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of lack.

      Internalizing the belief that their language was inferior, many members of the French humanist-educated elite suffered from the legacy of the nation’s colonized past. Barbarism became a label that stuck. To be sure, many of the elite argued that the label was not justified. Nevertheless, they still took this accusation seriously, as did Etienne Pasquier when he complained that “several Italian authors want to emblazon us with this title [of barbarian].”³⁴ Many French lettrés unwittingly wore a semivisible letter B emblazoned across their foreheads: for centuries they continually provided defenses against this accusation of barbarism, while at the same time indulging in grandiose rhetoric of greatness and genius.

      More than a hundred years later, the specter of France’s colonized past as a nation of barbarians still hovered over the educated elite’s struggle to defend their language and cultural power. In 1671 Dominique Bouhours penned one of the most popular and successful defenses in Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.³⁵ Like Du Bellay, Bouhours defended the French language and French culture against the legacy of the Roman colonization of Gaul. True, this past did not weigh as heavily over Bouhours as it did over his predecessors. But the effects of this past were still evident in the fact that France’s cultured elite continued to value and speak their former colonizer’s language. The Romans had forced their language upon the Gauls as an instrument of domination: “As soon as the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls, the Roman language began to be used there, either out of the complaisance of the conquered, or because it was necessary and in their best interest; be it because they were subjects who had no access to their masters without some fluency in Latin, or be it because the Roman decrees were all written in Latin. Little by little Latin gained ground and the Romans imposed the yoke of their language, along with servitude, upon the conquered, as Saint Augustine writes.”³⁶ Latin, far from being a neutral language of greatness, also contained the mark of the Gauls’ subjection to their colonial masters. To value the vernacular was a political act: to decolonize the French mind from foreign rule.

      Viewing the Romans as adversaries, Bouhours situated his defense within a curious master-slave discourse, arguing that French was not a “slave” to Latin. He boasted that French, liberated from the stranglehold the Romans exerted over it, had declared its freedom, whereas Spanish and Italian had not rid themselves of all Latin endings.³⁷ Understanding that the best defense is a good offense, he attacked these other languages, accusing them of still remaining yoked to the Romans: “They are like slaves who always carry the mark and the livery of their master.”³⁸ Fortunately the French had escaped such bondage; “rather,” wrote Bouhours, “we are people who enjoy total liberty. By removing this evident resemblance that other languages have with Latin, we have made a language for ourselves that has been created by a free people rather than born into slavery.”³⁹ Because the Romans adopted a strategy that colonized the Gauls through cultural imperialism, the status of Roman culture within France was highly freighted; it was part of a colonial bond that many intellectuals, mostly moderns, sought to break. The development of the French language became the mark of France’s independence from Ancient Rome, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman too has argued.⁴⁰

      Because Latin symbolized a problematic past, it is important to specify which version of Latin Bouhours had in mind. There were two basic kinds, as the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini reminds us.⁴¹ The first was a high, classical Latin, the language of Virgil and Cicero. The second was a more popular, vulgar version of the streets that evolved out of a political colonization and the mass infusion of different cultures, with the mixing of different populations. Bouhours had in mind the vulgar form that resulted from the Gauls’ history as a colonized people. After Bouhours’ character Eugène insisted that French was “created by a free people rather than born into slavery,” Ariste replied that such talk was a mask to hide the lowly origins of French: “We have acted like those men of fortune, who hide to others and to themselves who they are by disguising their family name, to escape reproach due to their lowly birth.” He briefly recounted the language’s evolution, beginning when the Gauls were “the vanquished” or “the subjects” and “the Romans made themselves masters of the Gauls.” The Gauls, “unable to make themselves agreeable to the victors except in speaking their language,” began to speak Latin more and more. Over time the Gauls forgot their own language, or rather “they corrupted it, mixing it with that of the Romans. Unable to completely rid themselves of their own, nor completely learn the other, they confused the two; from this confusion there resulted I do not know what kind of jargon which they called Roman, to distinguish it from Latin.” Then when the Franks drove the Romans out of Gaul, they added more words to this mixture; “rather than abolish this barbaric language, they accommodated themselves to it” and imposed “the yoke of their language on the vanquished nations along with that of servitude.”⁴² The Franks, to “mark that they were the masters,” inserted many German words into “this Gallic or rustic Latin, as some have called it.” And then came the Goths, the Bourguignons, the Huns, and the Vandals, all of whom “added several terms to the language of the countries where they established themselves.”⁴³ As a result, French “was, in its origin, only a miserable jargon, half-Gallic, half-Latin, and half-teutonic.” Ariste call this mixed origin “a horrible monster.” He added that “this monster lasted a long time, the linguistic barbarism having survived for entire centuries, along with its barbaric customs.”⁴⁴ This mixed heritage propelled Bouhours to insist upon purifying and cleansing the language of its “garbage” (“ordures”). Purifying the language meant liberating it from its colonial past by erasing the traces of its former subjection to invaders and forgetting that it had ever occurred. While Bouhours struggled here against Vulgar Latin, the status of classical Latin still remained an issue. It was equally problematic, for reasons I address in chapter 6.

      Thus far, my goal has been to show how the French elite defended their own world of letters within the context of their struggle to transcend the nation’s colonized past. However, I am not suggesting that this vision of the past came into a sharp or consistent focus. Rather, it appeared through shards. The fragmented awareness of this colonized past existed in tension with the dominant narrative that sought to deny it and bury this past as no longer relevant, as if it had never really happened. Trapped within this in-between state, never fully articulating the significance of this colonized past and never fully able to extirpate its traces, the French elite were still haunted by its remnants. Thus the elite vacillated between two competing narratives about the Gauls/French relation to the Romans. Tunisian writer Albert Memmi has illuminated a similar tension for the colonized of modern Tunisia in 1957. He described how the colonized experienced themselves and the world through two conflicting psychic and cultural realms, through the opposing lens of both the colonizer and the colonized in his text, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Certainly the early modern humanist-educated elite suffered from a similar double vision. They vacillated between seeing themselves through their own eyes and through the imagined perspective of their former colonizers. This vacillation itself was a legacy of the specific nature of the Romans’ colonial strategy, which used their cultural force to blur the “us-them” boundaries. To be sure, all colonizers strive to have the colonized internalize their values and thought structures. However, the Roman strategy of a cultural assimilation fostered this internalization to a particularly high degree by presenting themselves as mentors, and offering the gift of civilization. This strategy sought to catch the colonized off guard so they would identify their interests with those of the colonizer. This strategy was largely effective.

      The Vicious Circle of Imitation

      That the French elite should have internalized the threat of barbarism is not surprising, as this danger was built into the Greco-Roman thought structures that they were imitating. Many Greco-Roman beliefs and values were based on a hierarchical, colonial mentality that made imitation or any true alliance virtually impossible. The Ancient World’s underlying ideology did not allow any space on its throne of greatness for the French, and implicitly pushed them off it. Because the Ancients were long since dead, they obviously did not personally and literally reject the French as partners or heirs. But this rejection was embedded in the underlying assumptions of the Greco-Roman thought structures. These modes of thought disrupted

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