Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer
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