Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer
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,