Colonizer or Colonized? The Hidden Colonial Stories of Early Modern French Culture by Sara Melzer (review)

Colonizer or Colonized is an original, deeply and widely researched, boldly thought-out, and well-written book. Its aim is to reset our way of reading the early modern period in France. The book engages new areas of research and formulates surprising but logical associations, and allows the findings to dictate the shape of the argument. It gives evidence of significant work in the archives and couples it with thoughtful analysis. What’s more, for each point of inquiry, Melzer follows at least two main lines of argument and pursues them in tension with each other. Melzer’s book interrogates in a profound way the anxieties of identity that beset the French in the early modern period.

These worries found expression in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This seemingly frivolous dispute in fact reflected deep and strong feelings. The Ancients believed that the sublime had been achieved in earlier Greek and Roman times and that seventeenth-century efforts could only do well to imitate those early models, whereas the Moderns believed in progress, and thought that recent endeavors were not only innovating but improving on the earlier work of the Ancients. The French sought to orient themselves in relation to their own past—as the descendants of Gauls formerly colonized by the Romans—and their present—as colonizers themselves in the New World, but still recovering from their own colonization. French identity was destabilized by the confrontation of two foundational and conflicting stories: first, that of their origins in the people and place of the Gauls, and second, their relationship to “Civilization” as represented by classical Greek and Roman culture. In the first story, the Gauls were cast as “barbarians” colonized by the Romans. The next layer of narrative includes the discovery of the “New World” and the indigenous people there, and the civilizing, or colonizing, of the “savages” by these former and now uneasy Gallic “barbarians.” The two over-arching questions posed are: what is the long-range effect of being colonized on the colonized? And its corollary: what are the consequences of colonizing for the colonizer? Let us say that there are three main foci: the “forgotten” story of the French and their Gallic origins; the only slightly more familiar story of the French and the New World, as they told it to themselves; and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Were the partisans of the Ancients simply those thoroughly colonized people who had assimilated with the Greco-Latin invading culture to the point of losing sight of their own origins: Were the Moderns the new wave of invaders, set on converting and making the Indians of the New World like them, in bringing them enlightenment and culture?

In France’s “memory war,” the Moderns revolted against Greco-Roman influence, identifying against the Ancients by preferring a greater independence and dignity for France. The reason they unearthed the Gauls and championed them as their ancestors was precisely because the Gauls were once an independent nation (or at least tribe) that pre-dated both the Greeks and Romans. Thus the Gauls the Moderns had in mind were the Gauls before colonization, before Greece and before Rome. These Gauls were specifically not Romanized Gauls. However, the problem with these Gauls was that they were barbarians. The Ancients, however, favored a different set of Gauls to cite as their ancestors: the Gauls who had been civilized and Romanized. The only problem was that they had also been colonized.

During the early modern period, the French were not quite sure where on the continuum of “barbarous–civilized” they themselves belonged. Although they devoted themselves to the civilizing process through their church and state apparatus, in the process enriching themselves with wealth found in the New World, they realized they must take a firm stand against barbarity lest they themselves slip...