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CHAPTER 1

The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle

The Memory Wars over “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

The Puzzle of the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns

What was the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns? When did it take place? Numerous scholars see it as a late seventeenth-century phenomenon that began in 1687 when all hell broke loose on the French Academy floor.¹ It was set off by a seemingly minor event at what was to be a standard Academy meeting. Charles Perrault had opened the session by reciting a poem he had written, “The Century of Louis the Great.” While Perrault was reading, Boileau kept muttering to himself and fidgeting in his seat, making wisecracks under his breath, much like Alceste in Molière’s Le misanthrope listening to Oronte’s poem. Finally Boileau, outraged, leaped to his feet and railed against the poem so strongly that he eventually lost his voice. As an ancient in this instance, Boileau found Perrault’s poem objectionable because it was “scandalous to read [a poem] that criticized the great men of antiquity.”² As a champion of the moderns, Perrault refused to imitate the Greeks and Romans and kneel at their altar. He felt that France’s contemporary writers had not only equaled those of Ancient Greece and Rome but even surpassed them. After all, they had one key advantage over their predecessors—they had the good fortune to live in the reign of Louis XIV. Had Homer, Virgil, and Ovid lived in the age of the Sun King, they would have been even better writers, Perrault claimed. In cutting the Ancients down to size, Perrault was questioning how much France’s writers should imitate them, and he proposed that they chart a new course for themselves. For Boileau, this was blasphemy and more than he could bear.

Boileau’s histrionic outburst called for war. And war it was—for decades to come. Sounding a call for armies to form, this incident induced scores of writers to stake out positions on the literary and cultural battlefield, aligning themselves with either an ancient or a modern camp. Numerous participants used the term “war” in the titles of their works: Gabriel Gueret wrote La guerre des auteurs anciens et modernes (1671); François de Caillières, L’Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes (1688). Longpierre came to Boileau’s defense in his Discours sur les anciens (1687). Perrault responded to Boileau with his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, which came out in intervals between 1688 and 1697. Fontenelle wrote Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688) and other responses to these same issues, such as De l’origine des fables, Dialogues des morts, and Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683). Numerous other texts addressed this central conflict, such as Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690), which structured many word definitions in terms of an opposition between “les anciens” and “les modernes.” Thus, in the late seventeenth century the Quarrel reached a particularly high level of self-consciousness, bringing into public discourse scenarios of war that pitted ancients against moderns. The feverish intensity of this cultural discourse accounts for why most scholars associate the Quarrel with this period more than any other.

I recount this famous feud between Boileau and Perrault in order to highlight the puzzling nature of the Quarrel. How could a trivial personal squabble have ignited such an important and explosive set of debates? What was really at stake? The imitation of the Ancients was the stated issue: What was the status of France’s writers as imitators of Ancient texts? How closely were they to imitate the models of antiquity? To what extent were France’s writers free to invent new paths that reflected their own experience and their own truths?³ I am not suggesting that these questions were trivial. Obviously, they were very important. Rather, I am suggesting that they were not sufficient to justify the intense, emotional reaction they unleashed. The Quarrel is puzzling because of the strange disproportion between its stated issues and its frenzied feelings.

This disproportion becomes even more accentuated when we consider the duration of the Quarrel. Scholars differ on how to date it. Many date it to before the seventeenth century, interpreting it as a vast, sprawling, and amorphous set of controversies that include Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) as a key moment. Hundreds of other writers, both before Du Bellay and after him, took up their pens to prove the worth of the French language and of its literary culture in relation to that of Ancient Greece and Rome. But precisely how far back the Quarrel extends is unclear. Hubert Gillot reasonably traced it back to the late fifteenth century.⁴ Similarly, the Quarrel’s forward reach is also unclear. Marc Fumaroli and Anne-Marie Lecoq expanded it to 1761, although one could plausibly stretch that date even further forward to encompass Victor Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell, published in 1827.⁵ My point, however, is not so much to set exact dates in either direction as to emphasize the Quarrel’s long duration. If these debates generated enough passion to last three centuries, they had to have hit a very raw and powerful nerve. But what was it? Why was imitation such an explosive issue?

This strange disproportion has caused many scholars to trivialize the Quarrel and yet acknowledge its importance. The term itself, “Quarrel,” suggests a trivialization, lacking the weightiness of its British counterpart, the Battle of the Books, as Joan DeJean has rightly observed.⁶ Ernest Curtius implicitly trivialized the Quarrel by seeing in it simply a standard conflict between the old and the new.⁷ Acknowledging the long-standing trivialization, Terence Cave has suggested that the Quarrel’s “surprising virulence” may have caused the “histories of literature … [to] treat the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns as a rather parochial dispute among French lettrés of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.”⁸ In some sense, most scholars have been hard pressed to explain what was really at stake, which is precisely why many trivialize it.⁹ Or they just assume that time has dulled its edge because the issues that were important then have lost their sharpness for us now.

In this chapter, I argue that imitation was an explosive issue because it hit a nerve that neither we nor the Quarrel’s participants fully understood. It is not unusual for individuals or groups to become embroiled in emotional disputes over issues they cannot articulate or even fathom. Not uncommonly, they displace the real issue with smaller, more trivial ones. All they know is that they experience anxiety and anger but cannot name their real source. The early modern writers could not name it because they did not have the language or conceptual tools to do so. They called it imitation, but this word hid a deeper conflict.

This chapter unearths this buried conflict by extending the Quarrel’s foundations back to the late fifteenth century. The late seventeenth-century debates were simply the tip of a giant iceberg that was connected, at the base, to the debates of the late medieval era. The issues varied over the centuries, to be sure; but they were nevertheless all still part of one large, overarching set of controversies that constitute the Quarrel. Stretching the Quarrel’s foundational moment back two centuries is hardly a quibble about dates or nomenclature. It reflects the Quarrel’s larger dimensions by exposing the roots from which its debates about imitation have been severed: France’s colonized past.

This past, however, was invented in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when France’s humanists exhumed the Gauls, claiming them as ancestors to escape Greco-Roman domination and suffocation, as discussed in the previous chapter. This proposed Gallic heritage gave rise to the Quarrel’s foundational battle. It was a “memory war” about the writing of French history. Were the Romans an “us” or a “them”? The meaning of imitation would ultimately be shaped by the outcome of this memory war. Were the elite imitating models from their civilizers or from their former colonizers? Would the imitation of Roman thought forms liberate the French or subjugate their hearts and minds? This foundational question gave imitation a sharp edge.

This chapter thus uncovers the memory war at the base of the Quarrel and discusses how it mattered for France’s cultural self-understanding. But before doing so, it is important to elucidate its key terms, “ancient” and “modern.” It is difficult to define them in a stable and meaningful way, for several reasons. First, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, the term “Ancient” referred both to the Ancient Greeks and Romans as well as to France’s early modern writers who fused their identity with their models. This very confusion comes out of the colonial dilemma I am discussing: the ancients had internalized the discourse of the Ancients and (con)fused their identity with them.

Second, the term “Ancient” is problematic because it conflates the Greeks and Romans as if they were essentially the same. However, Rome was much more important for France than was Ancient Greece. Anthony Pagden observed that 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.”¹⁰ The Romans were the more important model, which also made them greater figures of resentment. The effects of Roman rule were present in the every day life of France’s cultured elite, especially in their language, law, and customs.¹¹ Many members of the French elite used the term “Rome” as a code word to express their anger against several different adversaries, as I indicated in the previous chapter. Resentful of the Romans, many men of letters turned toward the Greeks as an alternative. Hellenism came into vogue in the 1550s with Ronsard’s attempt to counter the “Latinate” poets from Lyon. Others, such as Henri Estienne and Blasset, argued that French derived etymologically from Greek, not Latin.¹² The Greeks, however, were hardly a safe haven, since they were problematic in yet other respects. Thus, although I will usually differentiate the Romans from the Greeks, at other times I will group them together as Ancients because many Romans, seeing the Greeks as their cultural masters, absorbed a number of their assumptions, values, and beliefs as foundations for their own, making it impossible to consistently differentiate Greek from Roman culture.

Third, the term “ancient” is confused in its relation to “modern” because the implied opposition does not hold firm. Neither camp can be aligned with a systematic, consistent set of beliefs. Most authors do not fit squarely on one side or the other, because many were modern with respect to some issues and ancient with respect to others. Moreover, the categories “modern” and “ancients” were themselves not clearly fixed, for they often slipped into their opposite. Thus these labels do not appear to be meaningful, since they do not have a rational consistency. This instability is perhaps one reason why many scholars tend to trivialize the Quarrel and have not accorded its debates the great importance they deserve.

More generally, it should be observed that the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns existed within several different fields of inquiry. I focus on imitation as a literary and cultural conflict to defend the nation’s language and letters. The battles in this conflict were bound up with the construction of French history. I separate out these literary and cultural battles from the related conflicts in philosophy and science, which overlapped at their core. In science and philosophy, Francis Bacon and René Descartes were moderns who challenged the standard beliefs about what counts as “knowledge.”¹³ They asked: By what methods does one pursue knowledge? What are its sources? Who are its authorities? What are its goals? While these questions are linked to the nation’s literary and cultural battles, their connections lie beyond our present concerns.

The Memory War of the Two Gauls

When the French cultured elite exhumed the Gauls and enthroned them as their ancestors, they faced a central question: Which Gauls did they have in mind? The Gauls were not a monolithic unit; rather, they could be divided into multiple subgroups.¹⁴ The major distinction here is not the difference between the Gauls and the Celts, since most historians use these terms interchangeably, as do I.¹⁵ Instead, the most important distinction I am making is between the Gauls before colonization and after colonization. Some sixteenth-century intellectuals (whom I loosely label “moderns”) championed an independent, precolonized image of the Gauls to break with their former colonizers and promote a growing collective awareness. These intellectuals encountered one key problem, however. To push Gallic history back this far meant that their ancestors were barbarians: a wild, lawless, and nomadic band of primitives, or so the Romans and Hellenistic Greeks claimed. For this reason, other sixteenth-century humanists (whom I loosely call “ancients”) imagined the Gauls after colonization, when they were already civilized and lived in cities with sophisticated political and social structures. The drawback of the latter Gauls, however, was that they were a colonized people who became Romanized Gauls. (I prefer the phrase “Romanized Gauls” over “Gallo-Roman” because the former reflects the dominant French perception that tipped the scale toward the Roman side; the civilizing process meant Romanization. Many of the French elite did not see the Gauls as equal partners in the mix.)

These competing versions of the Gauls incited a memory war. Which version of France’s ancestors would ultimately win out? The independent, precolonized, but barbaric, version? Or the civilized, but colonized, version? This question was central to the Quarrel’s foundational battle in the sixteenth century. To reformulate the issue more broadly: At what point did French “history” begin? When did France become “France”? Whereas some moderns thought it began with the Gauls in their early precolonized state, some ancients thought it began only once the Gauls had already been transformed into civilized, Romanized beings, who had been colonized and assimilated into the Roman Empire. The stakes were high because the outcome would shape France’s emerging cultural identity.

The Romanized version of France’s ancestors obviously prevailed since this narrative has now become so familiar that it may seem odd to imagine that an alternative view could have ever been possible. We tend to assume that the moderns by definition always win out. But that was not always the case. Here, the ancients won out over the moderns.¹⁶ This outcome has shaped the writing of French cultural history. To this day, most historians begin France’s history when the Gauls were on the cusp of civilization, after they had been cleaned up and made semipresentable. This narrative frames the nation’s development as a “civilizing process,” as Norbert Elias has called it.¹⁷ It starts after the Gauls had already been colonized, thus relegating France’s colonial past to a prehistory that did not really matter. But Suzanne Citron and other historians have recently argued that this era did matter and was an important part of the nation’s past.¹⁸ Of course, the traditional historical narrative does acknowledge that the Gauls were once barbarians whom the Romans conquered and dominated. However, after admitting these facts, the dominant narrative simply pays lip service to them in one brief moment and then disavows their significance in another. It covers them up so that their threatening potential is muted and only partially acknowledged.¹⁹ Citron’s goal has been to give greater significance to this earlier era as part of her larger effort to alter the traditional construct of French history.

In sum, French writers were at a crossroads in constructing a narrative about their nation’s self-understanding in the sixteenth century. That narrative could have begun with an earlier, independent, precolonized version of Gaul. However, because its modern advocates lost, the story of French history began as the ancients wished—when the Gauls were already on the verge of being Romanized/civilized, identified with the Roman colonizers. The memory of colonization faded because the ancients succeeded in framing Roman colonization as a civilizing process. My goal is thus to reconstruct the path not taken, and the past not taken.

Where did the Franks fit into the story of the two Gauls? As Colette Beaune, Michel Foucault, and Claude Nicolet have all noted, the Franks were major contenders for the role of ancestors.²⁰ But the Franks were not seen as an absolute origin, since they themselves had an important ancestry. Did they descend from the Trojans or from the Gauls? Until the sixteenth century, the French elite imagined that the Franks had descended from the Trojans. This lineage aligned the Franks/French with the Romans, since they were both refugees from Troy. As brothers, the Franks/French could lay claim to becoming heirs to the Roman Empire, inheriting the same rights and powers that the Roman emperor enjoyed over his subjects. As Foucault observed, to assert that the Franks were descended from the Trojans was to claim that “France was just as imperial as all the Roman Empire’s other descendants; it was just as imperial as the German Empire … and it was not subordinated to any Germanic Caesar.”²¹ In short, a Frankish/Trojan ancestry established continuity with Ancient Rome.

However, other French writers preferred a Gallic ancestry to a Frankish/Trojan one, precisely in order to break with Rome. In 1511–13, Jean Lemaire de Belges published Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie, which dramatized how the Gauls had founded Troy, thus placing the Gauls at the root of the Frankish family tree.²² So according to De Belges, both the Franks and the Trojans descended from the Gauls.²³ After De Belges, many other writers repeated this myth that placed the Gauls at the origin of both the Trojans and the Franks. Guillaume Postel’s Histoire mémorable (1532), Ronsard’s Franciade (1572), Guillaume du Bellay’s Epitomé des antiquités des Gaules et de la France (1556), Jean Bodin’s La méthode de l’histoire (1566), François Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (1573), and Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–1627) all traced the Franks back to the Gauls. Needless to say, each writer had different motivations for preferring the Gauls over the Trojans as ancestors of the Franks. For example, Bodin’s insistence on the Gallic origins of the Franks was a competition with Germany, as Nicolet has emphasized. But it was also an anti-Roman move. In La méthode de l’histoire, Bodin described how “the Gauls, tired of their servitude to the Romans, emigrated beyond the Rhine, … and as soon as they could, they hastened to cast off the yoke of the Romans, to return to their homeland and to take on the name of the Franks, that is to say of free men.”²⁴ When Hotman aligned the Franks with the Gauls in his Franco-Gallia, he was motivated, in part, by his Protestantism. But fundamentally what united these writers was that they were all anti-Roman.

Although many French intellectuals increasingly aligned the Franks with the Gauls, they obviously did not see these two sets of ancestors as the same. They highlighted one part of their Gallic/Frankish heritage over the other, depending on the particular battle they were fighting. For example, the French nobility of the sword traced their descent and legal status to the Franks. But many French lettrés needed an ancestry that was of more ancient origin than that of Greece or Rome, as we will see, and thus they emphasized the nation’s Gallic ancestry over its Frankish roots in their literary and cultural debates.

The Precolonized Gauls

When several moderns first proposed a Gallic heritage, they did so because this ancestry offered a road to independence. The Gauls predated the Greeks and Romans. Such a Gallic ancestry was desirable because the earliest Gauls existed in an independent, precolonized state, which enabled French writers to liberate themselves from their cultural memory of a past colonial subjection by providing an alternative lineage. In 1556, Guillaume du Bellay felt suffocated by France’s “previous submission to the Romans” and wanted to “vindicate and take back [the Gauls’] former freedom and natural liberty, except for their constrained submission…. Seeking to recover this liberty, they have persevered in this endeavor up until now and will continue to do so forever, as is the will of God.”²⁵ The Gauls’ “former freedom and natural liberty” was their greatest appeal, and thus Du Bellay, by definition, conjured up a precolonized Gaul.

The moderns used the Gauls to help fight distinct but interrelated cultural, legal, political, and religious battles. On the cultural level, the Gauls’ supposed antecedence would enable the humanists to reverse the hierarchy of civilizations, so that the Gauls’ ancientness would confer on the French a greater prestige. In a world that assumed that nature was degenerative (a belief the French adopted from the Greeks), being “firstborn” would grant the Gauls/French superiority over later arrivals on the scene of human (European) history. According to the Greek theory of the degeneration of nature, the civilizations that were born first were of the highest stock, as if Mother Nature was a creature with finite resources who became so exhausted after giving birth that all her subsequent creations were more base. If French intellectuals could show that the Gauls were of more ancient origin than the Greeks or Romans, they could then hope to reverse the hierarchy that devalued France as derivative.

These moderns, however, needed to prove not simply that the Gauls were the first to exist but also that they were civilized, which meant that they had a world of letters. According to Guillaume le Rouille’s Recueil de l’antique préexcellence de Gaule et des Gaulois (1546), the Gauls then passed this learning on to Ancient Greece and Rome. Rouille wrote: “I shall demonstrate that the Gauls conquered and subjugated not only Rome, but also Italy and all of Europe as well as a great part of Asia … and that letters and sciences originated from Gaul, and that the Gauls of native Gaul were and still are more excellent than all others.”²⁶ Guillaume des Autelz, author of Réplique aux furieuses deffences de Louis Meigret (1556), theorized that Latin was derived from French, concluding that “the Latins have learned their language from the French, rather than the other way around.”²⁷ Guillaume Postel, one of the most learned and significant intellectuals of this period, reversed the hierarchical relationship in his De originibus (1538): “It seems to me likely that the Gauls lacked letters until the arrival of the Phoenicians, who founded Massilia in the south of Gaul … from them, therefore, the Gauls, putting away their barbarism and becoming civilized, learned the ways of a cultivated life, and how to till their fields, and to surround their cities with walls. Then they accustomed themselves to plant the olive, to prune the vine, and to live by laws, not by arms. And civilization both in human and material things seems to have developed to such a degree that it passed, not from Greece into Gaul, but from Gaul into Greece.”²⁸ Seeking to change the translatio studii route, Petrus Ramus (also known as Pierre de la Ramée) stated in his Grammaire that the Gauls already had knowledge of the liberal arts. From Gaul, this knowledge traveled to Greece and then to Rome before finally returning home to France: “Grammar and all the other liberal disciplines were long ago in the Gallic Language and in the schools of our Druids owing nothing at all either to the Greeks or to the Latins: and this learning afterwards having left Gaul with the Gauls went to Greece, where it was greatly cherished and honored, and from there it was invited to Italy, and to every part of the world.”²⁹ According to Ramus, France’s Latin cultural heritage was a Gallic humanism, a fact that was lost after the Roman conquest. The Gauls were forced to learn Latin. As a consequence, the Gauls lost not only their own language but also their cultural heritage. Ramus saw the Roman conquest of Gaul as a cultural holocaust. Rather than bring civilization to the conquered peoples, the Romans destroyed all of the Gauls’ scientific and literary traditions. Honoré d’Urfé situated his novel L’Astrée in Gaul and claimed that its civilization pre-dated that of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Gallic traditions, not Roman culture or Roman Christianity, shaped the true essence of the Franks and of the French monarchy, according to Kathleen Wine’s interpretation of this novel.³⁰

These alternative narratives of cultural transmission might now seem fanciful and amusing to scholars, especially because we are so accustomed to the opposite, but these stories expressed an important emotional truth that is valid regardless of its factual truth or falsity. These narratives underscore the humanists’ wounded pride and anger at their subordination to the Ancients. For many moderns, then, the early, precolonized Gauls constituted the road to recovering their lost dignity.

Similarly, French legal and political theorists appealed to a precolonial theory of power to question some of the most reprehensible aspects of absolute power resting on Roman law. The persecution of the Protestants prompted several theorists such as François Hotman to challenge the king’s absolute authority by looking to the Gauls as France’s ancestors. The Gauls served Hotman as a political tool to argue for a “sovereignty of the people,” grounded in the Gauls’ “first liberty.”³¹ Hotman was a “monarchomaque,” that is, a member of a group of jurists and theorists who, shortly after the infamous and inflammatory St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, seriously entertained a theory of tyrannicide as permissible if the king violated what was perceived as a contract between God and the people. For the most part, the monarchomaques were anti-Roman and used the Gauls to challenge the validity of a legal system inherited from Rome, and the royal authority anchored in it.

Underlining his anti-Roman stance, Hotman championed Gaul “before it was subjected and reduced into a Province by the Romans” in his Franco-Gallia (1573 and 1576). Opposing kingly government, Hotman exalted the Gauls in their first, free state because they executed those who aspired to put them “under the Government of a single Person.”³² After celebrating the Gauls in their first, free state, Hotman then described “the State of Gaul, after it was reduced into the form of a Province by the Romans.” He resented the Romans for stealing the Gauls’ cherished liberty, changing their laws and customs, and “oppress[ing them] with perpetual Slavery.” The Gauls, Hotman argued, hated the Romans, who were “cruel and inhuman” and “suck’d out the very Blood of the Provincials.”³³ Describing the various forms of servitude to which the Romans subjected them, Hotman was particularly angered that the Gauls “were not permitted to be governed by their own Laws, but had Magistrates and Judges, with full Power and Authority over Life and Estate, sent them by the People of Rome.”³⁴ Hotman upheld the Franks as heroes, regarding them as having freed the Gauls from their Roman oppressors. The Franks were lovers of freedom: “by a Frank was meant a Freeman, … and Francisare signified to restore to liberty and freedom.”³⁵ The Franks “delivered France from the tyranny and oppression of the Romans.”³⁶ Thus began an alliance of Franks and Gauls. As Hotman’s title suggested, a Franco-Gallia should replace a Roman-Gallia.

Hotman constructed a new Franco-Gallic lineage to argue that the king’s power was not absolute. His logic was premised on the fact that the Frankish tribes elected their king. Because the populus conferred power on the king, they could revoke the king’s authority if he abused it. Hotman’s argument was part and parcel of the French tradition that sought to reduce the Roman influence in law. Those who followed France’s tradition of teaching law, the mos gallicus, often evoked a pre-Roman or precolonial era to contest the validity of Roman law in many different domains, but especially the part that accorded the king absolute power.

Equally anti-Roman, Etienne Pasquier, a jurist and a historian, was a pivotal figure in the struggle to reconstruct a pre-Roman past for France, since he based the nation’s Gallic ancestry on historical documentation, not myth or flights of fancy. He devoted almost sixty years to documenting and reconfiguring France’s lineage. He stated that he wrote his Recherches de la France (1560) to “avenge our France from the injury of the years.”³⁷ The target of his revenge was the Ancient Romans, who had stolen the Gauls’ liberty. Pasquier also targeted the contemporary Italians who had accused French humanists of barbarism.³⁸ He complained of Petro Crinit who “each time he mentioned the Gauls, he qualified them as clumsy oafs or barbarians.”³⁹ To counter this damage, Pasquier wanted to return to the “true and primitive laws of France” and throw off the yoke of Roman law. “It is high time that we rid ourselves of that stupid notion … by which we trample under foot the true and primitive laws of France and reduce all our judgments to those of the Romans…. God wished to separate us from Italy by a high thrust of mountains, so He separated us in all things, in manners, in laws, character, humors.”⁴⁰ The Gauls whom Pasquier admired were those who sought escape from the “foreign servitude” that the Romans had imposed on them.⁴¹ He railed against the “superstitious servitude in which we imprison our minds by following [Roman] law.”⁴² Pasquier’s Gaul was one that predated the Romans’ arrival, for he wanted to recover “this first liberty that Caesar had stolen.”⁴³ His praise of the Gauls arose from his hatred of France’s inherited Roman legal system.

However, one huge roadblock impeded the recovery of the Gauls’ “first liberty.” No written documents recorded the Gauls’ history. How, then, could France’s early modern writers construct their own ancestral history? Pasquier complained that “the honor of our good ancestors has remained buried in the grave of our forgetfulness.”⁴⁴ So how could he “transmit to posterity anything about our triumphs?”⁴⁵ The Gauls’ lack of historical writing meant that “we only know [about the Gauls] through a historical borrowing,” because Pasquier was forced to use Greek and Roman writings as his sources.⁴⁶ But that borrowed lens was distorted because the Ancients had demeaned the Gauls as the barbarian other. Pasquier continually railed against Livy in particular, as a “perpetual enemy of the Gallic name.”⁴⁷ But he also reserved large doses of bile for Strabo and Diodorus. To write a new French history of the Gauls, he had to borrow from the same sources that had debased the nation’s ancestors. In short, the nation’s colonized past put him in a bind; it meant France’s ancestors left no written accounts of their own and he was forced to turn to the very texts whose ideology he was trying to overthrow.

The writing of French history thus became a site of struggle in which the moderns developed a “new history” to respond to this dilemma. The term “new history” was not anachronistic; it figured in the title, Dessein de l’histoire nouvelle des Français (1598), written by Henri de La Popelinière who was also a Protestant, like Hotman. The other major proponents of a new history were Bodin, Budé, Le Roys, and Vignier, although Pasquier was its most successful practitioner, in George Huppert’s estimation.⁴⁸ This new history proposed what Foucault would centuries later call a “counter-discourse,” a designation that postcolonial theorists have subsequently used.⁴⁹ Pasquier’s new history challenged the authority of Greek and Roman historians such as Diodorus, Strabo, Livy, and even Caesar to tell the story of France’s ancestors. It did so by emphasizing that the Hellenistic Greeks and Romans were either ignorant or liars, biased against the Gauls.⁵⁰ Pasquier charged that “the Roman historiographers” sought to “downplay our virtues that they could not steal from us” by making up false accusations, such as that “the Gauls were enticed by the sweetness of Italy’s wines.”⁵¹ To get beyond the Romans’ bias, he proposed that French writers choose their sources carefully, since some Greeks and Romans were less prejudiced than others. Julius Caesar should be the main source because he was the most respectful: “I have noticed in reading [Caesar] that the word ‘barbarian’ has escaped from his pen only twice in referring to us.”⁵² Pasquier’s new history thus raised the problematic issues of the proper sources for reconstructing France’s past.

Pasquier also proposed a new interpretive strategy that read Greek and Roman historiographers against the grain. He devised techniques to move beyond “the calumnies of some [Greek and Roman] authors who … sought to tarnish our victories.”⁵³ This new kind of reading would look between the lines to tease out some facts and events that the Ancients presented, but then reject their interpretations. It would focus on the contradictions in the Ancients’ texts. If French historians pursued their implications, these texts would suggest the very opposite of what their Greek and Roman authors intended:

Given that the authority of some Latin authors has, over the long passage of time, insinuated itself or, more precisely, refined itself such that it is reputed to be true, it is difficult to uproot the commonly accepted opinion, especially when our understanding remains within the limits of a single narrator. We cannot correct such authors because we also learn from them. But sometimes, wishing to denigrate our victories to aggrandize their own, [the Latin authors] do not realize that they contradict themselves; that is to say, they portray events to make us look bad. Nevertheless, whoever would fit all the pieces of their narrative together will find that they show the exact opposite.⁵⁴

After examining what made Caesar, Suetonius, and Tacitus conclude that the Gauls were frivolous and inconstant, Pasquier then turned their logic on its head. In his alternative logic, he showed that the Gauls had adopted a clever ruse to make their behavior appear inconstant in order to outsmart the Romans. In his view, “the Gauls’ excessive frivolity did not stem so much from an ‘ill-formed’ brain as from the desire to recover this first liberty, which Caesar has confirmed: their aim was freedom or at least freedom from foreign servitude.”⁵⁵ To recover their freedom, the Gauls cleverly used the Romans’ own strategy against them.

Pasquier’s new reading strategy accounted for the absence of any Gallic writings. According to his alternative logic, the Gauls did not have any written accounts of their history because they purposely chose not to record any. This lack did not signify that they were illiterate. Their priests, the Druids, were highly literate, Pasquier claimed, but they were suspicious of putting their knowledge into writing for many of the same reasons that Plato’s Phaedrus articulated. Basing his argument on Caesar,⁵⁶ Pasquier insisted that “the Druids were so stingy about committing anything to writing … [they were] so skeptical of how posterity might use [this knowledge] that they kept the actions and events of our kings within their own memories.”⁵⁷ But their guardedness made them vulnerable to a memory theft. The Greeks and Romans stole the Gauls’ memory of themselves, Pasquier asserted. The Druids’ strategic logic was unfortunately turned against them. The Gauls did not protect their memory of themselves because they were preoccupied by war, religion, and justice. Their humanistic letters lagged far behind because the Gauls were more interested in performing “good deeds than in writing about them.”⁵⁸ Joachim du Bellay made the same argument in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) when he addressed why “our language is not as abundant or as rich as Greek and Latin.” He explained it was due to the “ignorance of our ancestors,” who held “well-doing in higher esteem than fair speaking.”⁵⁹

The absence of any Gallic texts to tell the Gauls’ own history was at the heart of France’s colonial dilemma. This lack forced many French writers to accept a Greco-Roman interpretation of their own past, which saw the Gauls as illiterate and hence barbaric. Geofroy Tory and others, however, interpreted this absence of writing differently. Based on their reading of Caesar, they argued that the Gauls did have writing. But the Greeks and Romans, fearful and jealous of the Gauls, sought to subjugate them by stealing the sources of their self-understanding. In his Champ Fleury (1529), Tory argued that the Gauls had a “working knowledge of reading and writing. Long before Julius Caesar came to France, philosophers named Druids … taught all those who came to memorize countless verses. I cannot say with certainty in which alphabet they taught: if it was in Hebraic, Greek, Latin, or French.”⁶⁰ The Gauls’ writings “were abolished by Julius Caesar. He and the Romans were such greedy seekers of glory” that the Romans, like the Greeks, could not stand sharing the limelight with the Gauls.⁶¹ The Romans forced a cultural amnesia on their colonial subjects, “destroying laws, customs, usages as well as every other good thing by demolishing epitaphs and sepulchers,” Tory wrote.⁶² By erasing the Gauls’ version of their own past, the Romans could then substitute their alternate version, which vaunted Roman “victories and achievements … recorded in their own Latin letters.”⁶³

Joachim du Bellay also accused the Romans of memory theft. In his Défense, Du Bellay argued that the Romans, not satisfied with simply subjugating the Gauls militarily, sought to render them “vile and abject in comparison” by joining together “to conspire against us” to make the Gauls’ great deeds “so poorly preserved, that we have nearly lost not only the glory of them but their very memory.”⁶⁴ So successful was the Roman campaign that the Gauls’ writings fell irretrievably into oblivion.

Without a written history of their own, the Gauls’ descendants had to see themselves through the distorted Greco-Roman memory of them, which was subsequently passed down to posterity, and came to seem true. Du Bellay railed against the Romans, who “to render us still more odious and contemptible, called us brutal, cruel and barbarous.”⁶⁵ Incensed that the “Romans called us barbarians, given their ambition and insatiable hunger for glory,”⁶⁶ the poet accused both the Greeks and the Romans of being liars. Thus, at the end of his Défense, Du Bellay castigated the Greeks as “that lying Greece,”⁶⁷ and he incited his fellow humanists to smash the Greek and Roman treasures on their own altars. “Greek liars” became a rallying cry that other humanists, such as Jodelle, also invoked. This phrase had a Roman counterpart: “the charlatan Romans.”⁶⁸ As liars, both the Greeks and Romans had invented an alternative past for the Gauls, a humiliating one that painted them as barbarians to make themselves look good. In short, the moderns’ counter-discourse argued that if the Gauls now appeared to be without writing, it was not because they were illiterate. Either the Gauls chose not to write, or if they did, the Romans plotted to erase all traces of those writings. Mainly, the Romans sought to steal the Gauls’ memory from them.

The Gauls were targets of theft because their greatness was so monumental and fearsome that the Greeks and Romans became jealous, waging a memory war to wipe them off the map of history. History was thus a major site of the battle between the ancients and the moderns. The moderns accused the Greeks and Romans of forcing the Gauls/French to see themselves and their descendants through their colonizers’ eyes. The moderns endeavored to escape this bind by developing a counter-discourse to interpret the colonizers’ texts within an alternative logic. In this way, the proponents of a new history in sixteenth-century France struggled against many of the same issues that today face the inhabitants of France’s former colonies who are engaged in a “politics of memory.”⁶⁹

The Romanized/Colonized Gauls

By contrast, the ancients understood France’s relationship to imperial Rome very differently. They began their construct of French history with a later set of Gauls—those who were being transformed into civilized, Romanized beings. Their construct accepted the Greco-Roman representation of their ancestors as true. To grasp what this internalized version meant, I would first like to return to the Hellenistic Greek and Roman portrait of the Gauls and of their civilizing process. I offered a glimpse of this portrait in the preceding chapter, and we should remember that it is not an accurate historical account of what actually happened but is simply the Greco-Roman representation of the Gauls’ past. As Greg Woolf has stressed, the Romans’ historical and literary accounts of their colonization of Gaul were quite distorted, as the process was much longer and more complicated than the Romans wanted to admit.⁷⁰ In point of fact, the establishment of a Roman order in Gaul was punctuated with many reversals and violent revolts, with the Gauls mounting great resistance. Nevertheless, I emphasize the dominant Greco-Roman discourse because it, more than the historical reality, shaped the French discourse about their ancestors and themselves. Ultimately this discourse would shape the nation’s own projects as colonizers in the New World and also its nineteenth- and twentieth-century endeavors in Africa and Asia.

Many Hellenistic Greeks and Romans wrote about the Roman colonization of Gaul, describing it as what could anachronistically be called a “civilizing mission.” This term was invented in the nineteenth century to describe the French efforts to civilize and colonize the indigenous inhabitants of their African and Asian territories. However, the concept existed long before the term’s invention, dating back to the Roman colonization of Gaul. The Roman understanding of this concept differed from that of the French since it openly conceived of their civilizing and colonizing missions as fused, as two sides of the same phenomenon. The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that the gods had chosen them to conquer, rule, and civilize the world.⁷¹ They thought colonization was beneficial because it brought civilization to the barbarians. The Romans used their civilization as an instrument of colonization, spreading humanitas throughout their empire.⁷² Humanitas provided the condition for human beings to realize their full potential as humans by becoming civilized.⁷³ Pliny the Elder wrote that Rome, “the capital of the world … is the nursling and the mother of all other lands, chosen by the providence of the gods to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make manners gentle, to draw together in converse by a community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of so many nations, to give mankind civilization (humanitatem homini daret), and in a word to become throughout the world the single fatherland of all the races.”⁷⁴ Although the Greeks had invented the concept, the Romans spread humanitas throughout the world. In so doing, they believed they were performing a great service to humankind, transforming the barbarians of the world through civilization, making their “manners gentle,” and uniting them in the Roman civitas.

The Romans adopted a “soft” mode of domination, as the sixteenth-century French humanist Geofroy Tory described it. He distinguished between two forms of force, between cultural and military power. Characterizing the first form, he explained that “the Romans, who have dominated the greatest part of the world, have prospered and obtained more victories by their language than by their lance.”⁷⁵ The Romans used their civilization as a mode of domination, although they also used physical force. Their soft approach to imperial expansion was predicated on the supposition that their civilization was so superior that it would become a magnet for others. Non-Romans, perceiving their own inferiority and wanting to improve their lives, would voluntarily imitate the Romans and cast aside their former ways to become like their chosen models in a Romanizing process.

Many Greek and Roman historiographers portrayed the Gauls as good colonial subjects, intelligent enough to recognize Rome’s superiority. Thus the Gauls eagerly “volunteered” to imitate their conquerors. According to Strabo, they were more eager than other peoples to adapt to the Roman way of life: “Again, the Romans conquered these people much more easily than they did the Iberians.”⁷⁶ He further commented: “If coaxed, they so easily yield to considerations of utility…. At the present time they are all at peace, since they have been enslaved and are living in accordance with the commands of the Romans who captured them.”⁷⁷ Similarly, Caesar praised them for their ability and eagerness to imitate the Romans: “They are a nation possessed of remarkable ingenuity, and extremely apt to copy and carry out anything suggested to them.”⁷⁸ Their supposed eagerness to adapt to the Roman way of life was part of what made the Gauls great, according to Caesar and Strabo.

As good colonial subjects, the Gauls became so fully Romanized that they purportedly forgot their own past, and even forgot their own language. As Strabo wrote: “[They] have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more. And most of them have become Latins, and they have received the Romans as colonists, so that they are not far from being all Romans. And the present jointly-settled cities, Pax Augusta in the Celtic country … manifest the change to the aforesaid civil modes of life.”⁷⁹ Once the Gauls “received the Romans as colonists,” they abandoned their former life as “barbarians.” Gradually they formed cities and followed a more restrained, civilized way of life. After becoming sedentary, they turned to farming, and some even studied philosophy and eloquence. Strabo recounts that the Gauls in Marseilles, the Massiliotes,

became more and more subdued as time went on, and instead of carrying on war have already turned to civic life and farming…. For all the men of culture turn to the art of speaking and the study of philosophy; so that the city, although a short time ago it was given over as merely a training school for the barbarians and was schooling the Galatae to be fond enough of the Greeks to write even their contracts in Greek, at the present time has attracted also the most notable of the Romans, if eager for knowledge, to go to school there instead of making their foreign sojourn at Athens…. Seeing these men and at the same time living at peace, the Galatae are glad to adapt their leisure to such modes of life.⁸⁰

Over time, the Gauls became Romans. Describing one group of Gauls, the Cavari, Strabo wrote: “The name of the Cavari prevails, and people are already calling by that name all the barbarians in that part of the country—no, they are no longer barbarians, but are, for the most part, transformed to the type of the Romans, both in their speech and in their modes of living, and some of them in their civic life as well.”⁸¹ Given that Strabo found the Gauls “transformed to the type of the Romans” in the Augustan Age, shortly after the conquest, H. D. Rankin concluded that the Gauls did in fact assimilate very rapidly into Roman culture.⁸²

Moreover, the Gauls assimilated voluntarily and happily, at least according to many Greek and Roman accounts. These colonial subjects identified with their Roman colonizers because they perceived the benefits of Roman rule. Far from feeling oppressed, the Gauls supposedly felt happy and expressed gratitude, not resentment. As Strabo wrote, “Along with the happy lot of their country, the qualities of both gentleness and civility have come … to the Celtic peoples.”⁸³ The Gauls were “glad to adapt their leisure to [the Roman] modes of life.”⁸⁴ As a result, their quality of life improved vastly. Strabo praised the Gauls for being intelligent enough to welcome the Romans with open arms.

The Romans saw themselves as liberators, freeing the barbarians from their ignorance. Motivated by love and generosity, the Romans saw themselves not as usurpers or conquerors but as friends, nurturing the less fortunate and treating them like family. These “friends” saw their colonizing mission as so soft that it merged with their civilizing mission and could not be reduced to a power dynamic of military conquest. The Romans wanted to believe that they did not impose their will on barbarians through brute force. The Gauls voluntarily chose Roman rule as a form of self-improvement.

In viewing themselves as the Gauls’ liberators, the Romans used an interpretive lens that reflected their own responses to the Greeks. Militarily, the Romans had colonized the Greeks, but culturally they reversed the power relationship. Seeing the Greeks as possessing a superior civilization, the Romans looked to them as liberators who held up the torch of enlightenment. Fearing that they themselves were barbarians, these self-perceived inferiors were grateful to the Greeks for freeing them from their ignorance. Imposing a cultural colonization on themselves, the Romans voluntarily strapped on chains that made the Greeks their cultural masters. Cicero expressed gratitude toward the Greeks for having “rescued us from barbarism.” As he wrote to his brother, “I shall not be ashamed to assert that I am indebted for whatever I have accomplished to the arts and studies transmitted to us in the records and philosophic teachings of Greece…. We owe a special debt to that race of men, and that is, among those very people whose precepts have rescued us from barbarism, to be the willing exponents of the lessons we have learnt from them.”⁸⁵ Cicero wanted the Romans to pass on to others the same wonderful gift of civilization that the Greeks had given to them. He advised his brother on how to rule by passing on this gift: “Treat … as friends those whom the Senate and people of Rome have committed and entrusted to your honor and authority, protect … them in every way possible…. Why, if fate had given you authority over the Africans or the Spaniards or the Gauls, uncouth and barbarous nations, you would still owe it to your humanitas to be concerned about their comforts, needs and security.”⁸⁶ Cicero, like many other Romans, felt that Rome’s duty was to help all peoples reach their potential as members of the human race. In short, the Roman colonizing strategy encouraged the Gauls to identify with the Romans and slip into an “us” position with them. By fusing the civilizing mission and the colonizing mission, the Roman strategy blurred the “us-them” boundary, and induced the colonized to identify with the colonizer.

In fact, however, this discourse did not convey the complexity of the Roman-Gaul encounter. As Greg Woolf has pointed out, the concept of “Romanization” is erroneous, for several reasons. First, it presupposes that there was a preexisting notion of a pure Roman culture. But actually “there was no standard Roman civilization against which provincial cultures might be measured. The city of Rome was a cultural melting pot and Italy experienced similar changes to the provinces.” Second, Romanization did not “culminate in a cultural uniformity throughout an empire.”⁸⁷ Third, this oversimplified discourse did not account for a high level of Gallic resistance.

Nevertheless, the idealized Roman discourse prevailed—and on a grand scale. So much so that long after the Roman Empire had disappeared, its supposedly friendly ghosts still lived on, taking up residence inside France’s collective psyche. When early modern French intellectuals looked back on their own past, they identified to a large degree with the Romans against the earlier, independent Gauls. Writing at the very end of the seventeenth century, Charles Rollin, a highly distinguished historian and educator, praised the Roman colonial strategy. He lauded its policy of colonizing through love, and blurring the “us-them” distinction. Unlike most other colonizers, the Romans did not treat “the vanquished as enemies according to the custom of other conquerors, by exterminating them, stripping them of freedom and reducing them to servitude, or in forcing them, by the harshness of oppression, to hate their new government.”⁸⁸ On the contrary, Rollin thought they treated the Gauls with love, hoping to include them, not subjugate them. The Roman strategy “viewed them as natural subjects, [and] made them live with them in Rome, bestowed upon them all the privileges of previous citizens, adopted their holidays and sacrifices, granted them access to all civil and military employment without a second thought; and in showing them all the advantages of the State’s beneficence, Rome attached them to itself by such powerful and voluntary bonds, that they were never tempted to break them.”⁸⁹ Because the Romans colonized through love, they were soon loved. The Roman general became a “protector” to the Gauls, much like a father who “treat[ed] them all like … his children.”⁹⁰ The Roman general “pleaded their cause in the senate, protected their rights and interests,”⁹¹ and included the transformed Gauls as naturalized Roman citizens.

According to Rollin, this strategy sought to dissolve the initial Gaul-Roman boundaries by giving the Gauls “all the rights” of the Roman-born and “admitted [some of them] into state government,” thus encouraging them to accept Roman beliefs and values. The “Gauls were full of consulary families,” and they fulfilled “civil and military appointments.”⁹² The Romans promised that the “us-them” boundary would be stretched to include the Gauls, “without almost no difference between them and their vanquishers.”⁹³ The Roman colonial strategy was supposedly open and inclusive, erasing the initial Rome-Gaul distinction. Once the colonized Gauls were properly educated and transformed by the Roman civitas, they became members of the Roman community.

The Romans’ seductive culture was an instrument of colonial domination: it would stimulate in the Gauls a love for their colonizer, inducing the colonized to imitate the colonizer/civilizer voluntarily, hoping their conqueror’s cultural superiority would rub off on them. The Gauls’ imitation of the Romans would set in motion a seemingly natural Romanization or civilizing process. Roman eloquence was essential to this goal: it was “the art and ability to win [the Gauls’] minds,” enticing them to willingly identify with the colonizer and see them as liberators, not conquerors, and “attach [the Gauls] to [Rome’s] power, to its advantages and glory.”⁹⁴ Lured into fully associating themselves with Roman prestige and power, the Gauls no longer claimed a separate identity.

The Romans thus dissolved the “us-them” barrier by making both the colonizer and the colonized forget the divide separating them. Admiring this approach, Rollin observed that the colonizer “forgot its status as a vanquisher,” and the colonized forgot that they were ever colonized: “one did not see any freed slave who did not prefer this new country to his native land and his family.”⁹⁵ To prefer the new country meant that the colonized forgot their old habits and customs. The Gauls became attached to the Romans “by bonds so powerful and voluntary that they were never tempted to break them,” continued Rollin.⁹⁶ The Romans treated the Gauls as if they “were born and sprang from the earth,” and thus the colonized forgot their first birth.⁹⁷ And so did posterity in France looking back on the Romanized Gauls. Tacitus is an example of this phenomenon. As H. D. Rankin points out, it was widely believed that Tacitus was a Gaul, born in Narbonese or Cisalpine Gaul, who became so much like a Roman that he is often thought of as Roman. But his origins were difficult to prove.⁹⁸ Forgetting thus played a key role in the Romans’ colonizing/civilizing mission. The colonized identified with the colonizer, forgetting the original power dynamic by viewing their masters as civilizers and liberators.

The “Ancients” Win the Memory War

The ancients won the memory war. The officially accepted story of France has relegated the colonized past of its nation’s ancestors to a prehistory. French history began when the Gauls were already subject to the Romans’ civilizing mission and were benefitting from it. In this version, the Gauls were dutiful subjects, as were their French descendants. Or rather, the Gauls were not colonial subjects but successors, transformed from a “them” into an “us” with their former masters, becoming their heirs and inheriting the same role as their masters.⁹⁹

The outcome of the memory war over the two Gauls had three decisive consequences for French literary and cultural history. First, it grounded the disjunction between the nation’s own cultural and colonial stories. The cultural story framed the Roman colonization of Gaul as a civilizing mission. This frame obscured what was true for the Romans: they acknowledged that their colonizing and civilizing missions were two sides of the same phenomenon. The French cultured elite, however, needed to separate them to preserve their own dignity and pride. In severing the role of the Romans as civilizers from their role as colonizers, the French elite sought to avoid the problems of imitating and identifying with colonizers who had oppressed them. Given the glory and greatness of Rome, it is not surprising that the French church, state, and “artisans of glory” chose to identify with it rather than against it. In so doing, the ancients replaced the story of resentment against Roman domination with the story of love and of gratitude for the gift of civilization. This winning narrative thus illustrates what the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o observed centuries later in Decolonizing the Mind (1986): “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues” and telling the colonizer’s story as one’s own.¹⁰⁰

Second, since the French, as the colonized, separated out in their own history the Roman colonizing and civilizing missions in Gaul, they felt justified and invested in maintaining the same distinction when they became colonizers, harnessing their version of Roman imperialism for their own aggrandizing agenda. In the seventeenth century, the French Church and State sought to forget the colonizing counterpart to their civilizing/evangelizing missions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the French state adapted a version of this same discourse in which it imagined the nation was holding up the torch of enlightenment for the Asians and Africans. In so doing, the French could preserve their dignity as colonizers by framing their expansionist ventures in a glorious, liberating light, worthy of la grandeur de la France.

The third consequence of the memory war was that because the nation’s winning, glorious narrative has dominated for so long, presenting its partial story as the whole story, it now becomes difficult to dislodge it and show that its alternative narrative still mattered. But as the next chapter will develop, the buried memory war was still of import because the underlying tension between the two competing narratives was never fully resolved. Since decolonization is impossible as long as the fact of colonization does not get acknowledged, the unresolved tensions about the nation’s colonized past continued to haunt the debates over imitation throughout the seventeenth century, shaping its meanings and giving it a disproportionately strong and heated charge. The enduring conflict of this foundational memory war runs so deep that this controversy is, surprisingly, still alive today, albeit in a different form, as this book’s conclusion will explore.