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

Chapter 2. The Return of the Submerged Story About France's Colonized Past in the Quarrel over Imitation

54 c h a p t e r 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 The Story about France’s Colonized Past 55 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, inbetween 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 france’s colonial relation to the ancients 56 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...