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Introduction

There has never been a document of culture that was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism.

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

“Our Ancestors the Gauls”

Once upon a time, long before the birth of France, barbarians inhabited its land. These nomadic tribes, dwelling in forests and caves, were known as the Gauls. They dined on human flesh, or so Diodorus, the Greek historian of the first century B.C., recounted.¹ Then they washed down their feasts with wine or a drink they invented made out of barley, now known as beer.² Lacking any moderation, they became prey to their drunken cravings, and were driven to a state of near madness. But in their more sober moments, they aspired to some order and cleanliness: “They consistently use urine to bathe the body and wash their teeth with it,” Diodorus observed, “thinking that in this practice is constituted the care and healing of the body.”³ According to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman reports⁴ about the Gauls, their customs were above all marked by barbaric cruelty. Strabo said of the most northern tribes: “When they depart from battle they hang the heads of their enemies from the necks of their horses, and when they have brought them home, nail the spectacle to the entrances of their homes.”⁵ Such barbarism dominated all their practices. Their priests, the Druids, conducted human sacrifice and engaged in divination by striking a human being “in the back with a sabre, and from his death-struggle they divine[d]” truth.⁶ Cicero deemed this reported custom “monstrous and barbarous.”⁷ In battle, the Gauls were known to show up naked.⁸ While this practice might suggest a self-confident bravery, Diodorus saw it as a foolishness that went hand in hand with cowardice, for they would also flee the battlefield at the strangest moments. Livy viewed the Gauls as unstable in war, commenting that their “habitual practice” was to begin with a “furious attack,” but then their “physical strength melted away; in their first efforts they were more than men, in the end they were weaker than women.”⁹ Diodorus deemed their linguistic practices equally monstrous. “The Gauls are terrifying in aspect and their voices are deep and altogether harsh; when they meet together they converse with a few words and in riddles, hinting darkly at things for the most part and using one word when they mean another; and they like to talk in superlatives, to the end that they may extol themselves and depreciate all the other men. They are also boasters and threateners and are fond of pompous language, and yet they have sharp wits and are not without cleverness at learning.”¹⁰ As for their sexual practices, Diodorus reported that homosexuality was rampant. Many men did not sleep with their wives and “had very little to do with them” because they would “rage with lust” and “tumble with a catamite on each side.”¹¹ Such was the image of the Gauls that the Hellenistic Greek and Roman historiographers bequeathed to posterity.

The Gauls are central to France’s dominant cultural narrative about itself. This narrative enshrines them as the nation’s ancestors of choice, elevating them to such lofty heights that all French school children were once made to recite proudly the phrase “our ancestors the Gauls” in their history lessons. Hence, the unflattering portrait that I have just highlighted might seem jarring and unfamiliar to most of France’s present-day inhabitants. My description refers to an earlier period in the Gauls’ history when they were colonized by the Greeks and then by the Romans. France’s dominant cultural narrative has excluded this past by pushing it into the shadows of a “prehistory.” France’s official story thus began with the Gauls at a later point in their history, after they had been cleaned up and made presentable by the Romans who had civilized them.

I open with the little-known Greco-Roman portrayal of France’s ancestors as barbaric because it lays the groundwork for the first of two interrelated colonial stories that this book tells. This first story takes us back to the nation’s pre-history and recalls that the Gauls were once a colonized people, with the Greeks and Romans as their colonizers. I do not mean to imply that this fact was unknown; rather, it was simply muted by an alternative version that downplayed the significance of this earlier colonial relationship. This earlier past will reveal that the French elite had a much darker and conflicted connection to the Ancient World than its literary history has acknowledged.

This book’s second story is about France’s colonial relationship to the New World. Here, the French were the colonizers seeking to civilize the New World “barbarians.” (I will henceforth use the terms “barbarian” and “sauvage” without quotation marks, although I do not mean to imply that the Amerindians were in fact barbaric or sauvage. See chapter 3 for a discussion of my reasons for using these problematic terms and for preferring the French word sauvage over its English counterpart.) Echoing the Greco-Roman accounts of the Gauls, the French represented the Amerindians as barbarians, repeating a similar profile of otherness. The French colonizing strategy in the New World borrowed the Roman colonizing strategy toward the Gauls. In sum, these two stories mirrored each other. In the first, the Gauls/French were the colonized other, who were then civilized by the Romans. In the second, France became the colonizer, assuming the same role as the Greco-Romans before them by civilizing the New World inhabitants. By creating a “New France” in the Americas, France would become the “New Rome.”

After describing these two different colonial relationships, I weave them together to show how they shaped the French elite’s cultural self-understanding. The dominant paradigm for early modern French culture has severed colonization from its cultural discourse about itself, as if it belonged on a different planet. I propose to show, however, that culture and colonization were always conjoined, so interdependent that each enabled and shaped the other. The Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns constitutes the primary locus where the nation’s colonial and cultural discourses merged. (I understand the Quarrel in its broadest sense, extending from the late fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, as the next chapter will discuss.) The Quarrel’s literary and cultural debates did not exist in a vacuum. They were connected to the nation’s colonial discourse of the relations de voyage, which were wildly popular travel reports about the French encounter with the Amerindians of the New World (and with peoples of other lands). The relations framed the nation’s colonization of the New World as a mirror of its relation to the Ancient World. In so doing, France’s colonial discourse pumped new life into the emerging memories of the nation’s distant past as Gauls, establishing parallels between the two stories. This book, then, seeks to show how early modern France carved out its emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, emphasizing the colonial/cultural dynamics that have marked both relationships.

France’s First Colonial Story: The Nation’s Relation to Ancient Rome

The first colonial story that this book unearths can meaningfully qualify as “postcolonial.” This term derives from recent scholarship on formerly colonized, so-called third world nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, especially in their twentieth-century struggles for independence and dignity. Their self-understanding becomes embroiled in a mix of pride and shame visà-vis their former colonizers. This concept, however, has an application much broader than most theorists have realized. Since colonialism is as old as recorded history, it stands to reason that its twin concept of a postcolonial phase would be of equally ancient origin. The concept refers not merely to a political condition of independence after the colonial period but also and especially to a cultural condition in which the nation’s self-understanding is anchored in the experience of a prior historical period of direct colonial rule.¹²

Because the term “postcolonial” was coined in a modern context, it may seem recklessly anachronistic to apply it to early modern France. Many literary critics bristle at any use of anachronistic concepts, consigning them to the realm of bad scholarship and sloppy thinking. However, Yves Citton in Lire, interpréter, actualiser, has powerfully defended the anachronistic by showing how contemporary categories of thought, if applied with careful attention to relevant historical specificity, can create a meaningful dialogue between past and present.¹³ In what he calls “une lecture actualisante,” Citton urges that the past be reframed to make it more relevant and meaningful for the present. Much of that past is inaccessible except through a more modern lens since many phenomena can only be understood retrospectively. Anachronisms provide a retrospective lens, enabling us to see more clearly what was less evident at any earlier time.

A number of medievalists began to use postcolonial theory in 2000 to bring out important dimensions of the Middle Ages which have otherwise been obscured.¹⁴ They convincingly demonstrate that postcolonial theory is not a one-size-fits-all methodology, but can be adapted to fit earlier times and places. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor of the foundational Postcolonial Middle Ages, emphasized that the fit will never be exact and that this lack of fit was a virtue. It forces scholars to reflect more upon the historical specificity of the relevant cultural contexts for both modern and pre-modern eras. While pre-modern scholars have much to learn from postcolonial theory, postcolonial theorists also have much to learn from pre-modern scholarship about the history that informs their own era and about the nature of the theory itself. The postcolonial, then, is a capacious, heterogeneous mode of thought that can be meaningfully configured to illuminate the particularities of different historical moments.

Since this book is concerned with early modern France, I interpret the postcolonial very differently than do both medieval and modern scholars. I ground my understanding of this concept in the historical and cultural circumstances most relevant for the early modern context. Historically, that context is the period when both the Greeks and the Romans literally colonized the Gauls. The Romans, of course, played a much more significant role because they were the more recent colonizers and their legacy was also more long lasting. Their law, language, and culture still dominated the world of early modern France. The Romans had colonized the Gauls beginning in 121 B.C., when they conquered and annexed the southern reaches of Gaul, founding their first colonia at Narbo Marius (Narbonne) in 118 B.C. Julius Caesar then enlarged the Roman stronghold in Gaul, through a military conquest during the Gallic Wars of 58–51 B.C., bombarding the Gauls with eight successive campaigns. Caesar’s conquest culminated in Vercingetorix’s defeat in 52 B.C. Later, Augustus used a softer touch to bring the Gauls under the empire’s hegemony. He “civilized” these barbaric tribes, transforming them from Gauls into Romans.

At this point, the story gets murky. How deep and how permanent was this transformation? Did the Gauls ever achieve independence? According to historians of today, the Gauls never really achieved independence because they became Latin-speaking peoples, or Gallo-Romans.¹⁵ However, France’s early modern writers such as François Hotman, Honoré d’Urfé, and Scipion Dupleix presented the Franks as having liberated the Gauls from the Romans. This confusion about the Gauls’ independence is at the heart of the postcolonial dilemma I will be exploring.

This literal, historical context is not sufficient to qualify as postcolonial. The mere fact that the French once experienced colonial rule would not automatically mean they suffered from postcolonial trauma. The historical fact of colonization needs to be combined with cultural elements. The decisive factor in determining the “postcolonial” is whether influential groups of intellectuals, writers, and politicians articulated the relationship as problematic in ways that significantly shaped their collective self-understanding. At first glance, it would seem ludicrous to suggest that France’s colonial past could have plagued its early modern writers given that the Ancient Greeks and Romans had been dead and gone for more than a thousand years. Since these colonizers were not standing over France’s writers, sword in hand or words at the ready, (brow) beating them into submission, they could hardly qualify as a menace. By any objective measure, this colonial past would seem but a flicker of a memory, buried in the catacombs of time, powerless to haunt the writers’ present consciousness. And yet, the textual evidence reveals that the remnants of this past were hauntingly alive.

I am not suggesting that this colonial history was an actual memory lingering in the French consciousness for an entire millennium. On the contrary, this history was a recent invention. It was constructed in the late fifteenth century when French intellectuals began to reconfigure their history by claiming the Gauls as their ancestors. Until then, the Gauls had been largely forgotten, since the French did not consider the Gauls part of their own history. Thus, France’s medieval chroniclers breathed not a word about them.¹⁶ These chroniclers began French history at a much later date, preferring the Franks as ancestors because they had supposedly descended from the Trojans. A Frankish-Trojan ancestry made the French more direct heirs to the Romans, connecting the nation back to the Holy Roman Empire. This lineage enabled the French monarchy to claim greater legitimacy.¹⁷ The Trojan myth of descent had predominated up to the sixteenth century.

The Trojan myth paralleled that of Ancient Rome’s legendary founding. In so doing, it forged a kinship between France and Rome by linking their respective cultures, origins, and destinies. According to this myth, France began when Troy was destroyed. Hector’s son, Francus or Francio, escaped and set up a new nation. Eventually he became king of the Franks. This story echoed the Roman founding legend. After Troy’s destruction, Aeneas fled his homeland and lived in exile until he came to Latium, where he founded Rome.¹⁸ In short, a Frankish-Trojan lineage was the umbilical cord attaching France to Rome.

Some French intellectuals, however, felt strangled by this cord and wanted to break it. Since all roads seemed to lead to Rome, many of France’s cultured elite felt suffocated, suffering from “a sentiment of national inferiority” and wanted to promote a greater “nationalist consciousness,” as literary scholar Claude-Gilbert Dubois phrased it.¹⁹ They turned toward the Gauls and claimed them as ancestors to construct a bypass route and circumvent Rome’s enduring influence. Dubois has characterized the French elite’s pursuit of independence as “an enterprise of cultural de-colonization: classical antiquity had invaded everything and sought to bring back everything to it.”²⁰ While Dubois briefly articulated this colonial dynamic, he never developed this connection. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, however, more powerfully developed a similar insight, arguing that the struggle for the vernacular was “an act of independence in relation to a power that we today would not hesitate to qualify as colonial.”²¹

Thus in the late fifteenth century several humanists sought to dethrone both the Trojans and the Romans by going back to the graveyard of history to exhume the Gauls and claim them as ancestors to the French.²² Declaring a Gallic ancestry was, for many, an act of declaring independence from Rome. This new genealogy caught on like wildfire in the sixteenth century, stirring up a veritable “Gallomania,” as Christian Hermann has called it.²³ Jean Lemaire de Belges, Guillaume Postel, Guillaume Budé, François Hotman, Etienne Pasquier, François de Belleforest, Guillaume du Bellay, Joachim du Bellay, Robert Céneau, Jean Picard de Toutry, Guillaume Le Rouille, Guillaume des Autelz, Claude Fauchet, Etienne Forcadel, Nicolas Vignier, and many others promoted a Gallic ancestry.²⁴ Clearly, the proposed new origin had hit a powerful nerve.

This declaration of independence from Rome impassioned the hearts of many because it resonated with multiple narratives about Rome. As postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe would note centuries later, the power of a colonized past to impact the present depends on how its stories become entangled in a multitude of narratives that “overlay and interpenetrate one another,” and depends less on how long ago this past occurred.²⁵ In sixteenth-century France, the term “Rome” served as a code word for the pope and the Roman Catholic Church.²⁶ Gallican-oriented thinkers such as Etienne Pasquier and Guillaume Postel championed the Gauls in the fight for a “nationalist” French church. Challenging an international Roman Church with a Roman pope at its center, these thinkers preferred a Franco-centered, or Gallocentric, church. Overlaying this meaning was another one, which the religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics triggered, giving a different emotional charge to the word “Rome.” Significantly, many Protestants such as François Hotman were the leaders in proposing the Gauls as ancestors. Their goal was to challenge Papal Rome’s religious authority. Similarly, “Rome” became a code word for those seeking to reduce the Roman influence in law. Followers of the French tradition of law, the mos gallicus, referred back to the Gauls in their pre-Roman times to question the validity of Roman law, especially the tenets that grounded the king’s absolute power. On yet another battlefield, “Rome” stood in for the Italians of the contemporary world, who were threats because they could make a special claim to being the most legitimate heirs of the Roman Empire. Moreover, many French humanists felt dwarfed by Italy’s cultural dominance. Since “Rome” and “Roman” often conjured up a range of targets that merged in the minds of those humanists who pitted the Gauls against the Romans, this colonial struggle was entangled in multiple strands of several different battles, all of which were anti-Roman.

The anti-Roman strain of France’s cultural narrative belongs to what Michel Foucault has called a “counter-history.” Such a history gets cast into the shadows because it is the “discourse of those who have no glory, or of those who have lost it and now find themselves in darkness and silence.” This side of history has been hidden “not only because it has been neglected, but because it has been carefully, deliberately and wickedly misrepresented.”²⁷ Foucault observed that an anti-Roman sentiment in France surfaced in the sixteenth century, challenging the historians of the Middle Ages who never saw “any difference, discontinuity, or break with Roman history and their own history, the history they were re-counting.”²⁸ Literary scholar Philippe Desan also noted a similar break with Ancient Rome in the sixteenth century, but he characterized it differently, as a “crisis of humanism.” Desan described how French intellectuals increasingly challenged the humanist ideal of a Greco-Roman universalism from the mid-sixteenth century onward. There were almost no new translations of ancient texts toward the end of the sixteenth century, which reflected, according to Desan, the elite’s desire to promote a “nationalism by writing in the vernacular.” These intellectuals rejected Greek and Roman models for not corresponding to their everyday life experiences and thus cultivated a “mode of thought that would correspond more fully to their national and cultural specificity.”²⁹ Desan discerned multiple “axes of crisis” for humanism, which he likened to a golden apple with a beautiful form that nevertheless contained a worm within, eating away and emptying its core.

One worm in French humanism was that many French intellectuals embraced a Gallic ancestry to escape the suffocating force of a Greco-Roman universalism. However, to liberate France from Latin and Ancient Rome by planting the Gauls at the root of France’s family tree proved difficult. France’s men of letters did not have any historical documentation to buttress their proposed new lineage and thus had to rely on mythical stories. As a result, the more established myth of a Trojan descent still held sway during much of the sixteenth century.³⁰

The anti-Roman strain reached a decisive moment when Etienne Pasquier published the first few volumes of his monumental six-volume Recherches de la France in 1562. His research played a crucial role in legitimizing the Gauls as ancestors. This jurist and historian devoted almost sixty years to documenting France’s Gallic ancestry. The full set of volumes was printed in final form six years after his death in 1615.³¹ Pasquier’s text commanded such authority and interest that it was reprinted in 1607, 1621, 1633, 1643, and 1665.

In documenting this new lineage, however, Pasquier encountered a key problem: the Gauls were barbarians colonized by the Romans. Seemingly illiterate, the Gauls left no writings to record their deeds and tell their own story. To construct their ancestral past, France’s humanists thus made a standard postcolonial move of turning to the texts of their former masters. They tried to use Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny, Livy, Mela, Tacitus, and Suetonius as sources for their anticolonial counter-narrative. But as the portrait with which I began this book indicated, these Greco-Roman writers demeaned the Gauls as barbarians. Pasquier was forced to understand France’s ancestry through the disdainful eyes of the Gauls’ colonizers. Like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures from France’s former colonies, Pasquier faced the dilemma of having to use the distorted lens of the nation’s former colonizers to construct an independent and dignified understanding of its own past. Seeking to transcend the bias of his sources, Pasquier found himself trapped in a dilemma: his own modes of conceiving France’s ancestors—and by extension France itself—were caught inside the language and mental categories of these sources. This trap was a version of what we would now call the “colonial bind.”

Understanding the “post” phase of the postcolonial is more complicated, especially in the context of early modern France. The split between direct colonial rule and its aftermath is not anchored in a specific, limited historical moment. There are no clear temporal boundaries, especially since the Gauls never formally decolonized themselves. These ancestors never officially achieved independence; they simply became Romanized, and then the Roman Empire itself disappeared.

The “post” in “postcolonial” does not necessarily mean that the effects of colonization were over after the political colonial moment had passed. Decolonization still remains a struggle in the “post”-colonial phase because the dynamics of the original colonial relationship “can be duplicated from within,” as Ania Loomba has observed.³² The real struggle begins after political independence. Many cultural bonds still remain, since they have become part of the hearts and souls of the colonized, who have internalized their former masters’ values. The colonized thus voluntarily repeat the initial colonial dynamic, unwittingly imitating the colonizers’ modes of thought. In so doing, the colonized often engage in a “neocolonization” that makes it hard to separate out colonizer and colonized.³³ This situation, where the colonized reconstitute a colonial mentality within their own hearts and minds, aptly describes the dilemma of early modern France. As Lorenzo Valla famously wrote centuries earlier in his Elegantiae (1471), the Roman Empire existed “wherever the Roman language was spoken,” and this extended far beyond its original political and religious dominion.³⁴ And far beyond its time. In early modern France, the prestige of the Roman language, law, and civilization ensured that Roman modes of thought not only endured but also shaped the French struggle to escape from those very thought structures.

Implausible as it may seem, the nation’s dark and distant colonized past continued to haunt France’s educated elite many centuries after its colonizers had died and the Roman Empire had faded away. The most important evidence for this haunting phenomenon is located in the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, a series of cultural debates about France’s relation to the Ancient World. The term “ancients” is confused because it refers to two different groups: 1) to France’s early modern writers who championed the classical world as the apogee of all worthwhile knowledge, and 2) the Greeks and Romans themselves. I therefore use the term “ancients” with a small a to refer to France’s early modern writers and the term “Ancients” with a capital A to designate the Greeks and Romans, following Terence Cave’s convention.³⁵

The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns continually raised the specter of the nation’s colonized past when many early modern intellectuals returned to the graveyard of history, disinterred the dead bodies of the Ancients, and infused them with new life by writing imagined dialogues with these ghostly figures. Some of these dialogues were explicit, as in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1680) and Dialogues des morts (1683), but most were implicit. When these dead souls returned, however, their apparitions did not always wear a kindly face professing solidarity and support of their “sons.” Nor did they necessarily even claim the French as sons. Rather, these phantom figures often returned with a vengeance, carping at the French for their insufficiency, taunting them with the label “barbarian,” continuing to wage another version of the original battle. The ghosts of this past were threaded in and around the Ancients’ language and logic that France’s intellectuals were imitating. These phantom figures fueled the French elite’s fears about themselves.

In short, the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns was a massive, enduring colonial battle that took place in the psyche of France’s humanist-educated elite. Struggling to decolonize themselves from the Greco-Romans, both the “ancients” and the “moderns” sought to forge the French nation’s own emerging independent, cultural identity, albeit in different ways. But both found Greco-Roman universalism stifling because it dwarfed their own stature. Their revolt was complicated, however, because they also admired the Greeks and Romans and viewed their discourse as that of authority, power, and civilization, thus making independence very difficult. While many intellectuals struggled to decolonize the French mind from the Greco-Romans, many also unwittingly reinstituted the initial colonial relationship, except that they called these bonds “civilization” and greatness.

France’s Second Colonial Story: Creating a New France in the New World

Mirroring France’s foundational relationship to the Ancient World was a second colonial story that focused on the New World. This second story began in the sixteenth century when many French explorers sailed across the Atlantic, hoping to establish colonial settlements. But those initial efforts were ill conceived and failed, especially since the nation was hampered by its internal religious wars.³⁶ But nonetheless, many of those travelers, such as Jacques Cartier and Jean de Léry, published important accounts of their voyages, which stirred the reading public’s imagination and created interest in the Americas. In 1598, after Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, the church and, to a lesser extent the state had more energy and resources to expand their spheres of influence outward. They turned in two major directions—toward the Americas and the Levant.³⁷ France’s interest in each was quite different. In the New World, the French sought to establish settlements and hoped to transform this area into an extension of itself as a New France. French travelers projected the image of a New France onto different parts of the Americas, not simply what are now Québec and the Maritime Provinces.³⁸ By contrast, the French were mostly interested in the Levant as a place to establish ports for their commercial activities. This part of the world did not really convey the promise of a New France.

The story that I will present of the French encounter with the New World highlights France’s colonial strategy of assimilation. Although the French church and state painted the Amerindians as barbarians, these institutions nevertheless sought to assimilate them and have them form “one people” with the French, to borrow a recurring phrase from the relations de voyage. Official French policy urged the French and the Native Americans to live together, work together, pray together, and be educated together. This policy went so far as to promote intermarriage. To help colonize the New World, Louis XIV’s minister Colbert urged that the Native Americans be made capable “of being admitted into the common life of the French,”³⁹ to form “a single people and a single blood.”⁴⁰ He instructed that dowries be offered to French Indian couples as an incentive to marry and to remain in the French, Catholic community. Intermarriage was an ideal throughout most of the seventeenth century, even though few marriages were actually concluded. This policy began as early as the first decade and lasted almost to the century’s end.⁴¹

The relations de voyage reported several stories about intermarriage between the French and the Amerindians. In one striking account, a French colonist named Michel Accault sought to marry a Christianized Native American woman, Aramepinchieue, daughter of the Kaskaskia chief who lived near what is now Peoria, Illinois, in 1694. Although the Frenchman was a tireless suitor, he did not have the fabled Gallic charm that would sweep her off her feet. She rejected his many advances, as she preferred God over what she saw as a debauched Frenchman. Nevertheless, her unchristianized parents were eager for the match, in order to promote trade relations. They pressured her, even resorting to stealing her modest but fine French clothes. Their harassment led to a massive argument in which she shouted at the Frenchman “I hate you” and threatened suicide. Exasperated, she turned for advice to Father Gravier, a Jesuit who had established a mission in the collection of villages at Pimitoui, Illinois.⁴² He counseled her: “God does not forbid you to marry; neither do I say to you, marry or do not marry. If you consent solely through love for God, and if you believe that by marrying you will win your family to God, the thought is a good one.”⁴³ Yielding to the pressure, Aramepinchieue married her French suitor. But she did so only to please Jesus Christ, thinking that her marriage would benefit the community. Her reasoning proved correct: immediately after her marriage, her father, her mother, and her entire village reportedly converted to Christianity in a grand rally of conversions.

It was a reference to this French colonial policy of intermarriage that sowed the seeds for this book. About twelve years ago, I stumbled across a footnote about Colbert’s policy. After reading it, I was so amazed to learn that the French church and state encouraged mixed communities and intermarriage that I had to reread the footnote a few times to make sure I had understood it correctly. How was it possible that I had never even heard of this policy? I then conducted an informal survey of numerous seventeenth-century literary scholars, including historians of France, phoning and e-mailing them in the United States, France, and England. No one else had heard of this policy either. In fact, some of the scholars even doubted its veracity.

My colleagues and I reasoned that if such a policy had existed, it would have been kept a dark secret, hidden from the awareness of the general French public. Given that such a phenomenon occurred on the far side of the Atlantic, all knowledge of it was probably restricted to those distant shores. After all, it is not uncommon for political regimes to promote policies on foreign soil that would be unacceptable at home. This secrecy might explain why literary scholars were unaware of this history—it would not seem to have had any influence on France’s own culture.

I soon discovered, however, that this colonial policy was by no means a secret. Indeed, it was common knowledge to the French reading public of the seventeenth century. While the church and state could easily have pursued this policy under the table, they chose to put it on the table and even make it the centerpiece. They eagerly advertised it as a public-relations campaign to promote their expansionist endeavors, and even brought several Native American men from Brazil to Paris in 1613 to be baptized and married to French women before Louis XIII and all of Paris.⁴⁴ But besides this dramatic spectacle, the church and state encouraged travelers to the New World to write relations de voyage that described their intimate encounters with the Amerindians.

And yet, despite this publicity, it is not completely surprising that neither I nor my colleagues knew of this policy, because it runs directly counter to the paradigm that most literary scholars and cultural historians have constructed for the seventeenth century. Dubbed “classical,” this period is the one moment in French history in which one would least expect to find a policy promoting marriage with sauvages. The master discourse for this so-called classical era has emphasized France’s closing of borders, tightening of ranks, and promoting of greater constraints, exclusivity, and homogeneity in the name of purity and civility. John Rule has observed that the French state at this moment developed an increasingly specialized vocabulary to describe its borders: “limites,” “cordon défensif,” “régions frontières,” “frontières fortifiées,” “les côtes de France,” “portes,” “frontières naturelles.”⁴⁵ Henry Phillips has shown how the Catholic Reformation sought to tighten boundaries between different forms of space to protect an imagined inside space from a contaminating outside.⁴⁶ He argues that an increasingly rigid inside/outside divide characterized France’s literary culture and its aesthetic values. Mitchell Greenberg has analyzed French classical theater in terms of an ever-tightening family circle, describing how the literary canon was linked to how individuals constituted themselves as subjects within as closed a system as possible.⁴⁷ As is well known, when Richelieu founded the French Academy, he restricted what could be said in order to “purify” the French language and literature. Its rules for drama reduced the action on stage to one place, one plot, and one day. Philosophically, Descartes’ categories of clear and distinct ideas emerged as rationalized boundaries to order and classify the world, as Foucault has analyzed.⁴⁸ At court, sartorial codes limited physical movement. The aristocracy became increasingly encumbered with ribbons, lace, and multiple layers of clothing; Louis XIV sported red high-heeled shoes and cascading wigs. The rules governing aristocratic behavior grew exponentially to assure ever more refined levels of civility.⁴⁹

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?

Clearly, a disciplinary divide separates what is known to most scholars of France as opposed to scholars of its former New World colonies. This split reflects the dilemma of what Clifford Geertz has called “local knowledge,” where the most basic knowledge of one discipline may be completely unknown in another.⁵¹ The disciplinary divide cuts more deeply than usual in this particular case, since it breaks down along the colonizer/colonized axis. As in any power relationship, the subordinate often has knowledge of the master that the master himself may choose to ignore, as Hegel analyzed in his famous master-slave discussion. In this instance, scholars who focus on the Franco-Amerindian encounter from the perspective of the colonized have a knowledge of the colonizer that is unknown to most of its significant specialists. This colonizer/colonized axis appears to be more important than the literature/history divide, since many cultural historians of France have been almost as unfamiliar with this colonial policy as literary scholars have been.

My book seeks to bridge the disciplinary gap. Scholars focused on the colonizer’s side of the divide have been limited by France’s dominant cultural paradigm which has shaped what they know and are not permitted to know. This paradigm is characterized by what I call a cultural poetics of containment. The nation’s colonial politics of expansion are made to seem invraisemblable because it clashes so strongly with the dominant paradigm. Influenced by the classical period’s ideal—not to say fetish—of unity, homogeneity, and purity, this paradigm has been virtually silent about colonization, sealing off the nation’s cultural identity as self-sufficient, allowing no role for its external colonial endeavors. The seal has been so tight that even though numerous Atlantic world historians have already amply documented France’s colonial activities for many decades, this research has barely scratched the surface of the nation’s cultural self-image. It is as if France’s colonial contact with the barbarian other had little importance for its cultural self-understanding.

The growing body of research from scholars focused on the colonized side of the divide suggests that colonization was a much more significant phenomenon than France’s cultural paradigm has allowed for. We thus need to reconfigure the nation’s cultural paradigm to account for the more complex dynamics of the culture/colonization nexus. Many literary scholars have already challenged the standard paradigm in many significant ways, but few have opened it up by including colonization within the nation’s own cultural self-understanding. My book thus enlarges the nation’s cultural discourse to show how colonization was always already inside French culture, intimately entwined, since colonization and culture operated in intersecting spheres.

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 of sauvages into French Catholics laid the groundwork for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts in Africa and Asia, and within France itself. As Eugen Weber has described assimilation in his pioneering study, From Peasants into Frenchmen, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century state pursued an internal colonization of its peasants, viewing them as sauvages who needed to be civilized and integrated into France’s dominant culture.⁶⁸ Weber observed that this internal colonization of France’s peasantry was connected to the external colonization of Asia and Africa. Many writers likened both forms of otherness to the New World Amerindians. For example, in Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth-century novel Les Paysans, a Parisian traveled to the Burgundy countryside where he was struck by the peasants’ similarity to the New World sauvage. “You don’t need to go to America to see sauvages,” he said. “Here are the Redskins of Fenimore Cooper.”⁶⁹ Balzac did not make up his connection out of thin air. He was building on the seventeenth-century assimilationist stance that viewed the Amerindians as the prototype of the sauvage. In short, I use the term “assimilation” to position my book within a broader historical sweep: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century state’s discourse of colonization was modeled on that of the seventeenth century, which in turn was modeled on that of the Romans.

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” and a “them.” The “us-them” boundaries were blurred on opposite ends of the imagined barbarism-civilization continuum. I will argue that the French elite carved out the nation’s emerging cultural identity in relation to both ends of the spectrum. In presenting a new, triangulated paradigm for understanding early modern French culture, I want to insist that no single, fixed triangulation can capture the complexity of its dynamics. Because elite France had a double relation to both the New World and the Ancient World, the nature of its triangulation will shift continually.

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 texts that made the nation’s stories of assimilation well known to France’s cultured elite, the relation was an important site where the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses intersected. Chapter 4 analyses the church and state’s assimilation strategy in the New World. I argue that assimilation presented a boundary dilemma by encouraging outsiders on the edge of civilization to become transformed and enter the French, Catholic community so fully that intermarriage was an ideal. But were the New World barbarians really an “us” or a “them”? The assimilation policy mirrored the dilemma the cultured elite faced: were the Romans an “us” or a “them”?

Part III weaves the two different colonial stories together into a shifting series of triangulated configurations and argues that the nation’s culture emerged in relation to the colonial dynamics of its Ancient World and New World connections. Chapter 5 shows how the colonial discourse about the New World sauvage was interwoven with the nation’s cultural debates about its relationship to the Ancient World. This chapter provides an introduction to the next three chapters, which form a unit, by reframing the Quarrel’s debates as offering a competing set of proposed escape routes to help the nation transcend the bind of its own barbaric, colonized past and cultivate an independent civilization worthy of pride and dignity. Each of the following chapters offers a competing triangulated escape route to arrive at that goal.

Chapter 6 centers on imitation as a proposed escape from barbarism. Typically, scholars examine imitation within a cultural context, viewing it as a “civilizing process” and presupposing that the Ancients were beneficent models and allies to help elite France along its desired path. This chapter expands the meaning of imitation by also examining it within the nation’s colonial discourse. Here imitation functioned as a “voluntary subjection,” stimulating a subjugating process. Many lettrés saw the Ancients as an imperial “them” and feared that imitating them would not lead out of the colonial bind; the most fundamental thought structures they were imitating reinforced the original power dynamic that relegated the French to the position of the barbarian other.

In Chapter 7 imitation offers a second proposed escape route. But here imitation is understood through a different interweaving of the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses. The relations often highlighted the Amerindians as an “us,” long-lost kin to justify colonization. These texts stimulated what I call a “crisis of similarity” with the barbaric. In this context, imitation of the Ancients took on the function of guarding against a regression into barbarism. Imitation served as a life raft to prevent elite France from sliding back on the evolutionary continuum toward the primitive stage of the Amerindians.

In the first two escape routes, neither path was able to liberate the French elite from their fear of barbarism. Both were locked in a binary battle that defined and measured France in relation to Greece and Rome. This binary struggle would endure as long as the elite continued to uphold the Ancients as the model for what they wanted to become. Chapter 8 examines the most successful route out of the bind in which the moderns looked to the New World as a third term. They used the concept of the sauvage as a lens through which to look at the Ancient World. The sauvage became a lever to undo the binary oppositions of the Ancient World, enabling the moderns to conceptualize an idea of progress that would reverse the slope of history and break the pull back to the Ancient World. The sauvage and the New World enabled the moderns to conceptualize a future that represented an evolutionary advance over the past, not a fall from it. In this way, the moderns built a new road to modernity and ushered in the Enlightenment.

The conclusion ends the book by examining the implications of this new early modern paradigm for understanding the modern era.

Each of the book’s chapters is cumulative, building on arguments set forth in the previous chapters. Thus one should read the chapters in sequence to make each seem plausible and to grasp the full force of the overarching argument.