Medieval Debris

My narrative of Bédier’s Creole Middle Ages has emerged from the traditional methods of philology, turned against the security of origins. Placing colonial history in relation to medieval studies during the Third Republic, I have sought to establish an archive of “local knowledge” that encompasses multiple places and times simultaneously. Françoise Lionnet has shown how the lack of such knowledge about Réunion has often led critics astray in their interpretations of French literature and culture.1 Given the generally “minor” status of Réunion from metropolitan and francophone perspectives alike, it is no wonder that Bédier’s creole identifications have been relatively unknown. Imagining a medievalist from the perspective of Réunion thus requires a sustained and tenuous effort to move beyond the bounds of the dominant discourses of colonialism and medievalism alike. Creole medievalism illustrates the many small challenges of recognizing missing archives.

In writing of and around Bédier, I have frequently placed personal anecdotes in relation to broader historical developments. The micro and macro levels of history are of course equally opaque, relations between them as prone to tenuous imagination as to banal certainties. No single event, statement, or relation explains something as intimate and mysterious as a “life,” but collectively they give texture to private and public histories. As a form of historiography, biography constructs a narrative of identity that, like all histories, can be rewritten and reimagined. In Bédier’s case, I have tried to multiply perspectives without reducing them to a single view and to connect these biographic idiosyncrasies to a broader argument about the place of both Réunion and the Middle Ages in France since 1870. These considerations, in turn, have led to reflections on the durable and uneven effects of colonial histories in contemporary culture and scholarship. In the process, I endeavored to disturb the ideological work of origins in personal, national, and literary histories.

Bédier’s influential medievalism resides simultaneously on Réunion, in Paris, during the Third Republic, and within French literature. Its formation and impact derive from the multiple migrations that made these collocations possible. Bédier’s literary histories reflect, and reflect on, the many meanings of French imperialism, viewed simultaneously from the eleventh century and the twentieth, from France’s southeastern colonial edge and its metropolitan center. Proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for “Bourbon,” Bédier vigorously defended French sovereignty while resisting the empire’s multicultural dimensions. His letters, speeches, and scholarship reveal a life shaped by irreconcilable desires for both creole and national belonging. Simultaneously immigrant and emigrant whether he travels toward Paris or Saint-Denis, Bédier lived with a fragmented sense of “home” that could never be resolved. He committed to personal strategies of forgetting while incessantly proclaiming the persistence of memory. The “forgetting” so fundamental to collective political and ethnic formations was both a personal effort and a historical theory.

The trajectories of colonial natives like Bédier reconfigure some the most seemingly obvious structures of imperial analysis—first and foremost the clear division between metropole and colony. This distinction does not so much describe imperial relations as prescribe them. It masks multiple layers of national and regional identities, all variously constituted through displacement. Bédier, for example, moved through at least three diaspora communities: the Réunionnais of imperial Paris (1860s), the Europeans of Réunion (1870s), and the Réunionnais of republican Paris (1880s and beyond). He remained throughout a citizen of France, an invisible migrant in his own homelands. His experience points to the limits of “common Europeanness” and to the “uneven positionality” of “whiteness” in colonial contexts.2 The culture and politics of creoles, including those most committed to the positive values of colonialism, shape a nuanced history of imperial racialism. As Bédier and his fellow creoles migrated between the Indian Ocean and the northern continent, they repeatedly encountered Euro–French culture as both familiar and awkwardly alien. They affirmed genealogical and cultural continuities through the prism of dislocation and métissage. In the perpetual transit of creole migration, every move closes one rupture while opening another.

Bédier’s two journeys from France to Réunion suggest that sometimes the colony comes “before” the metropole, even in the metropole. As such, creole experience and creolization as a sociocultural process exemplify what Ann Laura Stoler has termed “imperial debris.” Stoler insists on the degree to which the distinctions that often structure historical analysis derive from imperial formations—ideologies and actions that never belong entirely to the past: “The ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ spaces of imperial formations may not correspond to the common geographical designations that imperial architects scripted themselves. Terms like metropole and colony, core and periphery presume to make clear what is not.”3 This apparent clarity can block perception of phenomena that do not follow the script written by the architects of empire. “Imperial debris” thus refers partly to remains made to look discarded by the discourses that sustain empire.

In this perspective, the “old colonies” themselves functioned as entire societies that had to be made “peripheral” (beyond the fact of their geographical location relative to continental France) in order for France to consolidate its national imaginary. The islands’ designation by metropolitan powers in the 1950s and 1960s as imperial “confetti” underscores the durability of empire in postcolonial France: even though nineteenth-century conquests rendered the “old colonies” obsolete in the imperial economy, they eventually became almost all that “remained” of French overseas ambitions. Confetti is indeed a kind of debris difficult to control: it flutters about in the smallest breath of air, lingering in forgotten corners until some later disturbance. As a metaphor for relations between the “old colonies” and “France,” “confetti” suggests some of the complexities of imperial time and space. Devised to celebrate the imperial party, the term also points to the empire’s demise. Colonialism’s “leftovers” remain part of “France.” On Réunion—the former “second metropole” and “colonizing colony”—these debris remain deeply entangled with postcolonialism, globalization, and Europeanization.

The idea of imperial debris suggests a number of layered and shifting interactions among colonialism and medievalism. It underscores the fractured constitution of the very idea of creole medievalism—an imperial formation also shaped by subversion and resistance. Creole medievalism refers alternately and sometimes simultaneously to: colonialist recuperations of the national past, opposition to the hegemonies attributed to historical legitimation, exclusionary teleologies of national belonging, open-ended engagement with the diversities of literary history, and the possibility of imagining the past in ways not predicated on the binary structures produced by imperial ideologies. Creole medievalism—as articulated by Joseph Bédier, as an imperial formation that continues to mutate—“remains” within culture and scholarship in a number of different ways.

In French medieval studies, creole medievalism suggests that imperial formations should be part of what and how literary history is studied and taught. Literary histories themselves—the very notion of such histories—emerged institutionally in France alongside empire, and remain embedded in its formations. The specific genres that attracted Bédier’s most concerted attentions—fabliaux, romance, epic—present particularly rich opportunities for the investigation of transhistorical and transcultural filiations, affinities, and estrangements. Creole medievalism focuses attention, for example, on how fabliaux invite and resist comedy on a planetary scale, on how romance interrogates the politics of blind love, and on how epics support and challenge empires. The entire structure of the editorial debates that have grappled with Bédier’s “best manuscript” method relies on dichotomies and family metaphors indebted to the same conceptual structures that sustained colonialism. Creole medievalism subsumes nation-based perspectives on philology into an imperial understanding of the nation itself.

Bédier’s medievalism drew on broader republican discourses of the medieval and the colonial, all of which have left their own debris—from the infamous “Gaulish ancestors” presented to children throughout the empire to the “epic” narrative of colonial ambition. Wherever the French Middle Ages resurface in later cultural and theoretical formations, colonialism and imperialism also return. For example, the strains of medievalism that run through French philosophical thought—what Bruce Holsinger has called “theoretic medievalism”—carry within them the colonial formations of creole medievalism. Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes all came of age in Parisian academic institutions deeply affected by Bédier’s Middle Ages and epic nationalism. Their medievalism, in other words, derives partly from a Middle Ages conceived on Réunion. Theorists of a slightly younger generation, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, drew on these same legacies, as well as on their own direct colonial formations.4 Creole medievalism highlights the vibrant codependency of colonialism and medievalism in the work of these theorists who resist so explicitly the unitary affirmations of national ideologies. In this regard, the image of Derrida routing his colonial identity through identification with a fourteenth-century clandestine Jew from Spain performs poignantly medievalism’s entanglements with the ethics of imperial memory.5 From the perspectives of creole medievalism, French medievalism of all kinds inevitably mobilizes imperial debris.

At the most general level, creole medievalism reminds us that the Middle Ages have been drafted into a number of different roles in colonial discourse, from guaranteeing the “civilization” of Europe to imposing “barbarism” overseas. Medieval motifs also slip into colonial and postcolonial syncretisms as part of broader appropriations of European cultures, from the epic heroes of the Luso–African theater of tchiloli on the island of São Tomé (Roland, Charlemagne, and others) to much of the practice of European medieval studies outside of Europe.6 Indeed, imperial remains engage the medieval in a number of ways, from Glissant meditating on Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Latin Literature and the European Middle Ages to the rethinking of “empire” itself at the opening of the twenty-first century.7 While my specific claims for creole medievalism target French formations, France and its empires engage broader global dynamics that embed local phenomena in structures that far exceed their immediate resonance. Thus just as creole medievalism exceeds the personal limits of Bédier’s biography, its implications reach beyond both France and Réunion.

Imperial debris are most visible in material forms—in what Stoler calls “imperial ruins.” Arguing against critical complacency around the “legacies” of empire and the aesthetics of ancient ruins, Stoler asks how “imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives.” By focusing on the “material refuse of imperial projects,” Stoler underscores the multiple temporalities of imperial effects.8 The notion that the “leftovers” of empire continue to impinge, not necessarily continuously, on the present suggests that imperialism remains active even where it appears defeated or dormant: “To speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance and signs, the visible and visceral sense in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain.” The idea of the ruin, moreover, combines both action and artifact, suggesting how artifacts also act: “By definition ruination is an ambiguous term; both an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it.”9 Stoler’s idea of the “imperial ruin” reconfigures some of the now familiar terrain that collocates colonialism, medievalism, and Bédier. In conclusion, I would like to return to a few of the sites discussed in earlier chapters, and consider the remains of creole medievalism from the perspective of its “ruins.”

During 2003, the Musée Léon Dierx exhibited paintings acquired during the museum’s first decades. Although partly motivated by the practical necessity of repairs to the storage facility, “Ceci n’est pas une exposition” [This is not an exhibit] nonetheless raised trenchant questions about the politics of commemoration and the meanings of colonialism in the twenty-first century. The colonial-era paintings referenced many of the themes that shaped Bédier’s creole medievalism: portraits of Marius Leblond and the Kervéguens (cousins of Bédier’s, benefactors of the museum, and renowned plantation owners) referenced the racialist philosophy of aristocratic chivalry; Norman and Breton landscapes portrayed the Aryan provincial roots of which creoles like Bédier were so proud; local landscapes marked the island as an aesthetically desirable place of colonial privilege; images of Paris monuments like the Palais Bourbon and the Panthéon evoked the metropolitan prestige that structured creole society (and Bédier’s personal itinerary); two scenes inspired by Paul et Virginie echoed the use of this creole love story in idealized representations of Réunion during the Third Republic (including Bédier’s family history and the creole memories that inspired his Tristan et Iseut); paintings of and by Léon Dierx recalled the pantheon of creole poets that included Bédier; two anonymous religious paintings from the late Middle Ages maintained the museum’s founding medievalism and the deepest historical lineages claimed by “Réunionnais imperialism.” Finally, numerous portraits of unknown subjects by unknown painters materialized the romance of forgetting that Bédier identified as the basis of both medieval literature and national identity: as Bédier stated, family portraits—like medieval heroes—fall into anonymity within a few generations unless preserved in public writings.

As an imperial ruin, “Ceci n’est pas une exposition” interrogates the degree to which recontextualization can transfigure colonial formations. Certainly, the exhibition title marks the curators’ commitment to the disruptive powers of reappropriation: it points toward René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”—an image of a pipe accompanied by the written denial of the pipe’s presence. Magritte’s painting, in its various forms, demands recognition of the irresolvable simultaneity of its truth (there is no “real” pipe present) and its absurdity (a “pipe” clearly appears). Similarly, “Ceci n’est pas une exposition” presents both a museological truth and an absurdity: the exhibit “is not” in the sense that it denies curatorial ordering in favor of the accidental collocations of items from storage; clearly, paintings are on display. A “real” presentation of colonial origins is framed into absence (“ceci n’est pas”) while quite literally occupying the museum; the works retain their “original” significance while taking on new ones shaped by the dramatic changes that have taken place in Réunionnais society since the museum’s founding. The exhibit both returns to and denies its origins. In this impossible collocation, are viewers to admire or reject the aspirations that founded the museum and inspired the paintings? As a museological ruin, “Ceci n’est pas une exposition” cannot answer. It can only expose the uncanny and unsettling ability of colonialist and multiculturalist ideals to poke through each others’ veneers—to “ruin” each other.

The Musée des Colonies that opened for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris is another institutional site initially engaged with creole medievalism that has undergone major changes in recent years. Since October 2007, the building (now named for its location, Palais de la Porte Dorée) has housed the new Cité Nationale d’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI). At first, the CNHI seems to prolong the building’s inscription of colonial medievalism. The official introductory film, for example, shows the medieval French “nation” already welcoming “foreigners” within its borders. Yet the CNHI formally limits its museological focus to the last two hundred years.10 It has also largely defined immigrants as “foreigners.” The original slogan of the CNHI, “Leur histoire est notre histoire” [Their history is our history] inscribed indelible difference as the basis of national harmony. This approach assumed and required that “immigrants” have histories different from “ours.”11 These terms of national belonging remain largely the same as those of colonial republicanism: peoples belong to their “countries of origin,” and a society born entirely of migration (like Réunion’s) lacks “authentic” indigeneity. In this frame, there is little conceptual space for the “citizen immigrant” from overseas. The CNHI’s goal, moreover, of promoting integration and social cohesion sounds, from an overseas perspective, very much like a neocolonialist discourse of assimilation.

The CNHI is part of a much larger reorganization of museums undertaken by French governments over the last ten years. These changes include the opening of a new museum of “non-Western arts,” Musée du Quai Branly (MQB), drawing on collections formerly housed in the Palais de la Porte Dorée (Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, MAAO) and the Musée de l’Homme. An already substantial body of commentary has shown the various ways in which the MQB perpetuates colonial formations.12 However vibrantly contemporary the museum’s architecture, its foundation rests on imperial ruins. Like the CNHI, the MQB touts multicultural harmony. This goal is captured pithily in its slogan, “Là où dialoguent les cultures” [Where cultures dialogue] and in the 2008–9 exhibits “Planète métisse: To Mix or Not To Mix” and “Paris, ville métisse” (for a fee, patrons could take a guided tour of Chinatown in the 13th Arrondissement—Quartier Bédier!). The MQB’s recuperation of métissage brings it to the heart of “French” identity (juxtaposing provincial and tribal costumes) while also pushing it to the peripheral edge of “otherness” (one can choose “not to mix”; the “French” don’t visit Chinatown without a guide).

The MQB, like the CNHI, limits itself to the historical contours of modern imperialism (although with a slightly longer view covering the past five centuries).13 And yet the global Middle Ages subtly frame the museum’s authenticity: when the museum opened, the entrance to the permanent collection was marked by the same African royal statue that once stood at the entrance to the Musée de l’Homme14—a figure that dates to the same period as Roland (tenth–eleventh century). The MQB reaches even further into history with its official icon (purchased specifically for the new museum), a statue from Mexico created several centuries before the birth of Christ.15 These two prominent “ancient” objects subtly position the MQB outside of French imperial time (a viewpoint underscored by the relative absence of colonial history in the permanent displays). Meanwhile, the façade of the Palais de la Porte Dorée remains intact, preserving the imperial dimensions of creole medievalism sculpted there for 1931 (French ports guarded by medieval castles, modern colonialists inscribed in the lineage of medieval crusaders, Réunion represented in a small corner beneath Madagascar). These structures enjoy the protection of the French state; they may not be “ruined” without damage to the national patrimoine. At both the CNHI and the MQB, “preservation” conjures a number of conflicting relations with the legacies of empire.

The MQB relies on the same national definitions of citizenship as the CNHI: its mission recognizes responsibilities toward objects’ “countries of origin,” a concept that presumes that artifacts (like immigrants) have clearly defined identities as citizens of foreign nation-states (and that those states exert legitimate control over all artifacts ever produced within their current borders). This approach overlooks the heterogeneity of cultural and artistic production, while locating the “non-Western” securely “elsewhere.” Once again, then, Europeans from outside of Europe—and Europe before the nation-state—slip from view. Tellingly, in July 2008, the staff of neither the MQB nor the CNHI could locate photos from the Musée des Colonies that document traces of both the Middle Ages and Réunion in the museological history of empire—retrospective galleries of the Middle Ages and “Paul et Virginie.”16

Reconfigurations of the European Middle Ages will visibly accompany the installation of a third institution projected to join the CNHI and the MQB, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée. The MUCEM interrogates the origins and ongoing formations of “civilization” across the Mediterranean as part of a project devoted to discovering new foundations of crosscultural unity (the original acronym was PACEM).17 Scheduled to open fully in 2013 in Marseille, the MUCEM replaces the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (MNATP) in Paris, which closed in 2005. While the MNATP exhibited essentially an ethnography of continental France and traditional agriculture, the MUCEM places French traditions in a larger geographic context. The museum’s commitment to geographic proximities, however, excludes overseas France from the “European” patrimony. This exclusion is a particularly trenchant irony since places like Réunion are officially designated “ultra-peripheral” regions of the European Union (they must follow EU regulations, however ill suited to local conditions). Once again, colonial history occupies the “blind spot” of France’s national museums.18

While the MUCEM claims a limited geographical purview, its historical reach extends to the ninth century (and potentially much further).19 Fittingly, the exhibit that marked the transformation of the MNATP into the MUCEM addressed the European tradition of epic heroism. Presented in Paris in 2004, in Marseille in 2005, and envisioned as a permanent exhibit for the MUCEM, “At the Frontiers of Heroism, the Acrites in Europe” defines epic heroes as acrites or border figures—champions of intercultural understanding and avatars of values shared by all European cultures. The acrites project, largely underwritten by the European Commission, drafts medieval literature into the project of integrating the members of the EU into a harmonious cultural as well as economic unit:

The ambition of ACRINET is to demonstrate to the general European public the virtues of peaceful coexistence in a multicultural environment, as well as to emphasise the continuing legacy of the themes to be found in acritic songs and texts. . . . ACRINET seeks to identify and establish the common elements of a European identity, which is so vital to the process of European integration.20

In this view, heroic poetry abolishes temporal and spatial boundaries; Roland offers lessons in “peaceful coexistence” for all nations. ACRINET casts the nationalist recuperation of epics during the nineteenth century as nothing more than a curious episode in their long history, one with no lasting repercussions. Crusading histories vanish as Europe “repudiates histories of violence.”21 Moving in the opposite direction of those who have insisted on Roland’s inexorable dichotomies, this utopian affirmation of commonalities does no more justice to the complexities of epic discourse. The redeployment of the epic as a site of pan-European harmony unmoors Roland from the national rivalries that informed so much of its modern history, while also deforming the dissonant cultural traces that surround the poem.

Reappropriated at the nascent MUCEM, Roland continues its already long life as another kind of “imperial ruin.” The epic inhabits many different places at once, from the Carolingian empire to the Capetian monarchy to the England of the Plantagenêts through to the restored French monarchy of the 1830s, the Third Republic, and ever diversifying places and readers ever since. It portrays the transhistorical and transcultural ruins of several empires; it has shaped the discourse of ruins for several others. Cast as a material ruin—a particular manuscript that is not entirely legible and that has spawned numerous rewritings, editions, and translations—it brings together the concerted efforts to give it a single origin with the many possibilities for multiplying its sources. Its very “ruined,” incomplete state keeps it available for renewed power grabs while also enabling their undoing, their ruination.

Finally, it is only fitting to return to Saint-Paul, the site of Réunion’s first settlements. There, the Maison des Civilisations et de l’Unité Réunionnaise (MCUR)has been planned under the auspices of the regional government, led by Paul Vergès until March 2010.22 The MCUR proposes to represent the diverse forms of creolization that have shaped Réunionnais society while promoting a sense of cultural unity for the future (a project of integration not so different in some ways from the CNHI and MUCEM). A “museum of the present,” the MCUR project defends local culture in all its variety and idiosyncratic detail. The migrant origins of this culture mean that the MCUR also looks to history for the sources of the “six worlds” whose mutual creolization form the basis of Réunionnais “solidarity” (African, Chinese, European, Hindu, Muslim, and the other islands of the Indian Ocean). The recursive dynamics of creolization implicate the entirety of civilizational history from Africa through Europe to India and China. These fundamental facts of migration, slavery, and indenture shape a museological project dedicated to the interrogation of imperial ruins. The original MCUR has itself become an imperial ruin—cancelled by the new regional government in April 2010, accused of creating too much “divisive” memory, cast as an obstacle to economic opportunity for citizens who live daily with the ruins of imperialism.

Within the contours of creole medievalism, literary history provides an additional transhistorical vector. Notably, the excavation of “Réunionnais unity” around the MCUR project has included references to figures intimately tied to Bédier’s creole identifications: Axel Gauvin has explicated the “creolizations” of Parny and Leconte de Lisle (the national poets drafted to legitimate Bédier’s own identity as a creole writer), while Carpanin Marimoutou has argued that contemporary maloya inhabits a world partly conditioned by the poetics of the Leblonds.23 These references, from the perspective of creole medievalism, forge connections between postcolonial Réunionnité and the legacies of the Third Republic’s creole diaspora—including Bédier. Through literary history, Bédier’s own “creolizations” rejoin institutional identity politics in the twenty-first century, embedding medieval histories in the deep formations of Réunionnais society.

Meanwhile, at the shoreline in Saint-Paul, signs of empire and its ruinations abound. They include the grave of Leconte de Lisle, a slave cemetery, a monument to métissage, and some bare concrete walls that once bore the name “Joseph Bédier.” The paths of creole medievalism led me to disinter this literal signature of colonial Francocentrism from Réunion’s archives—and to “restore” the ruin, at least for those who read this book (and especially for those who know Saint-Paul). What are the ethics of such a restoration? Are some things better lost, blankness a more appropriate memorial to the neocolonial interventions of the 1960s and to the earlier imperialisms that made them possible?

Perhaps the wall is more ruined when accompanied by the ghostly memory of its lost letters. The monument, “ruined” by the letters’ removal (or by their inability to withstand the elements), testifies to the fragility of imperial certainties. The stairs in front lead, bleakly, to the prospect of reconciled futures, largely unnoticed on the backside of the market. Similarly, creole medievalism—a restoration project and a ruin—exemplifies the ways in which origins derive from reconstructions that translate desires to forget. In the present, we are, whoever we are, always “coming from the Middle Ages” like the Réunionnais migrant cited at the beginning of this book—that is to say, we are tied to the remnants of the origins of our own imagination.