark cloud over the sixteenth-century humanists’ efforts to shape and defend their own world of letters.²⁴ Many outsiders accused the French of barbarism. The shrillest accusations came from the Italians, France’s chief rivals in a quest for political and cultural hegemony that dated back to the early part of the century and before. In 1507 François Tissard defended the French language and world of letters against the Italians’ charge of barbarism in an address to the students at the University of Paris. He formulated the issue by mimicking the snicker of a haughty Italian who taunted the French from the towering heights of his nation’s supposed cultural superiority: “So? … a good Frenchman hopes to pull his country out of barbarism and to prove its worthiness? … Do you [French] really hope to outshine those in our country [Italy], so famous, so eloquent, so polished? You who are barbaric and uncultivated? … Who are those people in nations beyond the mountains who have no knowledge of human letters, neither Latin nor Greek?”²⁵ Adding to the Italians’ scorn of the French world of letters was a chorus of other Europeans. Erasmus, in De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio, devalued the French language by claiming that even a simple German boy could learn French in a few short months without much effort. He could do it “quite unconsciously while absorbed in other activities.” Moreover, French was “barbarous and irregular … [its] spelling does not agree with pronunciation, and [its] harsh sounds and accents … hardly fall within the realm of human speech.”²⁶

The most serious and insidious accusation, however, came not from the outside but from the inside. Many French humanists themselves had internalized this charge of barbarism. When Tissard countered the Italians’ accusations of barbarism, he did so by accepting the belief that French was indeed barbaric. Conceding the current inferiority of France’s world of letters, his defense was based on the promise of a more glorious future. Speaking of the new path to greatness that was opening up in France, Tissard wrote: “To this enterprise is promised an easy and imminent success. Let us then work together.”²⁷ He had internalized the perception that French was barbaric because he accepted the Greco-Roman definitions of barbarism and civilization. The Greco-Romans defined civilization as possessing a knowledge of their languages and their world of learning. Correspondingly, they defined barbarism in terms of its lack. What Tissard meant by “pull[ing] his country out of barbarism” was that the French elite should follow the same path as the Greeks and Romans, imitating their trajectory to narrow the gap separating them from their classical models.

Like Tissard, many humanists agreed that French was barbaric and defective; their defense consisted in repairing the language. Conceding that French was deficient and in need of reform, Etienne Dolet, in La Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en une autre (1540), proposed that the French civilize their language and themselves so that “foreigners will no longer call us barbarians.”²⁸ Du Bellay’s Défense explicitly addressed those French humanists who had internalized the accusation that the vernacular was indeed barbaric. The Roman memory theft caused the good memories of the Gauls’ deeds to fall into oblivion, forcing the French and their Gallic ancestors to adopt their former colonizers’ perceptions of them: “The Romans called us Barbarians, seeing that in their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory, they sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject in comparison with them.” Even though the Romans were dead, their power was so great that it transcended their graves. The ghosts of Romans past took up residence inside French souls and caused the French to keep alive the Roman disdain and turn it inward. It made the French themselves “view [their language] as barbarous and irregular, incapable of that elegance and fecundity which are in the Greek and Roman [language],” as Du Bellay put it.²⁹ Thus many French humanists assumed, he wrote, that “our tongue is too vile and barbarous to deal with such lofty subjects as philosophy” and believed that French was “incapable of all good letters and erudition.”³⁰ Du Bellay then added: “I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance and temerity of some of our fellow countrymen who, taking themselves for nothing less than Greeks or Romans, despise and reject with a stoic, haughty raised brow everything written in French. And I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opinion of some learned men, who think that our vulgar tongue is incapable of all good letters and erudition.”³¹ If many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries rejected “with a stoic, haughty raised brow” all that was written in French, where did their scorn come from? On what ground did these accusers stand? Clearly they stood not on a solid French ground but on one of an imagined alliance with the Ancients, at least a partial one. From these lofty heights, they saw their own language through the Ancients’ imagined perspective, which dwarfed their own stature as French. Many of Du Bellay’s contemporaries revealed such a self-deprecating stance. Guillaume Budé feared that his fellow countrymen were “unsuited to letters, in contrast to the Italians, whose sky and soil enabled even infants to wail with eloquence and poetry.”³² According to Guillaume du Vair, French eloquence “degenerates from Ancient Greek and Roman,” and “we do not have as many great masters and practitioners of eloquence as Greece and Rome.” He feared that French was inferior because of “the drought in our minds” and that there might be “a stain in us.”³³ Nothing could repair this kind of lack.

Internalizing the belief that their language was inferior, many members of the French humanist-educated elite suffered from the legacy of the nation’s colonized past. Barbarism became a label that stuck. To be sure, many of the elite argued that the label was not justified. Nevertheless, they still took this accusation seriously, as did Etienne Pasquier when he complained that “several Italian authors want to emblazon us with this title [of barbarian].”³⁴ Many French lettrés unwittingly wore a semivisible letter B emblazoned across their foreheads: for centuries they continually provided defenses against this accusation of barbarism, while at the same time indulging in grandiose rhetoric of greatness and genius.

More than a hundred years later, the specter of France’s colonized past as a nation of barbarians still hovered over the educated elite’s struggle to defend their language and cultural power. In 1671 Dominique Bouhours penned one of the most popular and successful defenses in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.³⁵ Like Du Bellay, Bouhours defended the French language and French culture against the legacy of the Roman colonization of Gaul. True, this past did not weigh as heavily over Bouhours as it did over his predecessors. But the effects of this past were still evident in the fact that France’s cultured elite continued to value and speak their former colonizer’s language. The Romans had forced their language upon the Gauls as an instrument of domination: “As soon as the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls, the Roman language began to be used there, either out of the complaisance of the conquered, or because it was necessary and in their best interest; be it because they were subjects who had no access to their masters without some fluency in Latin, or be it because the Roman decrees were all written in Latin. Little by little Latin gained ground and the Romans imposed the yoke of their language, along with servitude, upon the conquered, as Saint Augustine writes.”³⁶ Latin, far from being a neutral language of greatness, also contained the mark of the Gauls’ subjection to their colonial masters. To value the vernacular was a political act: to decolonize the French mind from foreign rule.

Viewing the Romans as adversaries, Bouhours situated his defense within a curious master-slave discourse, arguing that French was not a “slave” to Latin. He boasted that French, liberated from the stranglehold the Romans exerted over it, had declared its freedom, whereas Spanish and Italian had not rid themselves of all Latin endings.³⁷ Understanding that the best defense is a good offense, he attacked these other languages, accusing them of still remaining yoked to the Romans: “They are like slaves who always carry the mark and the livery of their master.”³⁸ Fortunately the French had escaped such bondage; “rather,” wrote Bouhours, “we are people who enjoy total liberty. By removing this evident resemblance that other languages have with Latin, we have made a language for ourselves that has been created by a free people rather than born into slavery.”³⁹ Because the Romans adopted a strategy that colonized the Gauls through cultural imperialism, the status of Roman culture within France was highly freighted; it was part of a colonial bond that many intellectuals, mostly moderns, sought to break. The development of the French language became the mark of France’s independence from Ancient Rome, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman too has argued.⁴⁰

Because Latin symbolized a problematic past, it is important to specify which version of Latin Bouhours had in mind. There were two basic kinds, as the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini reminds us.⁴¹ The first was a high, classical Latin, the language of Virgil and Cicero. The second was a more popular, vulgar version of the streets that evolved out of a political colonization and the mass infusion of different cultures, with the mixing of different populations. Bouhours had in mind the vulgar form that resulted from the Gauls’ history as a colonized people. After Bouhours’ character Eugène insisted that French was “created by a free people rather than born into slavery,” Ariste replied that such talk was a mask to hide the lowly origins of French: “We have acted like those men of fortune, who hide to others and to themselves who they are by disguising their family name, to escape reproach due to their lowly birth.” He briefly recounted the language’s evolution, beginning when the Gauls were “the vanquished” or “the subjects” and “the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls.” The Gauls, “unable to make themselves agreeable to the victors except in speaking their language,” began to speak Latin more and more. Over time the Gauls forgot their own language, or rather “they corrupted it, mixing it with that of the Romans. Unable to completely rid themselves of their own, nor completely learn the other, they confused the two; from this confusion there resulted I do not know what kind of jargon which they called Roman, to distinguish it from Latin.” Then when the Franks drove the Romans out of Gaul, they added more words to this mixture; “rather than abolish this barbaric language, they accommodated themselves to it” and imposed “the yoke of their language on the vanquished nations along with that of servitude.”⁴² The Franks, to “mark that they were the masters,” inserted many German words into “this Gallic or rustic Latin, as some have called it.” And then came the Goths, the Bourguignons, the Huns, and the Vandals, all of whom “added several terms to the language of the countries where they established themselves.”⁴³ As a result, French “was, in its origin, only a miserable jargon, half-Gallic, half-Latin, and half-teutonic.” Ariste call this mixed origin “a horrible monster.” He added that “this monster lasted a long time, the linguistic barbarism having survived for entire centuries, along with its barbaric customs.”⁴⁴ This mixed heritage propelled Bouhours to insist upon purifying and cleansing the language of its “garbage” (“ordures”). Purifying the language meant liberating it from its colonial past by erasing the traces of its former subjection to invaders and forgetting that it had ever occurred. While Bouhours struggled here against Vulgar Latin, the status of classical Latin still remained an issue. It was equally problematic, for reasons I address in chapter 6.

Thus far, my goal has been to show how the French elite defended their own world of letters within the context of their struggle to transcend the nation’s colonized past. However, I am not suggesting that this vision of the past came into a sharp or consistent focus. Rather, it appeared through shards. The fragmented awareness of this colonized past existed in tension with the dominant narrative that sought to deny it and bury this past as no longer relevant, as if it had never really happened. Trapped within this in-between state, never fully articulating the significance of this colonized past and never fully able to extirpate its traces, the French elite were still haunted by its remnants. Thus the elite vacillated between two competing narratives about the Gauls/French relation to the Romans. Tunisian writer Albert Memmi has illuminated a similar tension for the colonized of modern Tunisia in 1957. He described how the colonized experienced themselves and the world through two conflicting psychic and cultural realms, through the opposing lens of both the colonizer and the colonized in his text, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Certainly the early modern humanist-educated elite suffered from a similar double vision. They vacillated between seeing themselves through their own eyes and through the imagined perspective of their former colonizers. This vacillation itself was a legacy of the specific nature of the Romans’ colonial strategy, which used their cultural force to blur the “us-them” boundaries. To be sure, all colonizers strive to have the colonized internalize their values and thought structures. However, the Roman strategy of a cultural assimilation fostered this internalization to a particularly high degree by presenting themselves as mentors, and offering the gift of civilization. This strategy sought to catch the colonized off guard so they would identify their interests with those of the colonizer. This strategy was largely effective.

The Vicious Circle of Imitation

That the French elite should have internalized the threat of barbarism is not surprising, as this danger was built into the Greco-Roman thought structures that they were imitating. Many Greco-Roman beliefs and values were based on a hierarchical, colonial mentality that made imitation or any true alliance virtually impossible. The Ancient World’s underlying ideology did not allow any space on its throne of greatness for the French, and implicitly pushed them off it. Because the Ancients were long since dead, they obviously did not personally and literally reject the French as partners or heirs. But this rejection was embedded in the underlying assumptions of the Greco-Roman thought structures. These modes of thought disrupted the French myths of continuity and alliance, casting the French elite into the position of outsiders, beyond the family circle. Many Greek and Roman thought structures thrust imitators such as the French so far outside the family fold that they were not even sons a few notches below their fathers; they were simply not considered family at all. Rather, they were deficient beings, barbarians. Such thought structures did not really allow the French access to the pinnacle they aspired to. Imitating the Ancients thus led to a vicious circle, reinforcing the elite’s initial fear of barbarism.

Both Greek and Roman modes of thought were hostile to any imitators. The Greek view of nature and history placed non-Greeks in a perpetual position of inferiority. As Hesiod, Plato, and Polybius articulated these concepts, nature was degenerative. Nature’s decline meant that history was headed downhill and did not provide the French a level playing field with the Ancients. No matter how well the French imitated the Ancients, they would never come close to their lofty models because the future was always already slanted downward. The French elite’s task of bearing the Ancients’ load was as difficult and futile as Sisyphus’s. Many Romans, like Lucretius, adopted a similar view of nature and history, even though it meant that they, who came after the Greeks, were lower down in the hierarchy of being. France, by extension, was of even lesser stature. Thus, French imitators were diminished by both Greek and the Roman sources.

The concept of the barbarian, borrowed from Greek thought, coupled with the idea of the degeneration of nature, also troubled the myth of a French continuity or alignment with the Ancients, making their models seem inimitable. In his Défense, Du Bellay defined the term “barbarian” by observing that it came from a Greek word rooted in the specificity of the Greek language. Concerning “the meaning of this word barbarous: in antiquity they were called barbarous who spoke Greek badly. For as foreigners coming to Athens attempted to speak Greek, they often fell into this absurd sound Barbaras [βάρβαρος]”⁴⁵ Similarly, more than a century later Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) too defined “barbarian” as rooted in the Greek language: “Foreigners, when they came to Greece, stuttered, spoke crudely.”⁴⁶ Barbaros was an onomatopoeia, evoking the babbling, inarticulate sounds of the person who could not speak Greek correctly. By extension, the term “barbarian” designated all those who were not-Greek.

The Greek tongue was central to the Greeks’ definition of “barbarian” because language provided the foundation upon which all of Greek culture and identity was constructed, as Edith Hall and Anthony Pagden have discussed.⁴⁷ The outsiders’ incorrect use of Greek designated more than a simple linguistic deficiency. It meant they could not achieve right reason. Without the Greek language, with its right reason, outsiders did not have the proper qualities to form or be included in the community, the polis. Although outsiders physically resembled humans, they were not fully human because they dwelled beyond the boundaries of the polis. Positioned on the outside, they had no knowledge of virtue, nor could they share in human society’s highest goals. Not recognizing the force of the bonds holding humans together, they were creatures for whom “the language of social exchange was devoid of meaning,” as Pagden puts it.⁴⁸ Thus, while “barbarian” referred first to language and non-Greek speakers, it came to mean, by extension, those who were not fully rational or human. Many Greek writers grafted the human/nonhuman distinction onto the Greek/not-Greek opposition.⁴⁹ Du Bellay resented the implication of nonhuman, complaining: “Afterwards the Greeks transferred this term [barbarian] to brutal and cruel customs, calling all nations but Greece barbarous.”⁵⁰ A century later, Furetière’s dictionary definition of the term criticized the Greek/non-Greek opposition: “The Greeks called Barbarians … all those who were not from their country,”⁵¹ because of Greece’s disdain for non-Greek nations.

The Greek/barbarian binary opposition did not accord France’s humanist-educated elite a stable place within its frame. The French elite were literally not Greek-speaking, nor were they Greek. And yet, of course, they did not want to see themselves as barbarians. Greek culture, unlike its Roman counterpart, had no middle term or in-between state. It defined the “us” position so narrowly that not even the Romans quite fitted in. As Du Bellay noted, the Romans did not quite measure up; they enriched their language “almost the equal of Greek.”⁵² The Romans occupied a status of “almost but not quite” Greek, to transpose Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase,⁵³ making them feel culturally inferior. By extension, the French were even lower down in that imagined hierarchy. The Greek understanding of the barbarian came out of a binary thought structure that offered no solid place for the French—at least not literally in its original form. The French elite could not legitimately occupy the “us” slot alongside the Greeks, since these proclaimed “fathers” would have probably derided them as poor imitators had they still been alive.⁵⁴ Rooted in the specificity of the Greek language, the concept of the barbarian could not be easily transferred to the French language, thus pushing France outside the circle of a desired “us-ness” with the Greeks.

The Greek linguistic divide thus reflected the dominant Greek worldview, which imposed strong “us-them” boundaries that did not readily welcome outsiders. Its boundaries reflected a highly polarized world to protect the carefully ordered political structures of (Greek) reason from the wildness of barbaric spaces beyond. Because its boundaries were not particularly elastic or fluid, foreigners were largely fixed in their position outside the polis. Barbarians could not easily acquire right reason or become civilized enough to merit inclusion.⁵⁵

Despite this chasm that potentially threatened France’s continuity with the Ancients, many intellectuals still transformed or “translated” the key concepts of Greek thought into their own world of thought. Many seventeenth-century writers interpreted the term “barbarian” figuratively, seeing themselves as united with the Greeks in a fundamental sameness so that they could substitute themselves on the Greek pedestal. The French Academy dictionary of 1694 defined the term “barbarian” such that the French occupied the dominant, civilized “us” slot in the “us-them” divide: “Barbaric: A language which has no relation to ours, or which is rude and shocks our ear” (my emphasis).⁵⁶ Similarly, Furetière defined the barbarian as non-French. “Barbarian: Foreigner who is from a country which is very far, sauvage, badly polished, cruel and who has manners very different from ours” (my emphasis).⁵⁷ French intellectuals of the seventeenth-century world of letters became obsessed with their own language, imitating the Greek emphasis on language. To speak French well meant being, like the Greeks, “not barbarian.” Frenchness and purity came to be defined negatively as “not barbarian.” Vaugelas wrote that “one can commit a barbarism … in speaking a word which is not at all French.” To speak French purely “one has only to avoid barbarisms.”⁵⁸ Similarly, Furetière clarified his definition of “diction” by adding: “This diction is not French, but barbaric.”⁵⁹ However, as much as the French humanist-educated elite sought to align themselves with the Greeks in the “us” position, the Greek pedestal was a narrow space that did not permit the French to share it. If the French elite imagined they got one foot up on it, the other foot was left dangling, always waiting and hoping to gain a firm footing there. Unable to fit stably on the pedestal, the French elite kept falling out of alignment with the Greeks and into the “barbarian” slot. In sum, the dominant strain of Greek thought did not really accommodate imitation. The diachronic notion of degeneration and the synchronic notion of the barbarian, if understood literally, doomed the French aspiration of kinship to failure.

The Romans did not fit on the Greek pedestal either. They lived in the shadow of the Greek giants. The Roman-Greek dynamic presented a different version of the vicious circle that the French elite also fell into. The Romans were obsessed by the fear of being barbarians, culturally inferior to the Greeks, as several classicists have argued.⁶⁰ This Roman fear was reflected in its key founding myth from Virgil’s Aeneid. After the Greeks had sacked Troy, Aeneas left with his father and settled in the land of the Latins. As both Rémi Brague and Richard Waswo have described it, to be Roman was to be rooted in the experience of exile, separated from one’s first land and transplanted to a new one. There, one began anew out of the ashes of the old.⁶¹ Rome’s myth of its Trojan origin portrayed itself as derivative, and inferior to its sources. Thus Rome’s true home was located in an elsewhere, a source that it could never fully possess or ever fully make its own because it was both foreign and located in an unobtainable past. Imitating the Greeks only aggravated the Roman fears of inferiority. The Romans thus situated themselves in a slippery middle space in between Hellenism and barbarism, as Brague has characterized it. To be Roman “is to have above oneself a classicism to imitate and below a barbarism to subdue…. It is to perceive oneself as Greek with regard to that which is barbaric, but also as barbaric with regard to that which is Greek. It is to know that what one transmits, one does not hold in oneself, and that one only possesses it with great difficulty, in a fragile and provisional way.”⁶² Thus, when the French cultured elite were imitating the Romans, they were repeating the Roman fear of being “barbaric with regard to that which is Greek.” Like their Roman models, the French elite were trapped between a form of Hellenism and barbarism. In sum, as models the Romans presented a key problem. Since the Romans felt culturally inferior to the Greeks, what the French imitators were copying was the Roman fear of being barbaric in relation to the Greeks.

France’s inheritance from the Greeks and the Romans was thus a double liability and a double bind. To imitate either would not really help the French elite to defend themselves effectively against the legacy of their colonized past, since both models led into versions of a vicious circle. The French elite’s effort to rid themselves of the label “barbarian” only caused that glue to thicken. In its most basic structure, the vicious circle was about the struggle between similarity and difference, between civilization and barbarism. The French were in fact very different from the Ancients and feared that their differences signified that they were actually barbaric. Seeking to erase these differences, the French elite clung all the more doggedly to the Ancients, imitating them and celebrating myths of similarity with them, as if they were all kin. However, the thought structures the elite imitated reminded them of their differences, casting them out into the cold and leaving them to wonder if they could ever measure up. This cycle would then perpetuate itself without end. Imitation became a problem in itself because the underlying beliefs, values, and assumptions of the models they were imitating offered the French no stable home within them.

In summary, then, by reframing the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, we see how the genre of the defense and its obsession with imitation need to be understood within the larger context of France’s submerged history about the Greco-Roman colonization of Gaul. Imitation acquires more complex and different meanings depending upon the imitator’s imagined relation to its models. To the extent that the imitator views the model as an “us,” whose basic interests and ideals are similar, imitation is not necessarily problematic, because it serves as a civilizing process. But to the extent that the imitator views the model as a “them,” especially a colonizer once bent on subjugation, imitation becomes fraught with great danger. This mimetic dynamic is even more perilous when the imitator forgets that the model was a colonizer and insists on a fundamental sameness between imitator and model despite their obvious underlying differences. This chapter has brought out the latter scenario, where imitation risks trapping the imitator in a vicious circle: what the French were copying were thought structures that were implicitly hostile to them as imitators, continually relegating them to the position of the outsider, the barbarian other.

How could the French elite escape this vicious circle and cultivate an independent, dignified French world of letters to ground their emerging cultural identity? This question was central to the Quarrel and to the elite’s struggle to decolonize the nation from the Ancients and escape their influence. I examine three different proposed escape routes in chapters 6 to 8. Each of those pathways, however, involves a triangulated journey, since France situated itself between both the New World and the Ancient World. The Quarrel’s frame, I contend, thus needs to be expanded to include not simply the French decolonization from the Ancient World but also the French colonization of the New World, as chapter 5 discusses. But before exploring these triangulated routes, I need to address how the New World entered into the French imagination and how the reading French public imagined their colonial relation to the Amerindian barbarian. In chapter 3, I show how the information about the Americas became so widespread that the New World constituted an important pole opposite to that of the Ancient World. In chapter 4, I discuss France’s assimilationist stance toward the Amerindians: were they an “us” or a “them”?