Between Paris and Saint-Denis

Creole Republicans

Bédier came from a well-connected creole family. On his father’s side, he admired the legacy of his great-uncle Achille Bédier (1791–1865)—Bourbon’s first creole governor. Bédier’s father, Adolphe, lauded Achille for his devotion to Bourbon, his arguments in favor of colonizing Madagascar, and his noble disdain for bourgeois commerce.5 Bédier’s mother’s connections also reached deep into the creole elite. Bédier’s mother Marie-Céline Du Tertre Le Cocq, stepfather Du Tertre, and cousin De Mahy were all directly related to the island’s most powerful landowners, the Le Coat de Kervéguen family.6 This extended kinship network supported Marie-Céline and her three children after she returned to Bourbon a widow. Her remarriage in 1872 solidified family control in Saint-Denis: Du Tertre took over the hereditary office of town lawyer from her brother.7 The Du Tertres frequently hosted De Mahy when he visited Réunion; they (and the young Joseph Bédier) frequently vacationed with Hervé Le Coat de Kervéguen.8 In Paris, Bédier lived with De Mahy when he began his university studies.9 Although Bédier never held elected office or joined the colonial administration himself, he socialized in colonialist circles, enjoying a reputation for political influence (and wealth) among his fellow creoles.10 Late in life, he took on the presidency of the Alliance Française (at the urging of his compatriot Lacaze), assiduously supporting its colonialist mission to spread the French language.11

On Réunion, Du Tertre and De Mahy formed the core of a veritable political machine in the first decades of the Third Republic. De Mahy served as Réunion’s deputy from 1870 until his death in 1906, while Du Tertre was thrice mayor of Saint-Denis (1900–4, 1908–10, 1911–12) and deeply involved in local politics throughout his career (he died in 1926 at the age of 83). De Mahy defined the creole political agenda when he first took office: expel the enemy occupying Alsace-Lorraine, establish republican institutions, strengthen colonial freedoms, obtain Réunion’s political assimilation with France as a département, and promote a secular education that respected individual religious convictions.12 Du Tertre served as De Mahy’s political voice in his absence, and always campaigned with him on the island.13 Du Tertre (a lawyer) and De Mahy (a doctor) allied their interests with the landowners and industrialists. They supported stability above all, resisting both progressive republicans and clerical reactionaries (even as they frequently formed alliances with both).14 “Stability,” of course, remained an ideal rather than an achievement, as monetary crises, political corruption, and the countervailing pressures of property owners and impoverished workers combined to keep the island in turmoil.15 Du Tertre considered the forces of instability “criminal,” although he and De Mahy made their own contributions to violent and corrupt elections as they defended the elite’s traditional privileges.16 The uncommon volatility of creole republicanism derived largely from this explosive combination of economics, race, and religion.

This pattern of conflict and contradiction continued with the second generation of creole republicans—dominated by Lucien Gasparin (deputy 1906 to 1942) and Auguste Brunet (deputy 1924 to 1942, and a pallbearer at Bédier’s funeral). De Mahy and Du Tertre initially invited Gasparin into politics as their ally to broaden their appeal to the “people”: he became the only métis elected from Réunion during the Third Republic, and soon broke with his centrist patrons.17 The next ten years saw unprecedented political volatility as traditional allegiances fell apart. Gasparin ran against Du Tertre for the mayorality of Saint-Denis in 1908; Du Tertre ran against Gasparin for deputy in 1910 (unsuccessfully and possibly dishonestly).18 Some of Du Tertre’s own enemies despised Gasparin so thoroughly that they supported Du Tertre. These fissures resulted in a number of incongruous alliances and a sequence of split elections, such that for a long period Réunion’s deputies in Paris agreed on almost nothing.19 Even the apparent stability brought by the Gasparin–Brunet alliance after 1924 relied on improbabilities—a métis lawyer of modest background and a descendent of the “old creole” tradition (who, moreover, had dueled each other in their younger days . . . with Gasparin seconded by Du Tertre’s son, Maurice).20 Both, however, consistently affirmed their patriotic devotion to Réunion.21 Their rigorously colonial perspective made for seemingly unusual alliances, both in Paris and Saint-Denis.22 As Prosper Eve concludes, political party affiliations on Réunion meant little, and certainly not what they meant in the metropole.23

Creole republicanism functioned largely as a strategy for maintaining the power of the elite, not as a philosophy of social justice or liberation from religious authority. Polemicists on the island, for example, accused De Mahy of both propagating socialism and joining the extreme right.24 Meanwhile, the Leblonds could embrace socialism as a form a national defense—and characterize the Revolution a “pacific and liberating imperialism.”25 In an earlier period, Bédier’s father argued that many nineteenth-century royalists were in fact the only sincere republicans.26 These seemingly incongruous positions share a passionate patriotism. Réunionnais and metropolitan commentators alike often credit creoles with a deeper attachment to the patrie than continentals, their devotion growing in inverse proportion to their distance from Paris.27 For the Leblonds, creole patriotism shaped an “invisible solidarity” between Réunion and France, preserving tradition while expanding the empire.28 They specifically praised Bédier as an embodiment of these ideals. This form of creole republicanism directly supports colonial nationalism while alluding to medievalism (the ultimate source of prestigious “tradition”). Just like republican nationalism (see chapters 1 and 2), creole republicanism melds the value of distant times to distant places.

Creole republicanism partly explains the actions of both De Mahy and Bédier around the Dreyfus Affair, even though they acted quite differently. De Mahy, like many politicians, favored bourgeois values over revolutionary ones: he was not on the side of the peuple during the 1871 Commune—but did vote against violent repression afterwards.29 When Dreyfus was accused of treason, De Mahy supported the army and the state (in the interests of traditional order). He then joined Barrès in the anti-Dreyfusard Ligue de la Patrie Française in 1899, becoming president of the incipient Action Française. But when Henri Vaugeois called for a violent restoration of the monarchy at the group’s inaugural lecture, and then persisted in questioning the Republic, De Mahy resigned and demanded that his name be removed from the list of adherents to both groups.30 De Mahy’s conservative and xenophobic republicanism left him, in 1900, with few political allies: he voted (in the minority) against the exoneration of Dreyfus and also resisted (unsuccessfully) the law separating church and state because it threatened the privileges of the creole elite.

Bédier, by contrast, defended Dreyfus. While he was close to De Mahy, and had good relations with other anti-Dreyfusards, he supported Dreyfus from early on, and later met the captain at the salon of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti (a wealthy widow who hosted regular political discussions).31 Tellingly, Bédier turns the moral justice of the Dreyfus case into evidence of French cultural superiority in a letter to the Marquise:

The lesson of morality of which you speak, France has already received it during the salutary crisis of these last years. I dare say that it has given this lesson even more than it has received it: for what other people but ours would have found so many men ready to sacrifice their life or their bread to free an innocent?32

When the law passed overturning Dreyfus’s conviction (1906), Bédier declared that he loved his country more than ever.33 He remained concerned with the political fallout of the Affair, writing to the Marquise in 1908 of the “odious” Action Française and the difficulties still faced by Dreyfusards.34

Throughout this period Bédier developed two seemingly contradictory lines of thought: the one virulently anti-German (endearing him to the nationalist right, including the Action Française), the other supportive of the increasingly unpopular Jaurès (solidifying his socialist leanings). Bédier’s thinking on the Affair is thus not limited to the philological or the personal.35 Instead, he participates in the development of the “intellectual” as outlined by Antoine Compagnon and others.36 Bédier resembles most Gustave Lanson, the only other “literary” Dreyfusard.37 Both argued for an essentially nationalist literary history that began in the Middle Ages; they also shared numerous personal and professional contacts (including the Marquise).38 Bédier’s connections with Dreyfusards encompass his mentors (Gaston Paris, Paul Meyer, Gabriel Monod), students (Ferdinand Lot), and close personal friends (Lucien Herr); anti-Dreyfusards included his fellow creoles (De Mahy, José-Maria de Heredia), collaborators (Ferdinand Brunetière, his cousin-through-marriage Louis Artus), later champions (Barrès, Maurras) and future colleagues at the Académie Française (Lavisse, Hanotaux, Jules Lemaître).39 Bédier, in other words, fits uneasily into the categories generally defined for intellectuals in the period. Instead, he implements a “creole” commitment to patriotic honor above all partisan interests.

Bédier’s warm yet critical relationship with Jaurès further illustrates his seemingly idiosyncratic political values. He met Jaurès, like Dreyfus, at the Marquise’s salon, and came to admire him greatly: “When Jaurès speaks well of someone, I believe him at once, and I admire that person immediately.”40 Bédier even identified himself as “jauressiste” to friends of his wife’s family who had invited him to run for his father-in-law’s seat as a deputy.41 He consistently defended Jaurès, while also lamenting his involvement with the pacifists (a development that the Marquise herself could not pardon).42 Bédier even commended Jaurès’s failed attempt to legislate the end of private property, admiring the humanitarian beauty of his idealism: “I am far from constructing the future Citadel on the same design as Jaurès, but I like his speech precisely because he constructs there a different kind of Citadel.”43

As Jaurès radicalized his positions, Bédier applauded his adherence to republican values—yet disagreed with nearly every one of his actual policies:

I do not approve of his internationalism, nor of his collectivism, nor, I think, of any of his political ideas: which means basically that I am on another side than him, in another party. But are we making this discovery today that Jaurès is a revolutionary socialist, and that he already was one twenty years ago? Didn’t we know it, and should we, at each incident of daily life, be surprised if he doesn’t act like a conservative or a radical? Is it because he dreams of the “Great Night”? Is it as a revolutionary that he is despicable? So be it. But then, it is not today that he is despicable, but for twenty years now.44

Bédier goes on to praise Jaurès’s generosity, candor, purity, and loyalty (seeing in him the ideals of the “first Revolution”). As much as Bédier detests the workers’ strikes and the unions, he cannot blame Jaurès himself, whom he casts as a “prisoner” of socialist “barbarians.”45 Discussions around the new military service law of 1913 marked the definitive end of the Marquise’s relation with Jaurès, but not Bédier’s. While the Marquise would write of Jaurès’s assassination in 1914 as a service to national defense, Bédier expressed great sadness at the death of “noble Jaurès.”46 Bédier’s effort to separate the personal from the ideological is certainly not unique (Blum took a similar approach to Barrès),47 but it emerges at least partly from creole traditions that valued personal honor above party affiliations.

Bédier recognizes that there are many ways to express patriotism—but patriotism remains always fundamental. Within this frame, he articulates explicit tolerance for mutually exclusive views:

But, when one is not oneself a man of action, one should abstain, to my mind, from judging men of action on each event of daily politics. . . . And then, whom of our friends will we ask to love our country with precisely the same heart as us?48

Bédier concludes that individuals can change their positions without betraying their patriotism: “the richness of national feeling” derives from the conflicts that arise from diversity. He expresses the same sentiment even after the war. Asked to comment on France’s future approach to Germany, Bédier declared his own intransigent resistance to reconciliation—but went on to clarify that his personal view was not necessarily a desirable national one:

It is good that certain Frenchmen keep their resentments for a long time, it is good that certain others have already forgotten them. France’s attitude cannot derive from one mold, which would consist of a few short sentences, and that all would apply, like a Prussian, immediately and mechanically. It is of the infinitely diverse and complex effort of its sons, it is of the very diversity and complexity, even the contradiction, of their tendencies, that is composed the moral unity, the face, and the soul of a nation.49

For Bédier, differences among France’s citizens unify the national “soul.” France’s tolerance for diverse opinion defines its cultural superiority over Germany (a country of mechanical uniformity). Bédier’s principled commitment to honor the convictions of others parallels his belief in the separation of social spheres—“men of action” follow different rules than other men. Bédier’s defense of diversity thus rests, paradoxically, on an intolerance for mixing: it supports hierarchy rather than equality, social stasis rather than mobility. As such, Bédier’s political philosophy reveals its roots in colonial culture: honor above all, each in his proper place.

Bédier extends the same accepting tolerance to the conservative right as he does to Jaurès. Indeed, Léon Daudet, a former classmate of Bédier’s and ardent supporter of the Action Française, believed that Bédier was a socialist—and reports surprise that Bédier commented one day: “Love of our country makes us close, you and me.”50 Bédier’s fundamental nationalism made him an easy ally for a range of right-leaning thinkers—including Barrès, one of the most influential founders of the Action Française. The two became friends at the beginning of the war,51 developing a collaboration in which Barrès frequently relied on Bédier’s advice (their weekly meetings sometimes lasted hours). Barrès had already developed a patriotic medievalism resonant with the medievalists of 1870 (see chapter 1), supporting the sanctification of Jeanne d’Arc and legislating to protect medieval cathedrals.52 In keeping with the historiographical shift opened by 1870, Barrès made the Middle Ages (and specifically the Crusades) the precursor to the Republic rather than a justification for a new monarchy.53

In dialogue with Bédier, Barrès made his medievalism explicitly epic. The opening of Barrès’s famous historical novel, La colline inspirée (1913), for example, appears to follow the list of sanctuaries enumerated in Bédier’s Les légendes épiques—anchoring questions of modern French identity in the spiritual geography of the medieval epic.54 Soon after the novel’s publication, Bédier began assisting Barrès directly, sometimes extensively, with several writing projects, including Les traits éternels (1916) and Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France (1917).55 In Les traits éternels, Barrès takes the epic and the Crusades as direct precedents for modern military valor:

The epics, the Crusades, the whole youth of France is full of innumerable acts accomplished by our knights and by the holy people of God that precede, that prefigure the exploits executed by our armies in 1916.56

Barrès makes Bédier directly responsible for his understanding of these connections: “I will never say enough what I owe to M. Joseph Bédier, eminent master whose science and refinement helped me to understand both today’s heroic reality and the epic of the past.”57 Bédier’s influence on the historical conceptions supported by some of France’s most reactionary thinkers suggests a fundamental ideological solidarity.

Bédier’s own reflections on wartime valor illustrate the symbiosis between far-right nationalism and creole medievalism. On the one hand, Bédier revised his understanding of Roland in light of his patriotic understanding of the human sacrifices of modern combat: he no longer believed (as he had claimed in the Légendes épiques) that Roland “elevated” his dead comrades with his own death:

A leader is powerless, a troop is powerless, if there is not established from the leader to the troop and from the troop to the leader a double and continuous circuit of harmonious thoughts and feelings. . . . In spite of Roland, in spite of his companions, he incarnates their deepest desire. . . . At Roncevaux, his privilege as leader, as hero, as saint, is only to see beyond, to perceive immediately the work as necessarily accomplished, victory as necessarily won.58

The “circuit of harmonious feelings” between leaders and their troops draws the modern French soldier closer to Roland. Bédier seals this medieval patriotism by concluding L’effort français (1919) with Roland’s “douce France [sweet France].”59

But Bédier’s idealized medievalism began on Réunion, and L’effort français also links France’s “hereditary” honor to colonialism: he considered that only officers who had served in the colonies were really prepared for the war:

Through the colonial officers, our soldiers reconnected with their ancestors, recognized themselves with pleasure as the grandsons and great-grandsons of disciplined soldiers; thanks to them, they rediscovered intact, faithfully preserved, their own patrimony, the repository of the warrior virtues of their race.60

For Bédier, colonial officers (among them many Réunionnais) embody the authentic national character established at the foundation of the “French race”—in the Middle Ages. Their colonial experience brought them closer to the medieval vanquishers of “infidels” and “barbarians.” Through them, metropolitan soldiers (cut off from their own inherited virtues) could recognize themselves as “grandsons of Roland.” Bédier’s vision of colonial chivalry sustains a racialist nationalism fully compatible with Barrès’s more vociferous positions. As a creole, Bédier also follows De Mahy’s own reactionary tendencies, grounding patriotic nationalism in imperial geography.

Bédier’s wartime writings contributed to his election to the Académie Française in 1920, an effort initiated by Barrès (who had joined in 1906).61 Receiving Bédier at the Académie, Louis Barthou (then Minister of War) made explicit the national value of Bédier’s chivalric patriotism, praising his medieval scholarship and his wartime efforts as equally major contributions to “la gloire de la Patrie.”62 While Bédier’s election was just as appreciated on the left as on the right,63 reactionary activists claimed his legacy in especially direct ways. After Barrès died in 1923, Bédier replaced him on the Comité de Patronage of the recently founded Chronique des lettres françaises (no. 6), a billing he shared with the notorious reactionary Maurras.64 Indeed, partisans of the Action Française claimed that Bédier supported Maurras’s election to the Académie in 1937. While the moderate press quoted Bédier opposing Maurras (“there have never been polemicists under the Coupola”) and it is widely assumed that he voted against Maurras (along with Lacaze and Prévost),65 the editors of L’Action française published a letter claiming to prove the contrary (addressed to Maurras from one of Bédier’s summertime neighbors):

He spoke to me of your [Maurras’s] visit and gave me the large blue pencil that you had forgotten on his table. I asked him, if the occasion presented itself, if I could tell you that he had voted for you, and he answered: of course.66

Another partisan, Gabriel Rocher, reports that Bédier agreed to participate in a celebration for Maurras because “on the patriotic plane, I am with them... At least with those people, one breathes an air of patriotism.”67 Maurras’s own memory of Bédier expresses surprise at their many common ideas and friends, judging him an “admirable patriot” even though he was an old-style republican.68 Other extremists like Robert Brasillach (ardent fascist) and Bédier’s former student Hubert Bourgin (a vociferous anti-Semite) published effusive homages.69 All of these statements appeared among the flurry of remembrances that accompanied Bédier’s death, revealing perhaps more about the public contest to claim his legacy as they do about him. Nonetheless, Bédier did little if anything to attenuate his associations with conservatives and reactionaries. They form part of the continuum of contradictions that define creole republicanism.

Tellingly, creole elites found the traditionalist nationalism espoused by Barrès quite appealing.70 Barrès’s justification for his own republicanism (he never repudiated the Revolution like Maurras) resonates strongly with the conservative values of creole republicanism: “I consider that one cannot excuse oneself, when one is a traditionalist, when one is subjected to the law of continuity, from taking things in the state in which one finds them.”71 This kind of traditionalism made medievalism central to French identity, validating all aspects of national history simply because they have already happened. Bédier expressed his own social views in a similarly traditionalist or “conformist” manner: “It is good, in France as elsewhere, to occupy a place in the regular hierarchy.”72 Bédier’s respect for hierarchy, unquestioning praise of French culture, and theories of historical continuity (la vieille France éternelle) all gave comfort to creoles and reactionaries alike. His scholarship bolstered the racialist definitions of French identity that justified traditionalist elitism in both the colony and the metropole. In this sense, Bédier’s identity as a diaspora creole coincides with the reactionary definition of national feeling current in his later life. Bédier and Barrès both privilege the Middle Ages without becoming monarchist— and support the republic without becoming egalitarian.

Taken together, Bédier’s political connections, statements, and actions do not add up to a single ideological stance. Situated between the patriots of 1870 and the young nationalists of 1914, Bédier’s traditionalist nationalism developed from a combination of colonial chivalry, historical scholarship, and idiosyncratic personal affinities. His political engagements mirror the structure, if not the content, of many others, from De Mahy to Blum (who never completely gave up on Barrès, who himself never completely abandoned Jaurès). Bédier’s situation is thus both unique and representative of the complex patterns discerned by Zeev Sternhell, who concludes that conventional notions of “left” and right” do little to illuminate political reasoning during the Third Republic. The sum of Bédier’s individual affiliations resonate with these broader political entanglements, especially during the 1930s when ultranationalists, radicals, socialists—and creoles— all defended the colonial enterprise.73

Within this pliable ideological mix Bédier activated the Middle Ages as a locus of national reconciliation. In one sense, he joined the generalized trend of republican medievalism, seeking national legitimacy in France’s most distant origins. As a scholar actively creating knowledge about those origins, he engaged in a twofold politics: his medievalism both reflected and created a desirable vision of the past.74 Ultimately, Bédier’s specifically creole medievalism represents a particularly potent form of national belonging (for himself and for all of France’s citizens). Creole medievalism offered a multifaceted concept capable of satisfying the patriotic imagination of people who might have disagreed about most everything else (from socialists to royalists). It translates the ideological complexities of creole republicanism into influential scholarship and popular modernizations of medieval literature.

Creole Chivalry

Bédier’s medievalism emerges first and foremost from the traditionalist culture of the Réunionnais elite. Creoles staked their claim to primacy in the empire on their faithful preservation of France’s oldest and best traditions—that is, on an idealized vision of medieval chivalry. The creole elite understood themselves as a colonial aristocracy, the last vestige of the noble society that once defined France itself. This myth of inherited privilege permeated both public and private culture. In Bédier’s case, the family romance of aristocratic lineage began with colonial exile: specifically, the royal banishment of the lord of a castle in Ménéhouarne (near Vannes in Brittany). Bédier would have read this story in a book written by his father, Adolphe, which recounts the family lineage back to the early eighteenth century. According to Adolphe, the first migrant Bédier repurchased his lands in Brittany but died before restoring his title, “Sire de Maine et Ouarn.”75 Belief in this heritage shaped a creole identity that included an aristocratic responsibility to defend noble causes. This code of values, adopted by generations of Bédier descendents and shared by many of their creole compatriots, can best be described as chivalric. Its debt to a myth of valiant knights—and later, musketeers—brings traditional creole identity into direct dialogue with an idealized Middle Ages. In this sense, creole medievalism had broad cultural currency on Réunion well before Joseph Bédier elaborated a scholarly version for national consumption.

Aristocratic identity underwrote class privilege and social entitlement. Bédier, by his own admission, imbibed these lessons by reading his father’s book and his grandparents’ letters.76 Adolphe insists throughout his narrative on the family’s multiple layers of aristocratic lineage, from the Breton founder of the paternal line to the grandmother who married a descendent of a fifth-century Irish king.77 Through political upheavals large and small, the family core remained loyally “chevaleresque” and royalist.78 The truest sign of this aristocratic pedigree, for Adolphe, was the family’s steadfast maintenance of traditional values, including honor and a disdain for bourgeois commercial interests (considered immoral).79 Adolphe attributes these traits to all true creole families: the good ones trace their roots to the younger sons of noble French families; everything good in the colony derives from their influence. As Adolphe describes traditional creole values, he returns again and again to chivalric vocabulary, whether praising the dueling skills of distant ancestors or the riding skills of his father. Bédier expressed his own “hereditary royalism” when he dated a letter by noting the centennial of the death of Louis XVI, “our king, slaughtered by bourgeois revolutionaries.”80 And it is no accident that Bédier’s admirers readily described him as a “chivalric” figure who considered the word “noble” the highest possible form of praise.81

Colonial education reinforced the sense of chivalric responsibility that Bédier gained from family influence. Speeches given at annual award ceremonies at the Lycée de Saint-Denis articulate some of the principles that informed insular pedagogy. Speakers regularly emphasize a militaristic patriotism that underscores students’ duty to serve France, defend colonialism, and support revanche against Germany through academic excellence.82 In 1884, the vice rector described the lycée explicitly as “a great school of patriotism in which we teach how to love France.”83 Another speaker cast this patriotic service in specifically chivalric terms: “the honor of our country was always to take the defense of the weak against the strong.”84 In 1921, Raphaël Barquissau stated that the creole “cult of chivalric honor” maintains the values of “Old France”; one of those values is the “eternal genius” of colonialism.85 Bédier’s own teachers exhorted him and his fellows to honor both “la Patrie créole” and the Republic.86 Bédier and his compatriots absorbed this chivalric self-image as part of their creole consciousness. The famous Réunionnais aviator Roland Garros (“Knight of the Air”), for example, proclaimed of his military service: “I was Creole . . . I was therefore more ready than others to make war without hatred”; even more recently a Réunionnais historian compared Garros to “a knight of the Middle Ages challenged in a tournament.”87 Creole patriotism, in other words, meant embracing the idealized legacies of the medieval aristocracy.

Educators nourished both chivalry and republicanism in their daily writing assignments. Some of Bédier’s actual essays survive,88 revealing how even commonplace selections could resonate distinctly in tropical imaginations. His first essay is a Latin–French translation exercise on “why God does not wish to have slaves.” While the theme is theologically ordinary, on Réunion the slavery metaphor supports a racialized lesson in the value of social conformity. It complements teachers’ annual exhortations to students to fulfill their inherited obligations by choosing to serve France (just as Christians choose to serve God). Bédier’s three other essays come from “French narration”; they all tell stories of defiant nationalist heroism based on well-known historical episodes. “Le naufrage de Camoëns” [The Shipwreck of Camoëns] recounts how the revered author of the Portuguese national epic, the Lusiades (1572), saved himself and his manuscript from drowning off the coast of Indochina. The passage combines epic narration (of both Camoëns and Portugal) with imperial history: serving the Portuguese crown in Goa (India), Camoëns ran afoul of a local official who exiled him to Macao (China), where he penned the epic in the throes of exilic longing. Bédier’s composition captures the pathos of colonial heroism and the epic grandeur of an Indian Ocean storm. Even the prayer that ultimately saves Camoëns takes on local color, as he addresses the Virgin Mary as “Star of the sea” [Etoile de la mer].

The next two essays likewise inflect distant events with local resonance: “The Taking of the Fortress” [L’enlèvement de la Redoute] recounts an episode of the Napoleonic wars in Russia (1812), apparently based on a short story by Prosper Mérimée of the same title, in which a young captain joins his first regiment just before a particularly bloody confrontation. While Mérimée’s story presents a detached and insincere hero, Bédier’s essay portrays a sentimental heroism—the young captain, in his fear, thinks of his family; an older officer serves as a protective father figure. The town of Saint-Denis, moreover, has its own “Redoute”—the outpost overlooking the sea that formed the local front of the Napoleonic wars. In July 1810, a small contingent of Bourbonnais famously defended the fortress against the English for three days before surrendering. The Russian episode of the essay and the English episode of local history both invite children to identify with the glory of patriotic death. Finally, Bédier’s fourth essay waxes lyrical on the beauty of the ocean while recounting the shipwreck of the Vengeur during the Revolutionary wars (1794): after engaging the English, the damaged ship reputedly sank with its entire crew shouting “Vive la République!” The assigned essay ingenuously combines republican celebration with appreciation for the tropical landscape (the changing colors of the ocean, shores lined with filaos trees). It enacts a literally elemental form of creole republicanism.

Patriotic pedagogy imbued chivalry with colonial racialism. Barquissau (who actively promoted Bédier’s creole reputation) told a group of students in 1921:

You who will tomorrow be the elite, make yourselves the knights of all noble causes. . . . A noble French lineage bequeaths to you its role and its primacy in the sea of the Indies, show yourselves worthy. Will we say “Blood cannot lie”? It can lie. It depends on you that it not lie.89

For Barquissau, colonial chivalry is a birthright, but also a challenge to prove that one deserves to have been born. His emphasis on the precarious nature of biological determination—blood can lie—alludes to the complexity of racial identity on Réunion. In the colony, even those of pure blood can be tempted to behave ignobly—and those who seem pure may not be. The racial anxieties that underlie Barquissau’s address derive from the fact of multiple racial identities among his students, who undoubtedly looked something like the photo of the lycée’s students published for the Paris exposition of 1900—a range of skin tones, the relatively dark more or less equal in number to the relatively light.90 Expressing his distrust of blood, Barquissau both affirms the birthright of the elite and recognizes métissage. The result is a colonial mixture of racism and egalitarianism: the island’s white creole youth has inherited a high social responsibility; their education, not their blood, will enable them to meet it. Chivalry, with its uncontested European pedigree, offers a framework for protecting creole identity from the vagaries of blood genealogy. Indeed, for Bédier, chivalry defined life itself: accepting the presidency of the Alliance Française in 1934, he wrote: “Life is chivalry.”91 For both Bédier and Barquissau, creole chivalry offered the most secure path from colonial subjectivity to national citizenship.

Barquissau’s rhetorical question “Will we say ‘Blood cannot lie’?” refers to a standard cliché of colonial culture: blood genealogy determines class identity and chivalric instinct. Bédier’s father, for example, concludes that his younger cousins, whom he did not know well, must be as honorable as their older brothers: “there are bloods that never lie.”92 Elite creoles thus habitually treat class as a racial trait: resistance to slavery targeted the “white class”; the Leblonds regularly refer to the characteristics of the “white class” (including its innate talent for colonization).93 Bédier’s father even judges marriages between social classes (poor European migrants and wealthy white creoles) with the disdain of mixed-race unions:

Our family has undergone contact with [such immigrants], unfortunately, and in the genealogies that I’ve given you, there are indeed one or two names of “gray coats”: they will be designated by the silence that I will keep about them and you will never consider them your relatives.94

For Adolphe, the offspring of class miscegenation do not belong to the family. He insists that these people not be confused with the “real” creoles whom they resemble outwardly: interclass mingling is more pernicious than traditional métissage precisely because it cannot be seen at a glance.

Bédier held a similarly strict view of creole chivalry as a blood inheritance. Eulogizing his brother Édouard in 1893, he noted the influence of his father’s “noble lessons,” but attributed Édouard’s honorable conduct almost exclusively to genealogy: “we had received in our blood such an old tradition of honor that he conformed himself to it without effort, by nature and almost without merit.”95 The highest accolade Bédier can envision rests on blood purity: “You have kept pure our old name.”96 Bédier’s notion of creole identity thus conflates the inheritance of class privilege with the ontology of race, a notion he later underscores when he defines himself as “a blond Bourbonnais with blue eyes, of a race protected from any mixing.”97 This comment appears in various forms in prominent metropolitan and colonial remembrances of Bédier’s life.98 The essence of Bédier’s colonial identity, both for him and for others, thus rests on a racialized chivalry that comes “naturally” to those of pure blood.

Bédier’s inherited chivalry joined fortuitously with republican medievalism when he received a copy of Roland as a school prize in 1878 at the age of fourteen.99 Indeed, he later dated his interest in the Middle Ages to this moment.100 That Bédier’s teachers found Roland the most fitting prize for their star pupil speaks volumes. At the time, the epic was just beginning its assent to dominance in the pedagogy of national literary history (see chapter 1). Bédier’s reading of Léon Gautier’s patriotic preface would have been conditioned by the specifically colonial patriotism that had already shaped his cultural environment. Bédier’s father, moreover, described the duels of his family’s ancestors as survivals of the medieval custom of “Judgment by God.”101 In the creole context, Roland —which ends with just such a combat—portrays the distant precursor of a family tradition of vigorously defended honor. A certain medievalism, in other words, shaped Bédier’s creole subjectivity, which in turn shaped his view of the Middle Ages.

For subsequent generations of Réunionnais students, Roland continued to give historical dimension to a living discourse of chivalric privilege. Already in 1894, Roland served as a recognizable model of ideal action and a resource for creole republicanism: a graduation speaker concluded that the colony’s young “pure bloods” needed great energy to face the challenges ahead; if even Roland tired of fighting and lay down on his bloody sword (despite the inspiration of his “blond” fiancée, Aude), creoles would need extraordinary strength to serve both the island and the nation.102 Thirty years later, just after Bédier had published his own edition of Roland, a speaker at another graduation evoked Réunion’s noble and “chivalric” history, only to conclude that in the end a knight must act alone, “sustained only by the shout of valiance: Mont Joie Saint-Denis.”103 This medieval battle cry echoes Roland’s “Munjoie.” It reminds young creoles of Roland’s heroic struggle—and of the hair of Saint Denis (France’s first saint) encased in his sword. “Saint-Denis” also conflates Roland’s chivalry with Réunion’s capital, itself an echo of the nation’s sacred center outside Paris (also referenced in Roland).104

Bédier himself served as a model of creole chivalry for later generations of Réunionnais. Already in 1911, students at the lycée learned that they should honor Bédier among their most illustrious compatriots.105 At the time of his election to the Académie Française in 1920, his reputation soared. For the next three years, graduation speakers at the lycée present Bédier, “medievalist and troubadour,” as a model of creole accomplishment, exhorting their young charges to make themselves worthy of his example.106 Hippolyte Foucque, for example, reminds students that Bédier once sat in their same seats and followed perfectly the recommended motto: “Travail, Patriotisme, Idéalisme” [Work, Patriotism, Idealism]; he concludes by admonishing graduates to show themselves worthy of the glory brought to the colony by Bédier: “Gesta Dei per Francos. Whether we translate “France, soldier of God’ or ‘France, soldier of the Idea,’ it’s the same thing. It’s the summary of our past, it’s the announcement of our future.”107 The Latin title refers to a chronicle of the First Crusade: the allusion takes up Bédier’s own understanding of the eleventh-century Crusades as the origins of France while underscoring the chivalric basis of creole identity. In remarkably condensed fashion, Foucque’s Gesta Dei per Francos enfolds creole action within prestigious historical, religious, and national paradigms.

As Réunionnais officials celebrated Bédier as a model of creole chivalry, Bédier himself claimed the chivalric models of his own ancestors as the primary inspiration of his medieval studies. In a letter to friends on the island, he wrote:

I love these old creoles, their taste for risk and adventure, the way in which they pass from lethargy to energy, their pride, the refined sense of honor that they have, their chivalry. I have often asked them for guidance. And if I have become an historian of the France of yesteryear, it is because I tasted their great sense of French tradition, of French order, their intoxicated love of the motherland. It is to their image that I have above all tried to conform my life.108

Explicitly naming the creole ideals illustrated in his father’s book, Bédier anchors his personal and scholarly life in a medieval culture that survives uniquely on Bourbon. He strives to extend this prestigious tradition into the national future—living a “perfect imitation” of chivalric patriotism through medieval studies. In this same letter, he attributes his compatriots’ appreciation of his achievements more to his lineage than to himself:

I understand that it is not only to me, not even principally to me, that these signs of appreciation are addressed, but to the name that I carry, to my father and my mother, to the one who was like “my more than father” Du Tertre, to my brother Édouard, who served the colony well, and to the double lineage of people of honor from whom I descend.109

Insisting on the collective reputation of the name Bédier, Bédier casts Bourbonnais admiration for his career as an expression of genealogical approval and aristocratic memory [en souvenir et en l’honneur de nos anciens]. Moreover, Bédier presents his own understanding of this fact as proof that he himself remains faithful to traditional creole values despite having left the island thirty-three years ago. Creole chivalry demands, in other words, not only honorable conduct and pure blood, but durable memory.

The tenets of creole chivalry embraced by Bédier, his father, and other compatriots remained alive in later generations, articulated most stridently by the Leblonds. In their energetic defenses of traditional creole culture into the 1950s, they embraced the Middle Ages as foundational to the “genius” of French colonialism.110 They discerned the beginnings of France’s colonial imaginary in the Middle Ages: the Merovingians (the dynasty of the fifth to eighth centuries) stood for the “primitive” culture that preceded the beginnings of national glories with eleventh-century colonialism.111 They characterized both colonialism and republicanism as essentially chivalric endeavors based on egalitarian humanism.112 When they conceived a museum for Réunion in 1911, they arranged for it to include gothic statuary (an expression of the French “soul”); they attributed the creole “predisposition” for love and poetry to the culture of the creole salon—“which recalls more than anything else the love court of the Middle Ages.”113 For the Leblonds, creole culture derived almost directly from an idealized Middle Ages—as did the best of French national culture.

The Leblonds’ promotion of chivalry as the answer to the nation’s ills in the 1940s reveals the deeply racialist basis of chivalric thinking among traditional creoles (chillingly untouched by the horrors of Nazi racism). Marius begins his 1941 Redressement by invoking Vercingétorix (emblem of Celtic genius), Saint Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc; he concludes with a call for a “Return to Chivalry.”114 Four years later in La paix française, his discourse remains exactly the same:

Chivalry in humanism, chivalry in patriotism, chivalry in literature and art, chivalry in friendship, chivalry in fertile love, chivalry in all gestures and thoughts. It is chivalry that will suppress the childish antinomy between aristocracy and democracy. The renaissance of Chivalry is imperative to the grand opera of French culture, next to which [Wagner’s] Walkyrie are flashes of prehistoric times.115

In Marius’s imagination, a national practice of chivalry will consign Germany to premedieval primitivism relative to France’s shining march toward equality and civilization. Elsewhere, Marius extols the genius of French colonialism (beginning with the Crusades) alongside the superiority of the “white race” and the beatific tradition of French chivalry; he continues to implicate Bédier in the racial defense of empire.116 A few years later in his bid for election to the Académie Française, he described his own life’s work as “Action by every means in favor of an enthusiastic and chivalric patriotism.”117 Not surprisingly, the epic emerges as the preferred genre of Marius’s project for national restoration.118 By this time, though, creole chivalry had lost its aristocratic innocence: Marius had recommended cooperation with Pétain during the Nazi occupation, and collaborators had tainted chivalry with the period’s darkest crimes.119

The Leblonds epitomize, in extreme form, the racialism that permeates colonial society. From the island’s earliest settlement, multiple migrations have sustained a large mixed-race population. Métissage, or “blood politics,”120 conditions racial identity for all Réunionnais, regardless of epidermal aspect. Indeed, Bédier’s own colonial origins became visible in Paris only through contact with métissage:

Joseph Bédier, who was born on Réunion, like so many other writers, received often at his home persons of more or less dark color, natives of the island formerly called Bourbon. His doorkeeper . . . was so well accustomed to these visits that she indicated the floor of the professor before she was even asked.121

For this anonymous newspaper columnist, the “more or less dark color” of Bédier’s visitors reveals his own formation in colonial society (white creoles, by contrast, might have had to give their names before being admitted into the building). Bédier only appears as a “white creole,” in other words, through his associations with islanders who bear visible traces of non-European ancestry.

Two competing discourses define the racial parameters of “creole” identity. On the one hand, some claim that métissage touches everyone, even those who appear “white.” The Martinican métis activist Cyrille Bissette formulated this idea succinctly, commenting on the 1836–37 trial of Bourbonnais métis accused of inciting slave rebellion:

With the exception of an extremely small number of European families, or just about, everyone who lives on Bourbon and who claims a white origin descends by their maternal line from Malagasy who are perfectly copper or from Indians who are perfectly black. Whites on Bourbon Island are therefore mixed, mixed-bloods, “béqués,” creamed coffee, as they are called in the creole language of the Antilles.122

Bissette accuses the island’s “so-called” whites of seeking to “purify” their own mixed blood by expelling other métis inhabitants.123 Historically, colonial legal systems had fostered the integration of métis into “white” society. When slavery was established in 1723, the children of Franco–Indian and Franco–Malagasy unions were classified as “white.” A century later, the métis descendents of a liberated slave married into white families.124 Travelers in the period describe “rainbow families,” with each generation lighter than the one before.125 Leconte de Lisle’s short story “Sacatove” (1846) shows white society welcoming the métis child of a woman who returns to her family after an affair: “no one said that her firstborn had skin less white than hers.”126 This ironic comment reveals the hypocrisies of colonial society, the fragility of claims to purity, and the ease with which métissage could enter into “pure” genealogies.

Even Bédier had to admit that his father’s genealogy named none of the mothers in his maternal line before 1830127—in other words, none between his grandmother and the first Bédier migrant. If Adolphe Bédier does not name those who intermarried with lower-class whites, could he have left interracial family members in true silence? So believe some contemporary Bédiers, who can embrace universal métissage as comfortably as Bissette: unprompted, Adrien Bédier offered this account of the family genealogy: “of course there are mixed-race relatives. Racist ancestors made them disappear. . . . The blue eyes skipped a generation in my family.”128 Here, the idea of universal métissage shifts from insurrectionary anathema to genealogical fact, consigning racism to the past even while leaving Francocentrism intact (in the same moment, Adrien Bédier criticized creolophone activists for erasing signs of French from the spelling conventions of Creole).

During Joseph Bédier’s lifetime, the idea of universal métissage remained a proscribed “myth” attributed to outsiders and the visibly métis. White creoles, for their part, offered an alternate mythology of pure European genealogy for the (visibly) white elite. In the 1920s, Barquissau directly challenged the idea of a foundational métissage: “it’s not a bad idea to destroy a legend that some travelers have accredited frivolously, that of the métissage at the origin of the island’s colonization.”129 Marshalling “statistical” evidence, he argued that the “legend” spread from an eighteenth-century métis magistrate (government records, though, typically identify status—immigrants versus free laborers—rather than race).130 The most vocal proponents of creole purity were the Leblonds, who praised Barquissau’s account effusively: they wrote vividly about the social dangers posed by métis citizens, feared that the white race would disappear from the island, and popularized their ideas in novels like Le Miracle de la Race, épopée de la race blanche.131

To counter métissage, the Leblonds identified Celtic heritage as the dominant influence on creole culture.132 They encapsulated this ideological program in their pseudonym—“the Aryan Blond.”133 For them, “our ancestors the Gauls” accurately expressed the ideal of French genealogical nationalism. They addressed their first magazine, La Grande France, to the citizens of “ancient Gaul,” an idea they later made the foundation for a future United States of Europe.134 They went on to pen an immense four-volume Breton novel, Les martyrs de la République (1926–28) and a two-volume history of Vercingétorix (1937–38) (a work of Celtic revisionism that posits that the Gauls would have attained an even higher level of civilization if the Romans had not invaded).135 They even made Jeanne d’Arc a Celt.136 They considered Réunion itself “entirely Celtic,” and thus the privileged heir to these ancient “French” traditions: Réunion preserved Breton legends and songs more faithfully then Brittany itself; the Breton language provided the basis for Creole.137

While insisting on the superiority of the Celtic, the Leblonds also idealized the benefits of a multiracial society. Their belief in the redemptive value of interracial contact serves not so much to promote the “inferior” races but to promote Réunion itself (ruled by white creoles) to neglectful metropolitan decision makers. In novels like Zézère, amours de Blancs et de Noirs, they idealize métissage in order to enhance the island’s unique service to France.138 According to them, Réunionnais, unlike other imperial subjects, had fully internalized the “color-blind” ideals of republican fraternalism. To illustrate this idea, Marius Leblond tells a story about Bédier: Bédier and Marius’s uncle Lionel Poitier considered a fellow student from the Caribbean their equal and occasionally shared their meals with him. “They were horrified to see him throw the bones of his cutlet over his shoulder onto the floor; the mahogany polish of his cheeks had nothing to do with it.”139 The point, for Marius, is that a lack of education, rather than skin color, made the man an uncivilized dining companion. The Leblonds’ support for multiracialism, however, serves white superiority. The Miracle de la race, after all, is that a young man overcomes the disadvantages of his education alongside children of color to engage in the quintessential activity of his white ancestors—colonization (of Madagascar, in this case). And the Leblonds’ earlier novels scrupulously separate groups according to fixed racial stereotypes.140 The Leblonds seemingly contradictory approach to race (criticize métissage, promote racial equality, maintain social segregation)141 ultimately supports a unified program of white privilege.

Consonant with the Leblonds’ racial reasoning, Bédier insists pointedly on his own purely Celtic heritage. He purportedly took great pride in his blue eyes and blond hair—physiological proof that his blood had remained pure and his family without “misalliance.” Gustave Cohen reports that Bédier once confided: “You don’t know, my friend, what it is to be a blond Bourbonnais with blue eyes. It’s the purity index of a race that, in distant lands, preserved itself from all mixing.”142 Cohen later revised his description of Bédier’s words, writing that blond hair and blue eyes signify “continuous tradition” and “purity of race, without any misalliance.”143 Bédier’s first words in all three of Cohen’s accounts, however, refer not to race but to the impossibility of proper interpretation: “you don’t know” [vous ne savez pas]. By insisting that metropolitans cannot fathom the meaning of his appearance, Bédier indicates that white creoles lose their racial identity when they migrate to the metropole. Indeed, Bédier’s physiognomy means so little in Paris that in one instance Cohen asserts that he looks more Norman than Breton (dismissing Bédier’s own ethnic claims).144 If on Bourbon “white” epidermal coloring purported to signal a long history of racial privilege, it ceased to mean much of anything among the crowds of other white faces in Paris. Bédier endeavors to recover the “shock value” of his appearance in a 1923 interview: “I am a Breton from Bourbon Island—this surprises you? It’s nonetheless a true story.”145 By attributing “surprise” to his interlocutor, Bédier recovers the meaning his blue eyes should have.

In the metropole, white creoles risked trading colonial prestige for provincial marginalization. Unless they succeeded in “passing” directly into the metropolitan elite through perfect linguistic and cultural performance, they were likely to be judged “inferior.” To succeed, they needed to banish the “corrupting” and “enslaving” effects of Creole.146 And any trace of “accent” in French could attract the same denigration as provincial dialects (newly stigmatized in a republican education system that strove for national uniformity).147 Even today, Réunionnais accents attract a “colonial” stigma considered even lower than the “provincial.”148 Cognizant of this kind of prejudice, islanders declared their differences from, and superiority over, rural metropolitans.149 Evidence of metropolitan bias against white creoles appears revealingly in the brief appreciation of Leconte de Lisle published by Baudelaire in 1861: asking himself why creoles had generally not contributed anything significant to literature, he contrasts Leconte de Lisle’s virile originality with a portrait of “typical” creoles—provincial, effeminate, and naturally imitative, “a faculty they share incidentally with blacks.”150 White creole migrants to Paris thus entered a society more likely to classify them as provincial “savages” than as chivalric elites—that is, one more likely to wield the Middle Ages against them rather than for them.

Bédier actually offers a rather detailed picture of “what it means” to be white on Réunion. He recounts several childhood memories in a letter to a compatriot, Georges Mareschal de Bièvre (who had just published a pamphlet on Bourbon’s Revolutionary history):

I have just read with charm and emotion your refined study of Bourbon in the time of slavery. It brought back many memories: in my time, the customs had hardly changed. I see again clearly, among the dear figures of my childhood, an old freeman, Richard, who stayed with the household, and my old nanny, Olympe, who had been, as a slave, my father’s nurse. And a certain page of your study reminded me of a cafrine [black woman] with polished teeth, Rita, who, after twenty years of domestic service in our house, received on the same day, during an illness, the sacraments of baptism, penitence, the Eucharist, marriage, and Last Rites.151

Bédier’s images of domestic life testify to intimate interracial relations—and to the minimal changes in household structures thirty years after the abolition of slavery. Bédier, in the early twentieth century, remains essentially a product of slave society. Racial identities determined roles within the household, such that a creole youth knew himself every day as a racialized actor. “What it is,” then, to be a blond creole is to refute the myth of universal métissage. Indeed, according to one commentator, Bédier “revolted instinctively” and with “repugnance” against those who had “fallen out of line” [forligné]; they in turn treated him with the “ancestral humility” due to the “son of the masters.”152 Others also insist on Bédier’s racial purity—“a colonial of pure French race,” “without a shadow of métissage.”153 Bédier himself repeatedly expresses longing to return to the colonial place where racial continuity was meaningful in ways that could never be known in the metropole. On Réunion, chivalry resided in the consonance between skin color and noble action; there, the masters of slaves redeemed colonial society through the ideals of the medieval aristocracy.

Creole Exile

Bédier came to his understanding of race through multiple migrations. Born in Paris, he lived within a diaspora community that maintained the ideals of creole chivalry (as his father’s book attests). Colonial culture thus influenced his racial and linguistic consciousness even before his widowed mother moved her children to Saint-Denis in 1870 (just months before the Prussian invasion). Bédier then experienced, at age six, both a rupture and return: rupture with the urban metropole and return to origins that had remained palpable if physically distant. This “return,” however, would have been saturated with the unfamiliar—from tropical flora to architecture to currency (the roupie circulated as legal tender).154 Most importantly, Bédier soon felt the full force of “what it is” to be a blond creole: living as a privileged minority in colonial society, he experienced the birth of the “whiteness” that he later identified so clearly as the basis of his identity. Race and exile both condition his subsequent articulation of “home” as a double dislocation and double belonging—from and to the metropole, from and to the colony. As Bédier moves from Paris to Saint-Denis to Paris to Saint-Denis and finally permanently to Paris, he casts himself as a homeless creole on a permanent quest for national belonging. This sense of roving exile underlies many of his ideas about memory and history in the Middle Ages. Simultaneously exile, migrant, and native wherever he goes, Bédier uses medievalism to resolve these fragments into a homogenous vision of national history.

Bédier returned to Paris for the first time in 1881, as a postbaccalaureate student. In this migration, he both lost and found his homeland—resettling in a city he must have remembered to some degree and losing the place he knew most intimately. Even in Paris, though, Bédier’s community remained creole, through an extended network of family connections.155 Bédier and his brother found a second home with De Mahy, their cousin the deputy. From 1883 to 1891, Bédier lived frequently with De Mahy, both in Paris and in the Touraine at De Mahy’s “château”; through De Mahy, Bédier met his wife, Eugénie Bizarelli, daughter of a senator.156 Bédier sought De Mahy’s counsel for all major decisions, from his personal life to his career; they remained in frequent contact until De Mahy’s death in 1906.157 Throughout his life, Bédier continued to cultivate connections with his fellow “exiles” in Paris, and with his family and friends on Réunion.158 Even while teaching in Fribourg, Switzerland, he frequented Réunionnais circles.159 Years later, he reportedly attended faithfully the monthly lunch of the “Bichique-Club” in Paris (organized by Roland Garros’s father), and joined a committee to erect a memorial to Roland Garros in Saint-Denis.160 When, in 1930, the Maurician poet Robert Edward Hart offered Bédier a book with an elaborate personal dedication, Bédier asked him to write simply, “To Joseph Bédier, old creole.”161 At the time of his death, a majority of his obituaries recognized his creole origins; his compatriots judged him among the most famous of creoles of the day.162 This reputation, along with Bédier’s own comments, leave no doubt as to his enduring commitment to creole identity.

Bédier’s youthful letters to his close friend Joseph Texte express the various forms of alienation wrought by Bédier’s identification with the creole diaspora. For starters, layers of creole subjectivity traverse Bédier’s nickname, “Makokote.” The term refers both to a baby chick (cocotte) and a young woman of questionable morals.163 “Makokote” thus both infantilizes and feminizes, objectifying Bédier as belonging to someone else (“my chick”). The substitution for “k” for “c,” moreover, “creolizes” the nickname, inviting association with the term makot—something old, broken or dirty (as in “Si po koz in fransé makot, mié vo anvoiy an kréol” [If you speak broken French, it’s better to speak Creole]).164 Bédier illustrates the confrontation of his own creole identity with philology through a metrical analysis of the nickname:

Ma”. . .

Kókótt!

∪

—́

(anacrous

cf.; Müller)

Referring to Lucian Müller’s treatise on Latin metrics (which defines anacrusis as a “monosyllabic prelude” to a verse),165 this formula weds colonial experience to Bédier’s scholarly present. Underscoring the “weakness” of the personal (unaccented “Ma”), Bédier’s diagram insinuates the problem of creole selfhood into the facts of philological science. Bédier amplifies the alienation encoded in the nickname when he gives himself the title “Sir Makokote”166—a gesture both ennobling (in line with creole chivalry) and distancing (in a foreign language). In Bédier’s letters, “Makokote” stands for the initial confusions of the migrant self.167

Bédier’s double alienation, from both colony and metropole, surfaces dramatically in his reflections on his visit back to Bourbon in 1887. From the beginning, he envisions this trip as an expiation of the past that will enable him to work unencumbered:

I have decided to sacrifice everything to this life of the mind. I foresee the possibility of earning enough money this year . . . to go spend two months on Bourbon at the end of the year. I will see my parents again, for the last time in my life. After that, I will work at my pleasure.168

While Bédier’s failure to visit Réunion in later years may seem odd, given his attachment and many trips elsewhere,169 he clearly considered severance from the island a prerequisite to medieval scholarship. At this point, his commitment to intellectual pursuits requires a denial of the self: “Nothing is mine anymore”; he writes later of a “sacrifice of the heart.”170 He quite consciously intends, then, to substitute his connection to the distant place with a new one to a distant time. A year later, he declares definitively “Makokote is a pedant.”171 However, the fusion of time and place that formed a creole medievalist was gradual. And Bourbon relentlessly shadowed Bédier’s efforts to live with the Middle Ages.

Bédier’s sense of sacrifice was partly conditioned by his brother’s reverse sacrifice three years earlier. Seemingly destined for a brilliant scientific career, Édouard instead returned to Bourbon to teach in the lycée. Bédier notes that Édouard did not question whether it was legitimate to forgo his scientific research, “as if he had made the sacrifice of his own self.”172 Édouard’s decision to return, in other words, is as much a sacrifice as Bédier’s decision not to. According to Bédier, Édouard felt not only indebted to the colony for funding his studies in Paris, but also “he felt himself invincibly drawn to our little country to which we are attached by bonds so numerous, so old and so hardy, and that no creole ever manages [parvenir] to forget.”173 Bédier’s phrasing suggests that diaspora creoles aspire to forget but cannot. For the educated creole, as Bédier and his compatriots always insist, neither France nor Bourbon offers a peaceful resolution to the fractures of creole subjectivity.

Despite the vague sense of doom that hangs over Bédier’s decision to visit Bourbon in 1887, he anticipates the trip with unconditional joy: “What a trip! My God! What a trip!” He describes himself as a vagabond, or pilgrim, preparing to “tie up [his] knapsack”; next to him, Voltaire’s optimistic Candide is nothing but an “embroiderer of blackness.”174 Bédier writes to Texte again with the “joy” of anticipation, and again from on board the ship.175 He concludes a second shipboard letter, in which he describes the Suez Canal, with: “Here at last the so-desired Indian Ocean.”176 With the prospect of home, Bédier focuses entirely on the Indian Ocean, turned into object of universal desire [le tant desiré]. Between the lines of Bédier’s later claim to excellent eyesight, one can read the anxious gaze of this homecoming: “in his youth, when he went to Bourbon island, he spied land before the lookout.”177 With a possessive, joyful view of the tropical horizon, Bédier concludes six homesick years. The journey to Bourbon, however, has already revealed the degree to which he sees with metropolitan eyes: traveling through the Suez Canal, he gives himself “Parisian lips” and compares the experiences to a day trip along the Seine.178

Bédier’s activities and experiences during his two-month visit remain largely unknown. After arriving on August 15, he could have attended the annual meeting of the alumni of his lycée on the 28th; he refers later to happy family gatherings.179 The local press for this period, however, provides a revealing glimpse of life in Saint-Denis. Newspapers testify to a general sense of crisis: the pending application of a new military service law, the suspension of direct passenger service to Marseille (the French Australia line, on which Bédier traveled, would no longer stop at Bourbon), the depletion of funds supporting students (such as Bédier) studying in France, unfavorable tariffs for trade with the metropole, and violence in Madagascar.180 With De Mahy serving as deputy and Du Tertre as vice president of the Conseil Général and member of the Commission Coloniale, these policy issues were something of family affair. Indeed, Bédier had ties of “either affection or blood” to almost every family on the island,181 heightening his sensitivity to local affairs and the poignancy of his “sacrifice.”

Two months after returning from Bourbon, Bédier’s letters evidence deep psychological pain: he writes of “a fairly painful state of crisis”; describing his conflicting homesick emotions, he characterizes life on Bourbon as “simultaneous joy and pain.”182 Haunted by “dark thoughts” and still in pain [douleureux], Bédier regrets the trip altogether:

I regret this trip to Bourbon; I regret rather having come back from there. In any case, these are trials that one doesn’t renew. For the moment, I would like to be able to chase away all these memories. Happy are those who can return among their painful memories without finding some humiliation or some shame—I have left so much on Bourbon! and for forever—and to do what?—study romance languages [romaniser], learn German, etc.? Who will deliver me from this feeling of “what’s the use”?183

Bédier’s feelings are divided here: he regrets going as well as returning. He decides, again, never to return and to forget. In this moment, his homesickness almost derails his career at its inception. And what are the unnamed humiliation and shame? In any case, “romaniser” will become the lifelong activity that takes the place of forgetting: “To forget! That is the desire—but for that I will need a goal.” Tiring of analyzing himself, he concludes: “It’s just that I’ve left so many things on Bourbon! I’m an idiot to have returned. Well, here I am. I will work then.” “Return” has now become ambiguous, expressing Bédier’s split sense of place: should he never have returned to Bourbon, or to Europe? “Work” takes the place that “forgetting” never can—healing the rupture of migration. Since the only solutions could never have taken place (never to have left Paris, never to have left Bourbon), “work” will be a constant labor of mourning that betrays a permanent homesickness (shortly afterwards he calls it “consoling”).184 This labor entails willful blindness: “I will be like a man who becomes blind.” By the end of this letter, the people of Bédier’s insular past survive only as ghosts, figments who wander through his imagination [je fais marcher, aller, venir ceux de Bourbon].185 The Middle Ages take the place of colonial memory as Bédier seeks a literally postcolonial life.186 For him, the medieval promises to resolve the exilic condition shared by all creoles: “divided between the large and the small homeland [la grande et la petite patrie], whether they opt for one or the other, their life always depends on exile.”187 Bédier’s nearly continuous work on the topic of origins, and especially on Roland, shows that the ruptures of migration cannot be forgotten.

Meanwhile, still in December 1887, Bédier’s agony over “becoming medieval” continues unabated. Writing to Gaston Paris, he describes his apartment in Halle as a kind of laboratory for memory work: the décor includes a copy of an engraving by Dürer (1471–1528), a painting by Holbein (1497–1543), a copy of a Rembrandt (1606–69), and “some strange ferns from Bourbon Island.”188 This collection of memorabilia, which Bédier considers “a great luxury,” condenses multilayered memories. The ferns keep Bourbon literally close at hand; they represent the essence of the tropics (public displays of Réunionnais identity in Paris always included ferns).189 The artists, none of them French, represent “universal” European culture outside the orbit of the particularities of France (metropolitan or colonial). This “universal,” however, derives partly from nineteenth-century French romantics, who readily adopted Dürer as an artistic compatriot—a fellow genius suffering at the gates of modernity.190 Late romantics actually associated Dürer with the medieval: Huysmans’s famous “medieval” study, described in 1891, also contained copies of Dürer and Rembrandt.191 Bédier and his student friends clearly absorbed this popular ethos. Texte, for example, had written enthusiastically in 1886 of his own encounter with Dürer and Holbein in Bâle; Bédier had the chance to visit Dürer originals in Nuremberg in July 1888, writing of his great appreciation.192

The significance of Bédier’s decorating choices may be taken further if the Dürer print, as his heirs remember, was Melencolia (Figure 31).193 Later comments by Bédier strengthen the Melencolia hypothesis: reviewing Mâle’s L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen Age, Bédier praised the book’s style by stating that it resembled Michelet’s commentary on Melencolia.194 Melancholy accurately characterizes the homesick ethos of the creole dias pora.195 Dürer’s famous image represents an allegory of “sad science,” a wan figure who finds no cheer in the calculus of wisdom. For Michelet, Dürer illustrates a critical stance on truth—one that Bédier also adopted. Michelet observes that everything in Melencolia is “powerfully true” and also sad: the “angel of science” is “captive of the burden of science.”196 Scholarly duty also weighed on Bédier, as his letters testify. Bédier’s compatriots the Leblonds, by contrast, considered Melencolia “a victorious archangel of light” who meditates not on ruins but on “the continuity of his construction.”197 Bédier’s personal and scholarly devotion to continuity brings together these two assessments of Melencolia; the image symbolizes his conflicted aspirations to enter the citadel of national belonging. While there is something banal in finding “reflections” of Bédier’s mental state on his apartment walls, he apparently chose the prints to reflect his state of mind.

Home and sadness remain at the heart of Bédier’s thoughts as he contemplates his future employment options. He wonders why he would accept a menial teaching post in a provincial lycée when he could have had a similar one on Bourbon without living “far from my family, perpetually heimatlos [homeless].”198 Here, Bédier resists following his brother back to Saint-Denis, fulfilling while also regretting his promise to “sacrifice” himself to scholarship. The profound loss of “home” brought by this decision resounds in the intrusion of the “foreign” word, heimatlos: Bédier writes as one newly “at home” in German, but also forever severed from familiar speech. The German word itself expresses the double dislocation of exile: just as unheimlich can refer to both the familiar and the unfamiliar,199 heimatlos includes both loss and recovery. The pain of heimatlos replaces here the optimisms of Gemüthlichkeit [friendly hominess] that Bédier claimed to share with the Germans two months earlier.200 In both cases, the German words signal a new line of fracture in Bédier’s sense of identity. In Germany, then, he seeks the artifice of settled comfort in an apartment decorated with tropical ferns and German artists. This comfort rests on a denial of home that enables entry into medieval France—and into a new form of national belonging.

Bédier struggled persistently with desires to forget. Even late in life, he refers to his regrets and the enduring pain of “return”:

I grew up, I spent my whole adolescence in one of our oldest colonies . . . I came back toward the soil of the motherland and I rooted myself anew, but I always/still [toujours] remain faithful to my distant island, and I always/still miss it.201

Bédier emphasizes the ongoing process of “becoming French” by saying that he came “toward” France. And even as he pens these lines, he writes himself closer to the colony and the colony closer to France: the autograph copy of this speech shows the addition of “my whole lineage” (reinforcing his long attachment to the island), the replacement of “colonies” with “our colonies,” and the replacement of “Europe” with “motherland.” These revisions intensify the bonds between France and Bourbon while underscoring Bédier’s divided loyalties. As he sought to suture displacement through a strategic forgetting, he repeatedly and even obsessively invested his desires for unified subjectivity in medievalism (the time of the oldest colonies). Of course, most migrants maintain multiple affiliations. Bédier’s particular longing for colonial healing, however, underwrites a narrative of national history that had substantial political and academic influence.

As Bédier developed his scholarship, he returned consistently to his colonial memories (see chapter 4). His youthful desire for forgetting turned into a lifelong meditation on memory. As his reputation soared, he made Bourbon integral to his public persona. Creoles on Bourbon and around the world, for example, celebrated his election to the Académie Française as the latest jewel in the island’s crown of achievements.202 In his formal acceptance speech, Bédier identified Bourbon as a primary inspiration:

And I hear cherished distant voices: they come to me from my country, noble among all the noble lands of sweet France, my little island Bourbon, incessantly stretched toward the motherland, and so taken with love for her that she [the island] intoxicates all of her children with this love.203

The voices of Bourbon, reaching Bédier’s ears as if by magic, speak to the transcendent nature of the creole community. Claiming the island’s superiority in the language of Roland (“sweet France”), Bédier turns Bourbon into the source of a patriotic nationalism that originates in the Middle Ages.

Bédier elaborated on the creole origins of his medievalism to his compatriots, who organized their own celebration of his election. After describing how he read Roland as a boy, he declared his enduring attachment to Bourbon:

I keep between the pages of an old book a fern leaf of gold picked in a ravine of Cilaos . . . a droplet of Bourbon’s sun is enclosed in it. Forty years have passed, the golden dust has not tarnished, neither has my heart.204

The dried fern symbolizes Bédier’s untarnished heart—arrested in time between the leaves of “old books.” “Transplanted” and “uprooted,” the exiled creole still basks in the tropical sun of colonial memory. At this same celebration, Bédier received an ornate desk made of wood from Bourbon and decorated with scenes from both the island and Tristan et Iseut.205 At this desk, creole medievalism became for Bédier a daily practice of literal and figural return. Thanking those who made the desk possible, Bédier solidified these connections by claiming greater fluency in Creole than in French.206 As part of an extended claim that a faithful créolité generated his scholarly accomplishments, Bédier’s embrace of Creole signifies the intimate cohabitation of the creole and the medieval at the center of his historical epistemology.

Bédier reflected again on creole identity when his compatriot Lacaze joined him at the Académie in 1937:

It is our destiny to swarm [essaimer] and to run afar after various fortunes; but magnetic waves traverse lands and seas and bind us each to the others with the bonds of a mysterious telepathy.207

Bédier defines here an expansionist creole community that transcends geographical delimitations. Despite migration, the creole bees who have “swarmed” throughout the empire maintain continuous contact with the mother colony through “magnetic waves.”208 “Swarming” aligns Bédier with a colonialist créolité of the sort promoted by De Mahy, Barquissau, the Leblonds, and Lacaze himself—for young bees swarm specifically to establish new colonies. Napoleon captured this connotation when he adopted the Merovingian bee (instead of the Carolingian fleur-de-lis) for his imperial iconography.209 Bédier himself had long defined France’s historical greatness on the basis of its talent for “swarming” [essaimage]: for him, the nation began in the eleventh century when the French “swarmed” for the first time and established colonies throughout Europe and overseas (see chapter 2). The Leblonds also took up the metaphor, referring to creoles’ instrumental role in the “spread” [essaimer] of French civilization.210 In Bédier’s hands, the metaphor supports the “magnetic waves” that bind a secure creole community that knows no boundaries. Creole bonds depend not on colonial territory but on sentiment (much like the theories of national identity that favored emotion over territory after 1870 [chapter 1]). Bédier thus returned to Bourbon frequently on the waves of creole telepathy, even as he remained permanently in France.

The conclusion of Bédier’s Lacaze speech further deterritorializes, and exalts, creole identity. On the one hand, Bédier applauds the Académie Française because it has elected five Bourbonnais in less than a century and a half—“more Bourbonnais than natives of any of our departments in three centuries.”211 On the other hand, he ties Bourbon’s distinct traditions to France:

Following Lacaze’s example, may we—those like me who will never again see the cherished shores, and you the young people who hope to see them again—maintain in their original integrity, for the service of France, the traditions of our homeland, and may those who have remained there hear our friendly voices, our nostalgic voices, and receive the promises of firm and tender fidelity addressed to our mother island by her children who have left her and who still love her.212

Bédier sends back feelings of faith and belonging, just as he did the Roland that he republished this same year. He calls for the maintenance of the Bourbonnais in France, and for voices from France to find their way “telepathically” to the colony. The island itself matters little, since its traditions exist elsewhere; at the same time, it remains a vital geographical and genealogical origin. The traditions themselves perpetuate “Old France” even when France “herself” has forgotten. Lacaze’s own speech affirms this principle: Bourbon is “true France, more France than the one our ancestors left.”213 Some years earlier, Bédier made the same point in relation to his childhood memories:

All of my childhood impressions, all of my earliest sensations remain impregnated with memories, landscapes, horizons from over there . . . I have remained a Creole at heart, and never think without nostalgia of this land where remain, among 20,000 whites today, so many of our old ways, so many of our lovely customs from long ago, behind the coral reefs.214

Bédier racializes the “old customs” by limiting them to the island’s white population (a race of chivalric avatars). At the same time, he erases any trace of memory before migration: this autobiography begins on Bourbon, rather than in Paris. It underscores creole culture’s direct connections to national origins.

Creoles’ claims to preserve “Old France” depend ultimately on their claims to genealogical purity, as the discourse of racialized chivalry attests. The genealogies granted the most prestige derive—like Bédier’s—from Brittany. Not surprisingly, then, Bédier’s Académie election elicited considerable commentary on his Breton ancestry as metropolitan observers sought to locate his “creole” history within a national context. Receiving Bédier before the Académie, Barthou recognized him as exemplary of the “tenacity and imagination” of the Breton race (14). Charles Le Goffic went further, arguing that Brittany alone explained Bédier’s formation: his vocation as a medievalist derived from the proximity of Ménézouarn (the location of the Bédier ancestral lands) to Brocéliande (the famous forest of medieval Arthurian romance). Le Goffic, moreover, chastised Bédier for not mentioning Brittany in his acceptance speech, when he had just a few days before used his full Breton name “for the first time” on a card left for Le Goffic, “Joseph Bédier de Ménézouarn.”215 Meanwhile, the art critic Georges Grappe developed an extensive portrait of Bédier le Breton, comparing the family’s colonial itinerary to that of Marie de France’s Eliduc, who in exile “wisely maintained their robust Amorican roots.” Like Le Goffic, Grappe downplays the effects of the “African soil,” insisting instead that Bédier received before birth all the gifts that an “exotic fairy” could have bestowed after birth: “imagination, artistic sensibility, light irony, a taste for dreams and broad horizons are Celtic virtues that his heredity transmitted to him, along with blond hair and blue eyes.” For Grappe, Bédier’s intellectual heritage is not Parny and Leconte de Lisle but the Bretons Chateaubriand and Renan: “this Frenchman from Amorica is a Bretonizing Breton.” Atavistic Celticism also explains Bédier’s gravitation toward medieval studies.216 Twenty years later Jérôme Tharaud eulogized Bédier at the Académie in similar terms, emphasizing the primacy of the Celtic and the negligible impact of the colonial on both Bédier and France.217 While for metropolitans Bédier’s Breton origins protected his national identity from tropical contamination, for creoles the survival of pure Bretons defined Bourbon’s prestige. According to Bourbon’s elites, creole culture could generate all on its own the salient qualities of a “Bretonizing Breton.”

In the fully Francocentric view of elite creoles, the “grande patrie” was as much their homeland as the “petite patrie” of Bourbon. For Bédier, Paris comes both before and after Bourbon—at once home and exile, origin and destination (in Saint-Denis, he lived just steps from the Rue de Paris). He embraced Paris as “home” by making it a measure of cultural value, whether assessing his own career, judging the accents of his students, or working on the dictionary of the Adadémie Française.218 Bédier’s identification with the metropole comes across vividly in his praise of Paris during the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Collège de France in 1931.219 Between the lines of Bédier’s address to the city, though, one can also read a veiled memory of creole migration:

Paris, it’s an air one breathes, so vivifying that the man who finds himself suddenly plunged into it, whatever his profession, feels, with joy, the rhythm of his life accelerate. Paris, it’s for everyone the school of all modesty, for no one can travel the streets who doesn’t recognize himself the contemporary of all that has been grand in our country and who doesn’t learn in this same way to measure his own smallness. But, more particularly, for the man of the library or the laboratory, Paris, it’s the salutary invitation to tear himself away from himself and from the pride of his ivory tower in order to enrich, not his technical specialty, but his soul, in order to escape precisely from the peril of being only a specialist, therefore half a scholar. Paris, it’s the entrance into contact with all the elevated ways of understanding life.220

Parisian air is an omnipresence that enters the body, transforming everyone, regardless of race or nationality. Plunged into this air in 1881, Bédier feels an acceleration that disrupts his habitual rhythms. In the same breath, he enters a wrinkle in time that imposes a double-warping of perspective: he sees the immensity of the past as his contemporary, and equal, at the same time that he observes his own relative smallness in the middle of the metropolitan street. In this vertiginous space, various monuments and buildings place the colonial and the medieval in close proximity.221 Paris thus invites Bédier to leave specialization behind (be it scholarly or colonial) and embrace a transcendental understanding of national life. Unlike the “magnetic waves” of creole telepathy, which reach everywhere but affect only creoles, the air affects everyone in a delimited space regardless of origin. In this contrast of metaphors, Bédier captures the split between the colonial particularities of race and region and the universalizing ideals of the Republic—a split whose two sides condition his national identity.

Bédier’s geography of national belonging ultimately includes not only Paris, Bourbon, and Brittany, but also the Dauphiné—the region of his wife’s family (he is buried in her village, Le-Grand-Serre, near Valence). At the time of his election to the Académie, Bédier identified the Dauphiné— not Paris, where he actually lived—as his continental home.222 He thus adopts the path to national belonging consecrated by Barrès and others—deep roots in “la France profonde.” Unwavering attachment to a provincial “petite patrie” promised to protect both individual morals and national strength. Indeed, Bédier long considered himself a “provincial” metropolitan. Just after his 1887 trip to Bourbon, he commented to Gaston Paris on his “enduring” attachment to the provinces, and unease in Paris: “It must be said that I always/still [toujours] enjoy the provincial life, that the only thing I like about Paris is your courses, and that I hope for nothing more for next year, upon my return to France, than to live in the provinces.”223 Paris remains, after six years, an alien urban experience; en province, Bédier finds places most closely continuous with his insular sensibilities. These comments of course contradict the allegiance he pledges to life in Paris less than a year later.224 The various locales that Bédier calls “home”—provincial, colonial, Parisian—testify to his deeply divided sense of national place.

Exile shapes Bédier’s expressions of creole identity throughout his life, from his letters around the 1887 journey to Bourbon to speeches in the 1920s and 1930s. As he reflects on the meaning of personal history, he values continuity above all. Thus, Bédier’s supposed affirmation that “What is no more never was”225 expresses not disinterest in the past but an ideology of permanence: what is valuable has survived and so still exists; what no longer exists is rightfully forgotten. Bédier embraces this principle of cultural Darwinism concisely in a citation from Horace that he invoked throughout his life: “Caelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt” [They change their sky, not their soul, those who range across the sea].226 Regardless of migration, the soul remains immovable. Proclaiming his complete emotional identification with this line (“I know only too well the melancholic and sometimes painful feeling”),227 Bédier interprets Horace to address the soul’s attachment to home, an attachment fraught with pain when one must live or travel elsewhere. In one memorable instance—on a photo sent to his lycée after his election to the Académie—Bédier translated the Latin citation into Creole: “Quant i sa va l’aut’ coté la mer, l’ ciel i çanze, le coer i çanz’ pas” [When one goes to the other side of the sea, the sky changes, the heart changes not] (Figure 32).228 The Creole phrase affirms continuity, underscoring the exile’s faithful attachment to Bourbon and France (both are “the other side of the sea”). The doubling of Latin with Creole, moreover, affirms a continuity between past and present, Rome and the French colony. On a photo of himself sent to Bourbon, the phrase reminds those who remember Bédier that he also remembers them.

Bédier expressed poignant appreciation for another poet of exile, the sixteenth-century Joachim Du Bellay. Bédier taught Du Bellay’s Regrets early in his career, and later cited one of its most famous poems to express his own “instinctive” devotion to France: “France, mother of arts, arms, and laws!” [France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois!].229 Du Bellay wrote the Regrets while “exiled” in Rome—but his greater trauma may have been his return “home” to Paris, which reinforced his sense of distance from his provincial origins in the Loire: Du Bellay is as attached to his pays [province, regional identity] as to his patrie [national identity].230 His poetry expresses a sense of permanent “exile” regardless of location and a perpetually ambivalent relation to the homeland: from the perspective of the Loire, life in Paris looks as much like exile as Rome. Bédier’s citation of the sonnet “France, mère des arts” thus projects his own exilic imagination onto a poem more famous for national pride. Yet after the first line, the sonnet descends immediately to regret, as a “lamb” calls out in vain to its formerly nourishing mother, wandering plaintively toward the accusation, “ô cruelle” (l. 6). Emotionally wounded and exposed to mortal danger by the mother’s silence, the lamb’s last words condemn as unjust the security enjoyed by other members of the flock: “And yet I am not the worst of the flock” [Si ne suis-je pourtant le pire du troupeau] (l. 14). Neither arts, arms, nor laws will save this piteous creature. The lamb’s alienation is double, for it longs both for a distant time (the earlier moment when the mother provided nourishment) and a distant place (“France,” which no longer answers his calls).

In Bédier’s hands, Du Bellay’s poem captures the complexities of creole life in diaspora (exile, migrant, and citizen all at once). It invokes national belonging as both a distant memory and a desired future. The creole, like the lamb, feels abandoned—but usually turns melancholic rather than bitterly accusatory.231 His devotion is a racial trait, carried in his blood. Bédier’s medievalism addresses a similarly fractured relation to the nation, while also tracing a path toward reintegration with the “flock.” The Middle Ages become the vanishing point of temporal and spatial ruptures (an island home left in the past); they offer solace for the tropical heart lodged under cloudy northern skies. When Bédier argues that France exists in a seamlessly continuous relation with its eleventh-century self, he reroots his own identity in an immutable version of the nation that abandons no one.