Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

Chapter 6. Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?

136 c h a p t e r 6 imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection? We keep our own tongue in slavery ourselves; We show ourselves foreigners in our own country. What sort of nation are we, to speak perpetually with the mouth of another? —Jacques Peletier, Art poétique (1555) To civilize what he termed “barbarians” in France, Cardinal Mazarin left money and instructions after his death in 1661 to establish the Collège des Quatre nations. The barbarians he had in mind were the inhabitants of the nation’s newly acquired regions. louis XiV had conquered four new territories on the kingdom’s furthermost boundaries in 1648 and 1659: (1) Flanders, artois, Hainaut, and luxembourg; (2) alsace and other Germanic territories; (3) roussillon, Confluent, and Cerdagne; and (4) Pignerol and the Papal States. The collège brought sixty adolescents from those annexed regions to Paris to civilize and assimilate them into the nation. The founding document stated that the goal was to give them “a French education, and in imperceptibly inspiring in them the sweetness of our domination, it will erase in their hearts all the sentiments of a foreign affection. recognizing the favorable treatment of our noble institution, they will engrave in their hearts the marks of a sincere and faithful love for our person and our State.”1 Mazarin’s educational theory was designed to “win their hearts and to make them truly French.”2 But what did it mean to civilize these barbarians and make them truly Civilizing Process or Voluntary Subjection? 137 French? The French language, quite strikingly, was entirely absent from the school’s curriculum. Following Mazarin’s orders, the children were taught only in latin and spoke to each other only in latin.3 They heard French once a day—at mealtime when the students took turns reading aloud from Géraud de Cordemoy’s Histoire de la France.4 otherwise, French history, literature, and culture were completely missing. The curriculum substituted a romanized construction of the nation’s past for a French memory, teaching roman history, literature, and culture. The “new history” that Pasquier, Popelinière, and others had proposed for France did not make its way into this school. anything French was virtually absent from this education in Frenchness. in 1688, when the collège was actually built, the educated elite still preferred a romanized Frenchness over a French Frenchness. i present this story about the Collège des Quatre nations to illuminate the first path that the elite proposed to civilize their nation. Their path assumed that France’s differences from its ancient models were marks of its deficiencies. To advance on the road to civilization, the nation had to imitate ancient rome, resemble and identify with it as fully as possible. This chapter begins by examining the curriculum and structure of French schools to explore the meanings and functions of imitation since the first proposed escape route from barbarism dictated a mimetic sameness . i focus on the nation’s schools for two reasons. First, schools shaped the elite’s most fundamental beliefs about the vernacular, the nation’s world of letters, and its emerging cultural identity. Second, the school constituted an important site where the nation’s cultural and colonial stories intersected since its educational program mirrored its colonial policy. imitation played a similar role in both. This chapter presents the parallels between the nation’s educational/civilizing/colonizing process in France and in the new World to tease out the conflicting meanings implied within the imitative dynamic. How did imitation provide the path to civilization, helping to escape the haunting legacy of the nation’s own barbaric past? and how did imitation contain hidden dangers, creating a voluntary subjection and leading back into a vicious circle? French Schools in excluding the nation’s native tongue, history, and culture from the curriculum, the Collège des Quatre nations was far from anomalous. Most French schools weaving two colonial stories together 138 followed a similar pattern, imitating the ancient World by treating an education in Frenchness as if France were rome. The dominant strain of the elite in France were not troubled by the exclusion of the nation’s native tongue, history, and culture, since they subscribed to the notion of a Greco-roman universalism, which came out of a long-standing tradition of humanism. in this context, many members of the elite...