Colonizer or Colonized - Sara E. Melzer

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an important site where the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses intersected. Chapter 4 analyses the church and state’s assimilation strategy in the New World. I argue that assimilation presented a boundary dilemma by encouraging outsiders on the edge of civilization to become transformed and enter the French, Catholic community so fully that intermarriage was an ideal. But were the New World barbarians really an “us” or a “them”? The assimilation policy mirrored the dilemma the cultured elite faced: were the Romans an “us” or a “them”?

      Part III weaves the two different colonial stories together into a shifting series of triangulated configurations and argues that the nation’s culture emerged in relation to the colonial dynamics of its Ancient World and New World connections. Chapter 5 shows how the colonial discourse about the New World sauvage was interwoven with the nation’s cultural debates about its relationship to the Ancient World. This chapter provides an introduction to the next three chapters, which form a unit, by reframing the Quarrel’s debates as offering a competing set of proposed escape routes to help the nation transcend the bind of its own barbaric, colonized past and cultivate an independent civilization worthy of pride and dignity. Each of the following chapters offers a competing triangulated escape route to arrive at that goal.

      Chapter 6 centers on imitation as a proposed escape from barbarism. Typically, scholars examine imitation within a cultural context, viewing it as a “civilizing process” and presupposing that the Ancients were beneficent models and allies to help elite France along its desired path. This chapter expands the meaning of imitation by also examining it within the nation’s colonial discourse. Here imitation functioned as a “voluntary subjection,” stimulating a subjugating process. Many lettrés saw the Ancients as an imperial “them” and feared that imitating them would not lead out of the colonial bind; the most fundamental thought structures they were imitating reinforced the original power dynamic that relegated the French to the position of the barbarian other.

      In Chapter 7 imitation offers a second proposed escape route. But here imitation is understood through a different interweaving of the nation’s cultural and colonial discourses. The relations often highlighted the Amerindians as an “us,” long-lost kin to justify colonization. These texts stimulated what I call a “crisis of similarity” with the barbaric. In this context, imitation of the Ancients took on the function of guarding against a regression into barbarism. Imitation served as a life raft to prevent elite France from sliding back on the evolutionary continuum toward the primitive stage of the Amerindians.

      In the first two escape routes, neither path was able to liberate the French elite from their fear of barbarism. Both were locked in a binary battle that defined and measured France in relation to Greece and Rome. This binary struggle would endure as long as the elite continued to uphold the Ancients as the model for what they wanted to become. Chapter 8 examines the most successful route out of the bind in which the moderns looked to the New World as a third term. They used the concept of the sauvage as a lens through which to look at the Ancient World. The sauvage became a lever to undo the binary oppositions of the Ancient World, enabling the moderns to conceptualize an idea of progress that would reverse the slope of history and break the pull back to the Ancient World. The sauvage and the New World enabled the moderns to conceptualize a future that represented an evolutionary advance over the past, not a fall from it. In this way, the moderns built a new road to modernity and ushered in the Enlightenment.

      The conclusion ends the book by examining the implications of this new early modern paradigm for understanding the modern era.

      Each of the book’s chapters is cumulative, building on arguments set forth in the previous chapters. Thus one should read the chapters in sequence to make each seem plausible and to grasp the full force of the overarching argument.

      PART I

      France’s Colonial Relation to the Ancient World

      CHAPTER 1

      The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle

      The Memory Wars over “Our Ancestors the Gauls”

      The Puzzle of the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns

      What was the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns? When did it take place? Numerous scholars see it as a late seventeenth-century phenomenon that began in 1687 when all hell broke loose on the French Academy floor.1 It was set off by a seemingly minor event at what was to be a standard Academy meeting. Charles Perrault had opened the session by reciting a poem he had written, “The Century of Louis the Great.” While Perrault was reading, Boileau kept muttering to himself and fidgeting in his seat, making wisecracks under his breath, much like Alceste in Molière’s Le misanthrope listening to Oronte’s poem. Finally Boileau, outraged, leaped to his feet and railed against the poem so strongly that he eventually lost his voice. As an ancient in this instance, Boileau found Perrault’s poem objectionable because it was “scandalous to read [a poem] that criticized the great men of antiquity.”2 As a champion of the moderns, Perrault refused to imitate the Greeks and Romans and kneel at their altar. He felt that France’s contemporary writers had not only equaled those of Ancient Greece and Rome but even surpassed them. After all, they had one key advantage over their predecessors—they had the good fortune to live in the reign of Louis XIV. Had Homer, Virgil, and Ovid lived in the age of the Sun King, they would have been even better writers, Perrault claimed. In cutting the Ancients down to size, Perrault was questioning how much France’s writers should imitate them, and he proposed that they chart a new course for themselves. For Boileau, this was blasphemy and more than he could bear.

      Boileau’s histrionic outburst called for war. And war it was—for decades to come. Sounding a call for armies to form, this incident induced scores of writers to stake out positions on the literary and cultural battlefield, aligning themselves with either an ancient or a modern camp. Numerous participants used the term “war” in the titles of their works: Gabriel Gueret wrote La guerre des auteurs anciens et modernes (1671); François de Caillières, L’Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes (1688). Longpierre came to Boileau’s defense in his Discours sur les anciens (1687). Perrault responded to Boileau with his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, which came out in intervals between 1688 and 1697. Fontenelle wrote Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688) and other responses to these same issues, such as De l’origine des fables, Dialogues des morts, and Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683). Numerous other texts addressed this central conflict, such as Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690), which structured many word definitions in terms of an opposition between “les anciens” and “les modernes.” Thus, in the late seventeenth century the Quarrel reached a particularly high level of self-consciousness, bringing into public discourse scenarios of war that pitted ancients against moderns. The feverish intensity of this cultural discourse accounts for why most scholars associate the Quarrel with this period more than any other.

      I recount this famous feud between Boileau and Perrault in order to highlight the puzzling nature of the Quarrel. How could a trivial personal squabble have ignited such an important and explosive set of debates? What was really at stake? The imitation of the Ancients was the stated issue: What was the status of France’s writers as imitators of Ancient texts? How closely were they to imitate the models of antiquity? To what extent were France’s writers free to invent new paths that reflected their own experience and their own truths?3 I am not suggesting that these questions were trivial.

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