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  • Swords and Flowers: Conversion in La Chanson de Roland and Floire et Blanchefleur
    to our daughter, Anna Shenjing Vance
  • Denyse Delcourt (bio)

The prologue of Floire et Blanchefleur invites a comparison with La Chanson de Roland by presenting a fictive genealogy in which the two heroes and Charlemagne are said to be related by blood:

Se mon conte volés entendre, Molt i porrés d’amors aprendre: Çou du roi Flore l’enfant Et de Blanceflor le vaillant, De cui Berte as grans piés fu nee; Puis en France mariee. Berte fu mere Charlemaine Qui puis tint France et tot le Maine.

(lines 5–12)

[If you deign listen to my tale, you will learn much about love. It is about King Floire, the young man, and the remarkable Blanchefleur, the mother of Berthe aux Grands Pieds. Berthe married King Pepin. She became the mother of Charlemagne who, later, held France and all of Maine.]1

To claim Charlemagne as part of one’s lineage in a medieval narrative is hardly original.2 It becomes interesting and somewhat puzzling, however, when one considers the divergent views on conversion represented by Floire and the great emperor.

Floire et Blanchefleur is a love story involving a Spanish Saracen prince and the daughter of a French Christian captive. Like in Aucassin et [End Page S34] Nicolette, the lovers overcome many obstacles—including kidnapping, a pursuit to “Babylon,” and a menacing emir—before they can finally get to be together. At the end of the romance, Floire renounces the beliefs of his native Spain to become a devoted Christian king. The story makes it clear that Floire’s conversion to Christianity is one based on love for Blanchefleur.3

In La Chanson de Roland, Charlemagne’s mission is either to conquer and convert Spain, or else to kill the Saracens who are represented here as God’s worst enemies. The ethos of holy war finds its strongest expression in Roland’s righteousness that demands and justifies the annihilation of all pagans (“Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit”; 1015) (Chanson de Roland, ed. Dufournet)4 Unlike Floire et Blanche-fleur, La Chanson de Roland incorporates Spain into Christendom only through violence.5

In this essay I will examine how Floire et Blanchefleur and La Chanson de Roland relate with one another. I will not address how one text could have influenced the other. I will develop and explore the connection, established at the beginning of the romance, between Floire and Charlemagne and the discourse they each represent. Their obvious differences in their paths to conversion do not preclude a connection; they just make it more complicated. If Floire and Charlemagne’s lineage is perceived as a line, it is not a straight line.6 Somewhere along the genealogical line, one could say, generational change turned into a paradigm shift, replacing the idea of a peaceful relationship with Saracens with a confrontational one. The heroes’ divergent stands on conversion, however, cannot be explained as a simple disruption of a continuous past. Their respective attitudes toward the religious others [End Page S35] at times overlap; the peaceful Floire conducts himself like the warrior Charlemagne, and vice versa. What connects the two has less to do with the passage of time (diachronicity) than with a specific period of time (synchronicity). During the twelfth century when Floire and Roland were written,7 discourses on conversion not only developed together, but also acted upon one another. In Reading The Song of Roland, Eugene Vance convincingly argues that an ethical disjunction arises in the middle of the poem when the old Charlemagne replaces Roland as the central hero (64–66). Floire is a similarly disrupted text in which competing ideologies threaten the coherence of the story. I will explore the main differences between Floire and Roland in regard to conversion. Next, I will examine how the epic and the romance manifest an ambivalence to their own model of conversion, and how this ambivalence challenges each narrative’s organizing principles. Finally, I will relate the two stories’ opposite and ambivalent perspectives on conversion to the competing and often overlapping twelfth-century discourses on the Muslim other.

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