Joseph Bédier and the Imperial Nation

Medieval Réunion

Réunion, situated about 450 miles east of Madagascar and just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, is one of France’s oldest and most distant overseas colonies. Despite its isolation from other French dominions, it has long served as a symbolic condensation of French national identity—a “second France” or “second metropole” in the Indian Ocean. Part of that centrality has been imprinted through medievalism. First claimed by France in 1638, the island received the name “Bourbon” from Étienne de Flacourt (on behalf of the East India Company) in 1649 in honor of the royal family—a dynasty that owed its legitimacy ultimately to Saint Louis himself (the Bourbons descended from his youngest son). Many of the island’s coastal towns were subsequently given the names of medieval saints, including Saint-Louis and Saint-Denis—the capital, named after France’s oldest saint and (not coincidentally) the sacred burial site of French kings just outside of Paris. The medieval saints imported prestigious national origins into the colony, asserting cultural continuity across great distances of time and space. They ostentatiously declared the island’s attachment to centers of European royal power and affirmed its ties to France’s most venerable medieval traditions. Thus, while Bédier claimed to come from the “time of Saint-Louis,” he also came from the place of “Saint-Louis.”

The island’s name change at the time of the Revolution weakened its attachment to the legacy of the medieval monarchy, but maintained its symbolic centrality to the nation. The revolutionary Convention of 1793 changed the name to “Réunion,” a decree adopted (with resistance) on the island in 1794. Although republicans obviously saw advantages in displacing a royalist name, the decree gives no explanation of the choice of “Réunion.” Popular mythology has held that the name commemorates the “reunion” of revolutionaries from Réunion and neighboring Mauritius before a decisive battle in Paris.8 Others have attributed the name to a commemoration of the “reunion” of the national guard with the citizens of Marseille before the revolutionary assault on the Tuileries. Contemporary commentaries, however, interpret the name as a sign of the island’s “union” with the republican regime: in this perspective, “Réunion,” like “Bourbon,” declares both the island’s loyalty and the nation’s perfect unity [concorde] even across great distances.9 Each of these different explanations of “Réunion” translates in its own way metropolitan views of the island’s national importance: its inhabitants fight for France on French soil; it commemorates national (not local) history; it replicates faithfully the nation’s own most cherished values.

Subsequent changes to the island’s name followed a similar imperative to imprint national identity: Napoleon’s representative General Decaen rechristened the island “Bonaparte” in 1806; the British signaled their legitimacy by restoring “Bourbon” when they captured the island in 1810; the French, under a monarchical regime, maintained the royalist commemoration when they regained control in 1815. The symbolic tradition continued with the restoration of “Réunion” at the beginning of the Second Republic in 1848—and so it has remained, through the Second Empire (1852–70) and several succeeding republics. Insular resistance to metropolitan impositions, however, have kept “Bourbon” in constant use, even among ardent republicans. Bédier, for example, hardly ever used “Réunion.” When referring to his perspective and that of his contemporaries in this book, I also use “Bourbon.” Today, “Bourbon” and the saintly coastal towns (along with a fair number of places named “Jeanne d’Arc”) keep the island’s foundational medievalism in constant circulation.

The changes in political régimes that instigated new names for the island also opened questions about its administrative status within the empire. Already at the time of the Revolution some talked of integrating Réunion within the national structure of départements. At the beginning of both the Second and Third Republics (1848, 1870), Réunionnais representatives again envisioned their island becoming a département.10 These republican-minded (and imperialist) Réunionnais saw départementalisation as a way to end the often oppressive policies of colonial governors (usually sent from Paris) and gain control over local affairs. They went on to embrace republican colonialism as empowering for both Réunion and the nation (especially in relation to Madagascar). At the same time, they often found themselves the target of colonialist deprivations. Indeed, in the 1870s, members of the National Assembly sought to eliminate colonial representation in the national government. Under the auspices of a new Republic in 1946, Réunionnais representatives once again supported départementalisation, this time successfully. They envisioned the establishment of democratic freedoms and, although vigorously anticolonial, sought recognition of the island’s cultural proximity to the metropole (that is, continental France). Theoretically, Réunion (along with Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyane) enjoyed the same status as any continental département. In practice, laws and resources did not automatically apply overseas. As the social promises of départementalisation failed to materialize, its initial supporters began agitating for greater autonomy (some even for independence). Meanwhile, those who had initially resisted départementalisation championed neocolonial reforms. These conflicts have subsided somewhat since the national government began decentralizing administrative processes in the 1980s, granting increased local control over local affairs. Nonetheless, Réunion (like France’s other DOMs—départements d’outre-mer) still lacks parity with continental départements in a number of ways—and questions of administrative status resurfaced as recently as 2000 and 2003.11

Debates over administrative status engage the very nature of Réunionnais identity, especially its degree of “Frenchness.” Uninhabited when the first Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, the island’s culture has been shaped entirely by migration. Réunion thus occupies a distinctive place in French colonial history. In the seventeenth century, European, Malagasy, and Indian peoples settled the island—both voluntarily and forcibly (enslaved, exiled, indentured, etc.). As a strategic outpost on the sailing route from southern Africa to India, Réunion continually received new inhabitants of many different origins. After the official abolition of slavery in 1848, the French government arranged with Britain to contract indentured laborers from India (a practice that ended in the 1880s). Meanwhile, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the children of the island’s European elites commonly migrated to France for their education, sometimes at a very young age; some returned, many did not. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, voyages became more rapid and more frequent. During Bédier’s lifetime, most young men remained on the island until beginning their university studies. Réunionnais like Bédier were educated to assimilate seamlessly into metropolitan life in Paris. They nonetheless often encountered a disjunction between their own sense of “Frenchness” and the metropole’s rejection of them as inferior colonial subjects (even when they looked perfectly “European”). In this regard, Bédier’s experience of migration may not have been so different from that of his factory worker compatriot, who arrived in the metropole decades later through a government program designed to encourage (even force) migration to the continent. These kinds of programs made migration a coercive instrument of social policy in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, high population and low employment continue to exert pressures toward emigration, while Réunionnais in France live with the prospect of eventual return. Migration (in both directions) remains fraught with optimism and disappointment, economic opportunity and constraint, hopeful dreams and traumatic misunderstandings.12

One of the initial, and lasting, effects of migration has been the development of an exceptionally diverse society on Réunion, including many inhabitants with mixed racial and ethnic heritages. The predominance of mixing (métissage), alongside the tradition of identifying with metropolitan France, has given the term créole many meanings on Réunion. Within the broader scope of European colonial history, créole encompasses three mutually exclusive definitions, often in use simultaneously and with different historical developments in different places.13 From a Eurocentric perspective, créole designates white Europeans born in the colonies, who avoided intermarriage with other immigrants; this definition still appears in French dictionaries.14 Créole also can refer to anyone or anything of insular origin, regardless of their respective relations to Europe. Finally, créole can signify the mixing of races, cultures, and languages that takes place when groups of disparate origins live in close proximity. Créole thus encompasses a range of incompatible meanings: colonial Eurocentrism, overseas inhabitants of any race, the syncretic effects of colonial society.

All three of these meanings were active on Réunion during the Third Republic. Elite white Réunionnais promoted the idea that créole referred exclusively to their own European lineages. Metropolitan observers imbued this same definition with negative connotations: Charles Baudelaire (the nineteenth-century French poet) considered creoles weak, feminine, and incapable of original thinking; Bédier himself was judged “languid” and “nonchalant.”15 Nonwhite Réunionnais, meanwhile, came to understand créole as a generic term of overseas citizenship, emphasizing the notion of “native islander of any color.”16 Finally, metropolitan travelers and ethnographers, even in the eighteenth century, refer to the “creole race” specifically as the descendents of interracial couples.17 The potential for slippage among these various understandings of créole has steeped the term in controversy. Créole on Réunion points simultaneously to inclusion and exclusion, island and metropole, blanchitude and métissage. It can seem overly identified with the specifics of Caribbean culture (as defined by the influential writings of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant), with the utopian harmonies of the Réunionnais proponents of créolie, or with African filiations that exclude those of Asian ancestry. While some believe that créole can support a sense of collective Réunionnais identity, others prefer to circumvent its problematic heritage with terms such as Réunionnisme, Réunionnisation, and Réunionnité.18

Among the competing meanings of créole, white Réunionnais of Bédier’s era clung to Eurocentrism. They claimed créole as a term of elite culture and faithful allegiance to France that did not rightfully belong to the island’s nonwhite inhabitants. The most vocal ideologues of this view were Marius and Ary Leblond (pseudonyms of Georges Athénas and Aimé Merlo, prolific cultural activists). Looking back at the Third Republic from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century, the Leblonds trace their vision of créole’s evolution:

At first creole signifies exclusively the white man born in the colonies of European stock, an aristocracy that this word distinguishes from mixed bloods. After 1871 and universal suffrage, the latter—who descend from slaves or former immigrants—beating their chests sonorously, proclaim themselves creoles of color in order to place themselves above newly arrived immigrants and assure themselves increasing privileges.19

For the fanatically Eurocentric Leblonds, créole’s “hybrid” dimension emerges as an unwelcome side effect of republican enfranchisement. Rather than admit “mixed bloods” into the national culture, they open créole to recent European migrants, such that the term designates a superior form of Europeanness—one tempered by contact with the venerable French traditions preserved in the colony but lost in the metropole. The Leblonds thus laud the nineteenth-century Réunionnais poet Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle for his double claim to elite creole identity: “Creole by blood, Leconte de Lisle is also creole for the time he spent in his homeland.”20 According to the Leblonds, even a short stay in the colony could permanently transform a European into a creole: “You will hear [the young European who has returned to the metropole] laughingly throw about words of patois which are like the signs of a coat of arms of creole nobility.”21 By including nonnative Europeans among “authentic” creoles, the Leblonds negate the multiracial aspect of creole identity (“born in the colonies of any color”) in favor of racial purity (“born white in any place”). In these formulations, race determines culture.

The Leblonds actively promoted an image of Bédier as exemplary of their Eurocentric definition of créole. Bédier himself vigorously proclaimed a purely European heritage as the descendent of aristocratic migrants who settled the island in the mid-eighteenth century. For Bédier, as for the Leblonds, créole signals a Réunionnais identification with French imperial ambitions. In order to represent this historical phenomenon, I will often use the term creole to reflect Bédier’s perspective as a white colonial “Bourbonnais.” Even Bédier’s créole, however, includes the effects of métissage (however disavowed). These dynamics of mixing become the focus of creole in the final two chapters, although they of course operate throughout the book: however stridently colonizing subjects claim cultural and genealogical homogeneity, the complex interactions and improvisations of insular life repeatedly intrude on their desires. Creole medievalism, in turn, functions as a multifaceted phrase, encompassing innumerable combinations of the many contradictory connotations of both “creole” and “medieval.”

Joseph Bédier’s creole history begins with the migration of Jacques François Bédier Desjardins in 1746, supposedly exiled from France after a failed conspiracy against the king.22 Succeeding generations prospered as land and slave owners; according to family lore, one of them brought sugarcane cultivation to the island and started the first rum distillery.23 Joseph Bédier’s great-uncle, Philippe-Achille, became the island’s only creole administrator and an ardent proponent of the French conquest of Madagascar.24 Following the abolition of slavery in 1848 (which Philippe-Achille resisted), landholders like the Bédiers suffered significant economic losses; Joseph Bédier’s grandfather had in fact already sold his estate in Sainte-Suzanne in 1835.25 Bédier’s father Adolphe married Marie Céline Du Tertre Le Cocq in 1860, and left the island immediately to practice law in Paris, where Bédier was born in 1864.26 Four years later, Adolphe left his young wife a widow; in 1870 she moved her three children back to Réunion, where she soon married her cousin, the lawyer and politician Denis-Godefroy Du Tertre Le Cocq (often called Le Cocq Du Tertre).27 Thus began Bédier’s direct initiation into creole culture.

Eleven years later, Bédier began his university studies in Paris, making one last trip back to the island in 1887. Despite the fact that Bédier spent most of his life on the continent, he remained “definitively and passionately creole” (as the Leblonds would say; they rightly affirm that to understand Bédier, one must understand Réunion).28 From his earliest days in Paris in 1881 to his last in 1938, he maintained continuous contact with his fellow creole migrants—and with his family and compatriots on the island. Throughout this career, he repeatedly recalled his creole heritage in public speeches, private communications, and published scholarship. For Bédier, creole medievalism was a way of life; after his death, it became a scholarly legacy, shaping French medieval studies in ways that have yet to be understood.

Medieval Francophone Literature

Bédier achieved substantial public acclaim in 1900 when he published his immensely popular modernization of Tristan et Iseut. Three years later, he acceded to the chair of medieval French literature at France’s most prestigious research institution, the Collège de France. During World War I, he worked in the Ministry of War translating German documents whose publication made him a national hero. Bédier’s patriotic service, along with his proven literary talents, contributed to his subsequent election to France’s most revered cultural institution, the Académie Française (1920). When he died in 1938, his obituary appeared in nearly two hundred newspapers throughout the world.

Bédier’s status as an acclaimed public figure made him an ideal target of Réunionnais efforts to enhance the island’s status in the empire. Most importantly, his reputation as a poet spoke directly to Réunionnais strategies that made literature an instrument of cultural politics. Almost since its first settlement, Réunion was popularly known as the “Island of Poets.”29 By the early twentieth century, it had produced a number of poets who enjoyed high status in the French literary canon, including Évariste de Parny (1753–1814), Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle (1818–94), and Léon Dierx (1838–1912). For Réunionnais, Bédier seemed like the most recent heir to this exalted tradition. As the Leblonds and others integrated Bédier into the canon of nationally recognized Réunionnais poets, medievalism came into direct contact with colonial literary politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, colonialist writers—including prolific Réunionnais—sought to define “colonial literature” as pro-imperial, arguing that literature alone could effectively promote colonialism as a popular national enterprise.30 These arguments directly resisted the increasing prominence of black African and Caribbean writers publishing in French. Bédier’s poetry, consisting of modernized romances and epics, extended the colonialist literary vision to the nation’s very foundation in the Middle Ages. His creole medievalism thus underwrites a nationalist literary genealogy that begins and ends with overseas expansion.

The traditional group of creole poets, like Bédier, gained national reputations while drawing inspiration from colonial memory. Parny, for example, popularized an aesthetics of exilic mourning (Élégies, 1773) and lyrical lamentation for lost love (Poésies érotiques, 1778). He also authored one of the first examples of European “colonial literature,” Chansons madécasses (1787)—presented as translations of Malagasy songs and intended to inspire compassion for indigenous peoples (Parny’s preface blames France’s slave trade for creating intertribal warfare on Madagascar; he wrote eloquently against slavery).31 Most importantly for later Réunionnais cultural strategists, Parny gained sufficient national stature to join the Académie Française in 1803. Bédier, for his part, would have also known Parny as an ancestral cousin (married to a Bédier cousin, Grâce-Mary Vally).32

Leconte de Lisle was also elected to the Académie Française, in 1886. For him, Bourbon inspired affecting landscape descriptions, painful emotions of lost love, and a sensibility to Indian cultures. During his early years in France, he wrote several short stories sharply critical of colonial society along with nostalgic poems of homesick yearning.33 Although he soon signed a controversial creole petition supporting the abolition of slavery, he later defended French colonialism in India (and criticized Britain).34 After the Prussian seige of 1870, Leconte de Lisle affirmed his republican commitments with Le sacre de Paris, earning the appreciation of the Leblonds (who compared him to Victor Hugo) and of nationalist figures like Maurice Barrès (who also befriended Bédier).35 Leconte de Lisle is most widely known, however, as the leading representative of Parnassian poetry—an overtly classical conception that rejected both romanticism and medievalism in favor of “impartial” Greek models.36 Yet Leconte de Lisle built his Greece largely on the landscape of Bourbon.37 From this Eurocentric perspective, creole culture represents a prestigious fusion of “Aryan” influences (Greek, French, Indian). The multiplicities of this heritage enable metropolitan readers such as Baudelaire to conclude that Leconte de Lisle’s colonial origins were virtually undetectable in his poetry—and Réunionnais critics to discern insular influences throughout his writings.38

Dierx might have inherited Leconte de Lisle’s seat at the Académie Française, but he refused to present himself.39 Nonetheless, fifteen of his fellow Parisian poets voted him “Prince of the Poets” in 1898 (succeeding Stéphane Mallarmé); some on Réunion judged his poetry superior to both Leconte de Lisle and Hugo.40 Dierx developed a more sensual and nostalgic style than Leconte de Lisle, focused on the pains of creole exile, disappointed creole love, and impending death. His first collection, Aspirations (1858), drew on late romanticism, while his second, Poèmes et poésies (1864), dedicated to Leconte de Lisle, revealed his formal mastery of Parnassian ideals. Following several more acclaimed collections, Dierx edited his own Œuvres complètes (1894–96) and published no more. When he retired in 1909, Réunion’s General Council (presided by Bédier’s stepfather Du Tertre) granted him an annual stipend.41

All three of these creole poets, like Bédier, expressed longing for their island home while living out their professional lives in Paris. During the Revolution, Parny waxed particularly nostalgic, and once sought a teaching post at the lycée.42 At the beginning of the Second Republic (1848), Leconte de Lisle also sought an appointment to teach in his newly “liberated” homeland; he considered running for election in 1882.43 On the whole, though, Leconte de Lisle has left an ambiguous record of insular attachment: while some praise him, others believe that he disliked creoles; he made no public mention of Réunion in his acceptance speech to the Académie, but in private he warmly thanked his compatriots for their congratulations; when he died in 1894, some island newspapers published laudatory obituaries, while others took the opportunity to doubt his loyalty.44 Dierx, by contrast, maintained consistently warm relations with Réunion. He thought of returning permanently in 1878, and during an 1892 visit declared himself more fortunate than Leconte de Lisle who could not return to the homeland they had both celebrated in verse.45

Building on these personal and artistic connections, Réunionnais writers in the latter decades of the Third Republic promoted this trio of creole poets as emblems of Réunion’s value to the nation. The Leblonds, most vocally, defended the prestige of creole identity to a largely indifferent national audience (“we are tired of being treated like poor cousins”) by recalling France’s literary debts to the colony.46 Ary, for example, claimed Parny for egalitarian ideals, dubbing him “Friend of the Blacks.”47 And Marius characterized Leconte de Lisle as the paragon of “creole genius” (a model also applied to Bédier).48 In 1909, the Leblonds initiated an effort to erect a monument to Leconte de Lisle in Saint-Denis.49 Two years later, they opened Réunion’s first art museum and named it after Dierx.50

For the Leblonds and their sympathizers, the creole poets exemplified “colonial literature.” And they capitalized on Bédier’s international reputation to draft him into the group, establishing an enduring role for medieval studies in Réunionnais literary history.51 Just as Bédier used medieval poetry to enhance France’s prestige, the architects of his reputation as a creole poet used literature to enhance Réunion’s prestige. At the opening of the Musée Léon Dierx (1911), the Leblonds included Bédier among the island’s literary luminaries (“an honor to the French language”), alongside Leconte de Lisle and Dierx. Bédier’s election to the Académie Française in 1920 prompted Réunionnais to laud Bédier as the most recent addition to the island’s poetic pantheon.52 Major public displays soon followed—at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseille (1922) and the Exposition Réunionnaise in Saint-Denis (1925). Commemorative publications for both events placed Bédier firmly in the company of his poetic compatriots.53 More public displays and commemorative publications followed with the international expositions in Paris in 1931 and 1937—all featuring Bédier alongside Parny, Leconte de Lisle, and Dierx.54 The major obituary published on Réunion in 1938 concludes with the exhortation to add Bédier to the “glorious” lineage of Leconte de Lisle and Dierx.55

The politics of colonial literature reached a pivotal point in 1921—the same year Bédier joined the Académie Française: one month after Bédier’s Académie acceptance speech (3 November 1921), René Maran won the Prix Goncourt (14 December 1921). Credited as the first black African Francophone novel, Maran’s Batouala: veritable roman nègre tells a story of oppressive corruption, prefaced by a mordant critique of the colonial administration. The award of the Goncourt caused both literary and colonial scandal.56 Procolonialist novelists set out to reclaim the genre of the “colonial novel” for Europeans. In direct reply to Maran, the Leblonds (who themselves had won the Goncourt ten years earlier) published Ulysse, cafre, ou l’histoire dorée d’un noir (1924), a fictional demonstration of the value of French colonialism voiced by a white creole narrator.57 Dedicating the novel to Raymond Poincaré (former president of the Republic) and prefacing it with an extract of Louis XIV’s Code Noir, the Leblonds cast themselves as France’s colonial spokesmen. They followed the novel with a programmatic statement on colonial literature, Après l’exotisme de Loti: le roman colonial (1926). Here, they asserted that only white creoles (and a few uncommonly imaginative Europeans) could produce a literature capable of inspiring compassion for indigenous peoples among metropolitans, and an appreciation for “universal” French values among the colonized; other writers (like Pierre Loti) produced “mere exoticism.”58 Beyond their publications, the Leblonds organized a colonial writers group (1926) and hosted a number of events at the Exposition Coloniale (1931).59 Indeed, from their earliest writings, the Leblonds aimed to teach metropolitan audiences the “truth” about French colonialism.60 In all of their efforts, they sought to reclaim colonial literature from the emerging corpus of fiction produced by writers of color—beginning with Maran, but including the future artisans of négritude (Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Léopold Senghor).

Bédier’s creole medievalism frames the literary controversy of 1921. Earlier in the year, he began publishing a cultural review, La revue de France.61 The first issue in March featured both colonial and medieval literature: the editors promised the serial publication of a novel by Jean D’Esme (Les dieux rouges) as well as Bédier’s Perceval ou le Saint-Graal (which never in fact appeared). Bédier’s first publications did include an article on the oldest romances and extracts of his translation of Roland; the full edition, dedicated to “Bourbon Island,” came out a year later.62 Throughout the 1920s, the editorial content and advertising in La revue de France offered a consistent mix of colonial and medieval literature.63 In other words, at the same time that the Leblonds inserted Bédier into their literary politics, Bédier himself directly supported colonialist writers—and invited the readers of his review to connect these writers to France’s most ancient literary traditions (Pierre Mille, a popular colonial writer, cited Bédier’s critique of Chateaubriand’s 1827 account of his trip to the Americas as proof of the failures of “exotic” travel literature).64 Without explicitly saying so, Bédier enacted the ideological tenets of the Leblonds’ program for a pro-imperial colonial literature. Indeed, at a celebration for Ulysse, cafre attended by Bédier, the Leblonds thanked him at length for his support.65

With direct and indirect support from Bédier, the Eurocentric canon of colonial literature came to include an explicitly colonial medievalism. Early on, the Leblonds found the origins of authentic exoticism in the Crusades (1906).66 Bédier, not coincidentally, praised the Crusades as France’s first colonial venture.67 Anthologies published to consolidate and market the achievements of the colonialist writers often begin with medieval texts that celebrate Christian expansionism. Three anthologies published by Roland Lebel (a metropolitan professor working in Morocco) exemplify this conception: he selects almost exclusively European writers to define “African literature” (1927), he refers to both Roland and Bédier’s scholarship (1931), and he includes French medieval chroniclers Guillaume de Tyr and Joinville among his examples of “great colonial literature” (1952).68 A similar anthology published in 1942 begins with Foucher de Chartres and Guillaume de Tyr, with the explicit goal of fortifying the defeated French with examples of their triumphant colonial heritage.69 These kinds of anthologies make the Middle Ages the origin of French colonial culture.

Appropriations of Bédier’s own writings embed medievalism within the canonization of creole poetry as a form of colonial literature. At the centennial commemoration of Bédier’s birth (1964), Hippolyte Foucque identified him and Leconte de Lisle as the greatest contributors to the island’s literary reputation.70 The week before, celebrants of the first Grand Prix Littéraire de La Réunion (attributed to Jean Albany, one of the “fathers” of créolie) invoked Parny, Leconte de Lisle, Dierx, and Bédier as models for the future of Réunionnais poetry.71 A few years later, when Foucque published an anthology of Réunionnais poetry, he again included Bédier in the canonical pantheon.72 Even more telling, an anthology of Indian Ocean poetry published in Madagascar included extracts of Bédier’s Tristan et Iseut—integrating medieval literature into the genealogy of Francophone literature.73 Even now, Réunionnais remember Bédier as a creole poet. The nonagenarian Paul Champdemerle reminisced in 1996 about hearing Bédier speak in the 1930s: “Joseph Bédier could read three lectures . . . in absolute silence. You could have heard a fly buzzing. Because he wrote in verse, in a magnificent language. It was unforgettable.”74 Champdemerle’s memory pays tribute to a still famous compatriot, reactivating Bédier’s poetic reputation for a new generation of readers.

The instrumental role given to literature in colonial cultural politics has made it equally important to neocolonial and postcolonial arguments since the 1950s. Bédier, the Middle Ages, and the traditional creole poets repeatedly attract attention as writers and politicians imagine ways to represent Réunionnais identity. Appropriations have been politically varied, supporting both the far left and the far right. Two moments in Leconte de Lisle’s commemorative history are particularly instructive.

In 1977, enterprising admirers (including Champdemerle) arranged for the transfer of Leconte de Lisle’s remains from Paris to Saint-Paul (his birthplace).75 On the one hand, the reburial ceremony signaled Réunion’s profound attachment to France. Organized by conservative “integrationists” who favored neocolonial policies, it prompted a public commemoration at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (presided by France’s Réunionnais Prime Minister, Raymond Barre).76 The heir who authorized the transfer reserved the right to demand the remains’ return after ten years, for fear that Réunion would soon become independent from France.77 On the other hand, speeches at the ceremony characterized Leconte de Lisle as a social activist who fought against slavery and defended the impoverished; the socialist leader François Mitterand took the occasion to claim Leconte de Lisle as a “poet of the worker”; official and popular celebrations alike featured maloya, a form of music and dancing aligned with Réunion’s autonomist movement.78

More recently, the 1994 centenary of Leconte de Lisle’s death engendered equally contradictory reactions: commentators across the political spectrum praised the various commemorations; the Leblonds’ biography was reprinted, putting stridently colonialist interpretations back into circulation; the progressive artist Sham’s (pseudonym of the actor Chamsiddine Bénali) followed in the footsteps of the ultraconservative Henri Cornu in proposing a Musée Leconte de Lisle (Sham’s hoped to promote a collective sense of Réunionnité, while Cornu considered “the Réunionnais people” an impossible idea).79 These claims on Leconte de Lisle’s legacy testify to the enduring, and divergent, force of literary history in the politics of Réunionnais identity.

Another active venue of literary politics has been the translation of the canonical poets into the Creole language. Parny’s Chansons madécasses, for example, appeared in 2005 accompanied by translations into kréol rényoné. This project directly counters the “integrationist” commemoration of Parny in the 1960s, which made him a republican patriot in the nationalist vein.80 Instead, the translators, Axel and Robert Gauvin, cast Parny as the founder of a long line of poets who have defended the island’s freedoms: “the author shows himself respectful of the culture of the other and, the first, opens the path to a line of Réunionnais writers, from Leconte de Lisle to Gamaleya, who have been the bards of Liberty.”81 The Gauvains here integrate both Parny and Leconte de Lisle into a liberationist literary history by associating him with Boris Gamaleya (b. 1930)—a former communist activist, exiled to Paris in 1960 for supporting Réunion’s autonomy from France, author in the 1970s of a number of essays on Creole, and currently considered one of Réunion’s greatest living poets.82 His Vali pour une reine morte (1973) occupies for Réunion a place similar to Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal for Martinique. Gamaleya actually took decisive inspiration from Leconte de Lisle early in life, and later studied Parny (who he claimed as a communist predecessor).83 Parny, Leconte de Lisle, and Gamaleya thus all appear here as participants in a distinctly Réunionnais multicultural aesthetic with a long and venerable history.

For the Gauvins, this aesthetic also includes Bédier: a few years before translating Chansons madécasses, Axel Gauvin published an extract of Bédier’s Tristan et Iseut translated into kréol rényoné, alongside other translations from Parny and contemporary poetry composed directly in Creole.84 Creolophone activists thus continue the legacy of literary politics initiated by the Leblonds to opposite effect: Gauvin wrests Parny from pure Francocentrism and dislodges Bédier from earlier imperialist appropriations. Tristan et Iseut in Creole seals the evolution of “medieval Francophone literature” from colonial to postcolonial concept. This confluence of medieval and modern poetry in Réunion’s literary history places Bédier firmly within the literary genealogy of Francophone studies. Routed through Réunion, medieval and modern literary histories both reach far beyond their respective temporal boundaries.

Imperial cultures

The creole medievalism articulated by the Réunionnais migrant (cited earlier) has a long history, one that arguably lies at the very basis of the notion of the mission civilisatrice that drove French colonial ideology for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.85 If newly colonized peoples were irremediably different from Europeans, “assimilating” them into French culture would be a senseless project. If, however, “savages” merely lived in a time lag, they could develop toward French defined civilization. Like medieval Europeans, they could “evolve” into “modern” peoples. Some French anthropologists even set out to prove morphological similarities between contemporary Africans and medieval Europeans (to the detriment of both groups).86 This attitude owes much to the legacies of romantic historiography, which approached the primitive “other” as a living embodiment of Europe’s childhood.87 These intertwinings of medievalism and colonialism form the broader context of Bédier’s creole medievalism.

This book begins, then, with an exploration of interactions between medievalism and colonialism during the Third Republic, with a particular focus on Réunion’s relations with metropolitan France. Chapter 1, “Roncevaux and Réunion,” addresses how distant times and distant places together bolstered the discourse of national identity. As republicans distanced themselves from the radical legacies of the Revolution, the Middle Ages (previously shunned as unredeemably royalist) offered a new source of republican legitimacy. Simultaneously, colonialism became instrumental in reestablishing France’s reputation for military prowess. The defeat of 1870 reconfigured France’s relation to colonialism on several levels: the Prussian annexation of Alsace and parts of Lorraine made France itself a victim of colonizing aggression; other provinces became targets of aggressive centralizing policies; France’s ability to colonize new overseas territories counteracted the emotional effects of the continental losses; the integration of colonial representatives in the newly formed parliament gave distant territories a central place in the nation. The recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and the pursuit of new overseas colonies remained entangled over the following decades—and Réunionnais promoted both. One of Réunion’s longest serving deputies, François-Césaire De Mahy, saw colonial expansion (especially in Madagascar) as key to strengthening the young Republic and recovering from the losses of the Franco-Prussian war. Later, Bédier and his two sons all served eagerly in the war of 1914–18 that brought France’s “lost provinces” back into the national fold. De Mahy, not incidentally, was a cousin of Bédier’s parents and greatly influenced his early years in the metropole.

The Prussian victory in 1870 also prompted efforts to strengthen France’s institutions (from the army to the university), whose “weaknesses” many blamed for the defeat. Those responsible for reforming the education system included a number of influential medieval historians who gave the Middle Ages new prominence in the pedagogy of national identity. They sought to create a patriotic republican citizenry by providing lessons in the nation’s ancient prestige at every level of the curriculum. In literature, these lessons focused on Roland, whose epic battle at Roncevaux illustrated French grandeur and so promised to renew French patriotism for the future. At the same time, scholars and popular writers from across the political spectrum drew on negative images of a “barbaric” Middle Ages to denigrate both Germany and “uncivilized” overseas cultures. During Bédier’s lifetime, then, republican culture sustained a dualistic approach to the Middle Ages, a dualism that conditioned both the formation and reception of his creole medievalism.

On the popular level, medievalism and colonialism came together monumentally each time France put itself on display for the expositions universelles, or World Fairs, hosted in Paris. Chapter 2, “Medieval and Colonial Attractions,” analyzes the public performance of national and imperial identities. Through reconstructions of medieval and colonial buildings, organizers encouraged millions of visitors to draw parallels between distant times and distant places.88 They grounded national identity in the prestige of both medievalism and colonialism, enlisting both in the service of a triumphant modernity. The exhibits from Réunion, for their part, vividly crystallized creoles’ dreams of imperial prominence. To this end, the island’s pavilions in the 1920s and 1930s showcased Bédier’s scholarly publications, turning the famous medievalist into an icon of both colonial achievement and the nation’s most cherished ideals.

The roles of Réunionnais in the expositions and in republican politics suggest some of the particularities of Bédier’s own formation as a “creole.” I thus turn in chapter 3, “Between Paris and Saint-Denis,” to Bédier’s personal history—political affiliations, inherited creole culture, and explicit statements of creole identification. Politically, Bédier maintained seemingly incongruous affinities, from the socialist (Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum) to the reactionary (Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras). Bédier’s contradictory political engagements derive from the fissures of creole subjectivity, themselves shaped by the contradictions of medievalism. On the one hand, Réunionnais elites embraced an idealized notion of chivalry that they translated into a mythology of racial purity. On the other, they resisted metropolitan efforts to compare the colony to “primitive” French provinces or other colonies “stuck” in medieval time. The same duality characterizes Bédier’s personal relationship to creole identity. As he engages colonial memory in letters, speeches, and other autobiographical statements, he portrays the island as a source of both loss and fulfillment, exile and belonging. Together, these biographical details establish Bédier as a representative “creole” as well as a unique “medievalist.” Through the practice of medieval studies, he addresses his own fractured desires for national belonging.

Having inherited a certain medievalism from creole society, Bédier elaborated a scholarly version that made colonial experience the source of a national literary history. Chapter 4, “Island Philology,” analyzes how Bédier turns to memories of “Bourbon” in each of his most influential and popular publications: his dissertation Les Fabliaux (1893), his rewriting of Tristan et Iseut (1900), his study of the epic tradition in Les légendes épiques (1908–13), and his edition and translation of Roland (1922). Bédier published multiple editions of each of these works, indicating his persistent and overlapping interests (four editions for the Fabliaux, four for Tristan et Iseut, three for the Légendes épiques, six for Roland). Arguably, Bédier worked intermittently on all four of these major works from the beginning to the end of his career (between 1921 and 1925, all four appeared in either new editions or reprintings). In each of these works, Bédier constructs medieval French literature as a purely national tradition, minimizing and even negating outside influences (be they Indian, Celtic, or Germanic). Paradoxically, Bédier fortifies this vision of cultural homogeneity through colonial memory. In the Fabliaux and the Légendes épiques, for example, he supports his “scientific” arguments with anecdotes that derive from Réunion. Meanwhile, he dedicates Tristan et Iseut to his stepfather Du Tertre and Roland to the island itself. Bédier’s idea of literary history thus originates as much from colonial experience as from historical study. Each of these four publications reveals the creole in the medieval—just as Bédier’s biography reveals the medieval in the creole. These formative and often forgotten interactions shape a creole genealogy for medieval French studies whose effects reach far beyond Bédier himself.

Creole medievalism concerns almost the entirety of Bédier’s scholarship, but it affects the Roland most deeply. I therefore pursue in chapter 5, “A Creole Epic,” an analysis of Bédier’s relations with the Roland—both what he claimed about the poem and what he denied. The poem recounts the story of Charlemagne’s efforts to convert the “pagans” of Spain and to keep peace among his own men. As this drama develops, the poem establishes numerous dichotomies between the “righteous Christians” and the “immoral Pagans.” These portrayals of absolute difference inspired the nationalist appropriations for which the poem is famous. For Bédier, they ratified his commitments to a purified history of France. Indeed, in his translation, Bédier bolsters the poem’s anti-Pagan judgments and minimizes ambiguity whenever possible. The Roland, however, also portrays the Pagans and the Christians as remarkably similar (in their dress, chivalric values, etc.). In fact, the poem is saturated with suggestions of shared histories—and not only because a Christian view dominates the representation of the Pagans. I argue specifically that materials used by both Franks and Saracens (such as silk, fur, and ivory) reveal traces of disavowed histories of exchange and shared culture. This thematic dualism—in which the foreign is both rejected and desired, presented as both different and the same—speaks directly to the dualistic nature of creole relations with France. The poem can actually support many different visions of national history. The fact that this diversity has rarely surfaced testifies to the persuasive force of the interpretive tradition that Bédier helped solidify.

Today on Réunion, like elsewhere in France, young people still study the Roland in school. And it still serves primarily to illustrate the continental nation’s heroic origins. The poem’s rigorous dichotomies speak perhaps too well to contemporary xenophobias. Traces of cross-cultural interaction, however, offer some possibilities for a postcolonial pedagogy of medieval literature. These two interpretive tendencies support opposite political stances. They exemplify, once again, the internal tensions of medievalism in general and of creole medievalism in particular. And so, having begun with the founding imprint of medievalism on Réunion in the seventeenth century, I explore in chapter 6, “Postcolonial Itineraries,” creole medievalism’s continuing development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since Bédier’s death, creole medievalism has included engagements with both the Middle Ages and Bédier himself. Bédier’s prestige as a Réunionnais who succeeded at the highest echelons of the national culture has made him attractive to partisans of nearly every political persuasion. The Middle Ages have an equally varied valence: the fact that Réunion was settled in modern times makes the Middle Ages both a justifying precursor to modern expansionism and innocent of colonialism’s direct legacies. Bédier and the Middle Ages thus console metropolitan ambitions of centralized control while also fostering postcolonial dreams. Creole medievalism has appeared in a number of ways on Réunion since departmentalization in 1946—street names, historical commemorations, Creole language politics, and artistic installations. Each of these manifestations refers either to Bédier or the Middle Ages as symbols of the essence of either “France” or “Réunion.” These postcolonial elaborations of historical memory reenact the long-standing intimacies of colonialism and medievalism.

Creole Medievalism connects medieval literature to modern political history and contemporary culture. It illustrates the many mutual entanglements of philology, colonialism, and nationalism in the French empire since 1870. Both France and the Middle Ages look rather different from the perspective of Réunion and Bédier’s biography. By making literature central to imperial identity, Bédier’s Middle Ages aestheticized cultural politics. They did not, however, silence other histories. Through the configurations of creole medievalism (in all of its contradictory senses), the geographies and temporalities of “France” refract into multiple unresolved perspectives that defy the notion of a “general” national history.