Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture by Sara E. Melzer (review)

This pioneering book reconciles two aspects of early modern culture rarely examined together: the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and France's settlement of America. As Sara E. Melzer demonstrates, these two seemingly separate discourses paralleled each other and often intersected in debates about French cultural identity. She exposes a 'triangulated dynamic' (p. 126) in which France simultaneously represented the barbarian other of Greco-Roman civilization and an ideal of civility in relation to New World savagery. The book's first chapters reframe the famous Quarrel as a contest over cultural memory. According to Melzer, 'ancient' partisans embraced the ideology of their Roman colonizers in tracing their cultural genealogy to the Gallo-Romans or to Troy via the Franks. Moderns, meanwhile, rejected Roman influence, building their defences of the vernacular on images of a native Gallic culture resistant to Roman invaders. Here, Melzer intriguingly characterizes their refutation of classicist charges of barbarism as an attempt to 'decolonize' French minds. Part II shifts the focus to America. Jesuit Relations and other accounts portrayed Native Americans as sauvages and barbares needing civilization. France pursued a policy of 'cultural assimilation' designed to 'Frenchify' Amerindians through conversion and intermarriage. Jesuit chroniclers, however, saw these strategies as a threat to settlers' civility and advocated against mixed marriages, which, they claimed, caused Frenchmen to behave like 'libertines' (pp. 117-18). Metropolitan French writers shared this 'generalized anxiety about backsliding into barbarism' (p. 126), expressing it in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Yet, as the book's final, synthetic section shows, American sauvages mediated these debates. If the Quarrel forced thinkers to see France as either the fully assimilated inheritor of Roman culture or as its barbaric other, New World encounters offered a third way to understand their culture's status. In particular, Fontenelle's comparison of Amerindians and ancient Greeks in De l'origine des fables transcended the binary opposition between savagery and civility by suggesting that cultures become more civilized over time. Fontenelle thus opened a 'liberating path toward decolonization' (p. 218). The book's thematic organization succeeds in making a clear, bold argument and in providing ample context. This quality guarantees the book's accessibility to non-specialists, facilitating its goal to 'provide a wider and more deeply rooted framework' (p. 224) for recent debates over France's colonial history. This admirable clarity sometimes precludes closer attention to evolutions in thought over the period under investigation, as well as more detailed exploration of issues of internal diversity such as the religious conflicts mentioned in Chapter 1. Provincial French identities might also have been examined: the Collège des Quatre Nations, discussed in Chapter 6 to illustrate Latin's imposition on French schoolboys, was established to transform young nobles from newly annexed provinces (Alsace, Roussillon, etc.) into good Frenchmen. Moreover, many of the 'libertine' French settlers condemned by Jesuits happened to be Normans, Gascons, or Basques. Arguably, the 'colonization' of France by metropolitan culture began in this rich nexus of cultural rivalries. Admittedly, this is a lot to ask of an already ambitious, groundbreaking study. Melzer's book represents a major contribution to early modern French cultural studies.