Colonizer or Colonized. Sara E. Melzer
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.
CHAPTER 2
The Return of the Submerged Story About France’s Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation
One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly in the trains of reasoning.
—Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925)
Were the Greco-Romans an “us” or a “them”? This question was central to the memory war about how French history would be constructed, as we saw in Chapter 1. The ancients won this foundational conflict of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, and thus French history was considered to have begun with the Romans as an “us” who helped civilize the Gauls. The effects of this memory war have been long lasting, because the nation’s dominant narrative aligned France with the Ancient Romans. In so doing, this narrative forced underground the competing alternative, which highlighted the nation’s colonized past. In this losing version, the Romans were a “them”—colonizers and invaders who deprecated the Gauls as barbarians.
The narrative about France’s colonized past did not disappear, however, even if the national memory bank excluded it. Shards of it remained. Because any representation of history is always partial, historiographers have to eliminate large portions to make it cohesive and intelligible, noted Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History. But whatever one excludes and “holds to be irrelevant … comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies,” he astutely observed.1
This chapter will show how the nation’s excluded history about its colonized past came back indirectly, “despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies.” It returned in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation and about the nation’s world of letters. However, when this memory resurfaced, it did not return in a rational or coherent manner. Rather, it erupted in a disguised, fragmentary form that produced strange inconsistencies in texts that discussed the nation’s past. These fragments had a strange, in-between status. They left enough traces to prevent the nation’s colonized past from being completely erased. But those traces were relatively weak, so they never cohered into a sustained, fully defined logical construct. Had they been stronger, the traces would have been easier to combat. It was as if the cultured elite were boxing with shadows.
These shadows were what gave the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns its strange and amorphous power. Having explored the Quarrel’s foundational battle as a memory war in the previous chapter, let us now consider how the remnants of that battle erupted in the Quarrel’s cultural debates about imitation. I contend that what was really at stake in these debates was a quarrel over decolonization.
Defending the French Language and French Culture
The latent memory of France’s colonized past resurfaced in a special class of writing known as the “defense.” This genre was the most important site for the nation’s struggle to decolonize from the Ancients. While the defense was a mode of discourse that had many different purposes, my discussion will focus on the humanist-educated elite’s struggles to defend the vernacular and the nation’s own world of letters.2 Du Bellay wrote the most important and famous of the defenses, La défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). He was hardly alone, however. Hundreds of writers rallied round this same cause in the early modern era, although they often did not use the word “defense” in their titles. For example, the French Academy was founded in 1634 as a defensive structure: its primary mission was to defend the nation’s world of letters.3 To cite another example, Dominique Bouhours defended the French language in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671). France’s world of letters was not the only thing that needed a defense. Estienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France was a “historical defense and illustration of the French nation,” as Danielle Trudeau has remarked.4 Pasquier sought to defend the nation’s independence in the political, religious, and literary domains. The defense thus was a vast and important category of writing.
Yet the defense has received surprisingly little attention as a genre, with the notable exception of Margaret Ferguson’s excellent study.5 While examining the defenses, most scholars have zeroed in on the concept of imitation, concentrating largely on the formal or theoretical issues of mimesis.6 For the most part, scholars ignore or minimize the fact that imitation was frequently raised within the specific discursive context of the defense. As a result, the unstated assumption of most scholars is that imitation was charged with the role of helping the French elite to achieve its highest goal: becoming civilized. They have generally neglected what imitation was defending against. The genre of the defense, however, needs to be taken literally, since its distinctive mode of discourse profoundly shaped the dynamics of imitation and broadened its meanings. A defense looks downward to defend against something as well as looking upward to argue for something. In the context of the Quarrel, imitation was concerned with both. Its most well-known function was to enable French intellectuals to progress upward toward civilization by emulating Greek and Roman models. However, imitation had a second, counterbalancing function: to defend against regression into barbarism.
Ferguson’s analysis illuminated the nature of the literary defense, showing how it followed structures similar to those of a psychological defense, as Freud would later develop it. She observed how Freud often used the concepts of defense and repression in overlapping ways. The goal of both, she argued, was to guard against two different kinds of danger. The first was an external danger that was real and very much in the present moment; the second was felt within the psyche from a remembered danger that was replaying an archaic, primitive drama. Often the sources of both dangers became conflated, with one substituting for the other.
As for the danger present in early modern France, the state was struggling with many different issues, too numerous to elaborate here. Broadly speaking, the state wanted to develop and fortify its monarchical powers, and it was also preoccupied with the ongoing tension between Catholics and Protestants, which continued well after the Edict of Nantes, which officially ended the religious wars. Hélène Merlin-Kajman and Marc Fumaroli have described how the French language developed in the context of both struggles.7 Both scholars are mostly