Roncevaux and Réunion

Colonial Nation

The Middle Ages provided France with images of national value well before 1870.3 The Prussian victory, however, reconfigured history’s place in nationalist thinking. Indeed, Pierre Nora has suggested that 1870 rehabilitated historical study, shifting the nation’s defining edge from the Revolution (an internal, temporal division) to the border with Germany (an external, geographic division).4 The events of 1870, in other words, shifted ideological attention simultaneously toward the Middle Ages and Germany. Stated more strongly, the geographic conquest of modern France opened a place for the royalist Middle Ages to serve the prestige of a republican nation. The precarious nature of the government immediately after 1870, where royalists held the majority in the hastily configured parliament, contributed further to the emergence of a republican medievalism. Republicans defended themselves from royalist pressures by eschewing Revolutionary radicalism, and claiming the Middle Ages as their own source of legitimacy. As a result, republican nationalism became both medievalist and colonialist: “If French nationalism was republican rather than monarchical, it was a republic without revolution, based on militarism and heroic sacrifice, which harked back to former royal glories and emphasized race.”5 While republican royalism evokes the Middle Ages, republican racialism sustained colonialism (itself partly grounded in medieval precedents).

Conversely, and simultaneously, medievalism figured in French national discourse as a sign of illegitimacy. Again, this form of medievalism was not invented around 1870, but it gained new poignancy as leaders of the Third Republic sought to consolidate national identity. The Prussians’ “medievalness” was said to undermine their military superiority: commentators compared them to fifth-century Germanic “barbarians” (implying that their culture had not changed in fourteen centuries).6 Later, French critics of Bismarck cast his colonial ambitions as a further sign of Germany’s “medieval” character.7 During the war of 1914–18, Bédier himself characterized Attila the Hun as a model of civilized honor far surpassing modern Germans.8 Within France, negative medievalism helped to define national values. Some blamed the 1870 defeat on weaknesses caused by France’s “medieval” Catholicism.9 Radical republicanism could also appear negatively medieval: during the Commune of 1871 (when revolutionary-minded workers occupied Paris), Gustave Flaubert accused the communards of having “medieval ideas,” and Paul de Saint-Victor compared them to medieval Italian despots.10 Rural Frenchmen seemed to pose a similarly “medieval” impediment to national cohesion: Léon Gambetta, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior, referred to peasants as “several centuries behind the enlightened part of the country.”11 All of these metaphors, whether addressed to France or to Germany, use the Middle Ages to define the boundaries of modern French superiority. Republican medievalism thus secured national identity from internal and external challenges.

The events of 1870 also reconfigured France’s relation to colonialism, with particularly dramatic effects for Réunion. Politically, Réunion (along with the other “old colonies”) gained new access to national influence when the provisional postimperial government included colonial representatives as full members of the National Assembly.12 Colonial representation remained contested in the following years, even after the ratification of a new constitution in 1875. The Réunionnais deputy, Bédier’s cousin François-Césaire De Mahy, vigorously defended the colonies’ place in the national government, while also defending the republic against the royalists.13 He argued persuasively for the restoration of colonial representation when the Assembly voted to end it (November 1875); when other deputies again challenged the colonies in 1877, De Mahy reminded them that without the colonies “the Republic would not have been created.”14 Indeed, from the Réunionnais perspective, De Mahy himself had made the Republic: when the constitution using the word “republic” passed in 1875 by one vote, Réunionnais claimed that he had single-handedly safeguarded the nation.15 In the founding days of the Third Republic, Réunionnais claimed for themselves a central place in the republican imaginary—a place rarely recognized by the broader republican culture.

In more abstract terms, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine transformed the place of colonial subjectivity in French national identity. It now belonged “within” the nation rather than only “outside”—and it belonged to everyone. For the “wound” of continental colonization affected the whole nation, not just the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine. For those dedicated to revanche, or the recovery of the lost territories, including Réunionnais, the “decolonization” of France was a shared project of national reunification. For Réunionnais creoles, the integration of colonial subjectivity within national identity made their own relationship to France exemplary, rather than exceptional. If displaced Alsatians maintained what Jean-Marie Mayeur has called a “mémoire frontière” [border-memory]—an unwavering commitment to their “petite patrie” (Alsace) fused with unrivaled devotion to the “grande patrie” (France)—migrant creoles related to Réunion and France in the same way. Displaced inhabitants from both regions characterized themselves as exiles. Alsace, moreover, proved that a relatively “recent colony” (forcibly annexed by the French monarchy during the seventeenth century, like Réunion) could become fully French.16 Revealingly, when an Alsatian addressed Réunionnais graduates in 1923, he underscored parallels between the two “provinces,” both of which were “ransomed” in unwanted wars without ever wavering in their ardent love for France.17 In the longer course of the Third Republic, this kind of dual commitment to regional and national identity became a desirable model of national belonging for all citizens (especially in the influential writings of the Lorrain Maurice Barrès).18 In the wake of 1870, creole nationalism and republican nationalism converged to a substantial degree.

The consolidation of the French nation also proceeded along colonialist lines during the Third Republic, again with repercussions for Réunionnais’ identity. Eugen Weber has shown how slowly the French government implemented measures to unify the national culture, and how much it drew on colonialist models. Once one ventured out of Paris, the feeling went, one found only savages: the rural provinces were populated by Redskins, like in America; the Landes resembled the African Sahara; some provincials wished only to be treated as well as the colonies; Bretons and Asians looked equally “foreign.”19 The Musée d’Ethnographie institutionalized the discursive association between the provinces and the colonies by including a “Salle de France” alongside its colonial exhibits.20 Colonialist views of the provinces remained current well into the twentieth century (Bédier once compared French peasants to the “sauvages” of Australia).21 Even the newly repatriated Alsace succumbed to colonial logic in 1919, as the Minister of War noted that many officers thought that they could conduct themselves there “as if they were in the Congo.”22 As late as the 1930s, the edges of Paris seemed in need of civilizing conquest.23 On Réunion, the colonialist approach to the continental provinces helped articulate Réunion’s own difference from newer colonies: by associating French peasants with Africans and Asians, Réunionnais drew themselves closer to the center of the nation.24

Colonialism entered the heart of French national identity most literally through the government’s pursuit of new overseas conquests in the 1880s and 1890s. Leaders, such as Gambetta and Jules Ferry, received substantial support from the colonial deputies themselves, as well as from others who saw economic advantages to imperialism. These loosely affiliated members of the parti colonial promoted imperialism as an expression of patriotism, despite their often-conflicting political and geographic interests.25 Colonial successes contributed to an emerging sense of national healing, seeming to compensate for the losses of 1870. Paul Morand articulated this sentiment succinctly in 1931:

Haven’t the colonies always consoled us, we French, from our reversals? It’s after the sad end of the reign of Louis XIV that the Regency develops the charter companies; after Waterloo, our comfort is Algeria; after 1871, our real revenge (Germany understood this) was Indochina and Tchad.26

By proving its prowess overseas, France “de-colonized” the national imaginary at home. Republican colonialism, tied to revanche, thus remained current—if contested—well into the twentieth century.27

No one supported colonial expansion as an expression of national identity more vocally and consistently than the Réunionnais deputies. De Mahy aligned himself early on with Gambetta: he did not support the treaty that ceded Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, and he promoted colonialism as compatible with a strong stance against Germany.28 De Mahy participated actively in a number of procolonial organizations (from the Comité Dupleix to the Société Africaine de France), which sought repeatedly to expand colonial representation in parliament, and popularized colonialism in the political press.29 His fellow deputy Louis Brunet (elected in 1893) shared De Mahy’s views (including his antiprotestantism).30 Both politicians fashioned themselves as leaders of a “colonizing colony,” making creole identity a mirror of national identity, Réunion France’s diminutive double.31 Through colonialism, they sought to ensure Réunionnais’ status as civilized, national subjects (neither provincial nor colonial savages)—worthy of becoming citizens of a département.32

De Mahy and Brunet lobbied specifically for the conquest of Madagascar (“a tropical Normandy”).33 Both authored books favoring conquest, continuing the arguments made by Bédier’s great-uncle Philippe-Achille Bédier (as governor in the 1830s, he prepared an influential report on how Madagascar was more important to France than Algeria).34 In the Réunionnais’ view, the larger island would become Réunion’s political dependent, as well as the solution to its economic problems. According to De Mahy, France could eradicate excessive protestant influence on Madagascar while providing a new destination for displaced Alsatians.35 In 1883, De Mahy personally launched an expedition to Madagascar during his three weeks as Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies. France took possession in 1896 (the exiled queen resided on Réunion before settling in Algeria).36 From the perspective of what Jean Ganiage has called “Réunionnais imperialism,” De Mahy and Brunet “forced” the metropolitan government to undertake the conquest of Madagascar.37

Madagascar represents the most visible success of the Réunionnais imperial agenda. For even though De Mahy was active in the parti colonial and held numerous important governmental posts throughout his career, he achieved few other material successes.38 And even Madagascar ultimately failed Réunionnais expectations: metropolitan investors turned away from Réunion in favor of Madagascar, the farms of Réunionnais migrants failed, Madagascar received government subsidies that Réunion did not, and Réunion became Madagascar’s administrative dependent, rather than vice versa.39 Bédier himself lamented Réunion’s vexed relations with both Madagascar and Paris, commenting that creoles deserved greater recognition from the metropole “in memory of all that Bourbon has done on Madagascar, for Madagascar. Madagascar, now an ungrateful country.”40 Indeed, the whole colonialist agenda, meant to provide a secure place for Réunion within the empire, actually exacerbated its marginalization as the government reduced its funding in order to pay for expeditions in Africa.41 One of the most influential procolonialist books of the period, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, refers disdainfully to smaller colonies like Réunion as “microscopic,” “stingy vestiges” of France’s previous imperial ambitions.42 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, advocates for Réunion continued to call for greater recognition of their island’s contributions and needs, but with little success as government priorities focused on the vast natural resources of Africa and Asia. Thus, while Réunionnais adopted colonial nationalism as their own, this strategy ironically contributed to the island’s marginalization.

The overseas projects championed by De Mahy and other colonialists brought France back into direct conflict with Germany, whose own national interests motivated colonial ambitions from the 1870s all the way to 1940.43 Especially after 1885, French rivalry with Germany had as much to do with Africa as with Alsace-Lorraine.44 In Morocco, for example, protracted tensions developed after 1900 and contributed to the declaration of war in 1914. When France signed the Entente Cordiale with Britain in 1904, commercial interests in Morocco seemed settled to Germany’s detriment. For a number of reasons, the effort to reopen negotiations with France culminated in a visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II to Tangiers in 1905, where he reportedly declared support for Moroccan independence. The ensuing diplomatic crisis led to new international agreements over Moroccan trade, slowing France’s plans for annexation while leaving Germany in a weakened position.45 Ongoing failures to resolve competing financial interests led to a new crisis in 1911, when Germany anchored a small ship off Agadir in reaction to France’s mobilization of troops in the interior. The resulting treaty opened the way for the French annexation of Morocco, but at the cost of major territorial concessions in the Congo—leaving both sides dissatisfied.46 In France, the Agadir crisis renewed agitation for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and revitalized the literature of revanche.47 Indeed, during the Agadir confrontation, French criticism of German initiatives to complete the legal integration of the “stolen” continental provinces strengthened. Subsequent German efforts to outlaw “pro-French” cultural organizations in Alsace further inflamed French nationalist passions.48 Bédier’s own reaction to Agadir reflects this general rise in militantism: tracing German wrongs back to 1792, he concludes that France should have taken a stronger position and moved toward war (citizens, if not the government, were ready to demonstrate “our warrior heredity”); he himself made preparations to leave for battle (and in fact enlisted, at age 50, as soon as France declared war in 1914).49

French commentators regularly expressed their concerns about Germany in colonial terms. The category of the “primitive” made colonialist metaphors the logical companions to delegitimizing medieval metaphors: Germany, “the India of Europe,” needed civilizing;50 it represented a “childlike, colonized” culture of the sort that France, a “mature” civilization, had long transcended. After 1870, the victors’ putative primitiveness thus attracted the label of “Mohican” as well as “barbarian.”51 Even before 1870, “outre-Rhin” and “outre-mer” could be invoked as parallel indicators of the uncivilized—both contrary to essential “Frenchness.”52 The layering of colonialist tropes appears vividly in a 1915 image by Lucien Jonas depicting a Sénégalais soldier guarding German prisoners: he asks a family of French peasants (“paysans”) if they have come to see the “sauvages” (Figure 1). This caption deftly “colonizes” German identity while enabling both Africans and French peasants to identify with French civilization. On Réunion, a similar rhetoric bolstered white creole identifications with France, as politicians accused their darker-skinned rivals of “germanophilie.”53

The German threat to France itself was also seen as colonial. In 1908, the fervent nationalist Paul Déroulède declared that the price of peace with Germany would be the colonization of continental France (“a Germanic colony, carved up and indentured”); the French people would become German colonial subjects (“Dahomeans or Tonkinese of the white race”).54 Bédier reportedly expressed the same fear of German colonization in the years before the war.55 Although he resisted aggressive nationalism in the early 1900s, beginning in 1908 he echoed Déroulède in his desire for war and confidence in victory.56 In Bédier’s view, the price of peace would be the regrettable end of French colonialism: the Congo represented only the first concession and would not appease German aggression.57 For Bédier and other Réunionnais, German colonialism posed an additional threat: Kaiser Wilhelm apparently planned to assert German control over both Réunion and Madagascar.58 Indeed, colonialists in Germany had Réunion on their territorial wish list all the way back in 1870, and identified Réunion as a strategic objective again in 1940.59 After the war of 1914–18, the Leblonds recalled the German threat with wistful irony, remarking that if Germany had taken over, tourism on the island would be better organized and the economy much improved.60

Réunion’s own participation in the war illustrates its fraught relations with the metropole. Like other colonies, Réunion contributed troops. Bédier himself served eagerly (as nurse, propagandist, and mayor of his Paris neighborhood), as did his stepfather on the island.61 In general, the government lauded colonial soldiers’ bravery and patriotism. Some argued that the colonies’ successful participation proved that they should receive greater national support. Réunionnais commentators specifically cited creole service in the war to illustrate the island’s equality with the metropole, and to promote greater political assimilation.62 They gave medievalism an instrumental value as they lauded the nationally recognized heroism of their fortuitously named compatriot, the aviator Roland Garros: “Roland! a name of glorious destiny, who founded, raised, fortified his remarkable lineage in the trenches of the Middle Ages, at Roncevaux, in order to enlighten our twentieth century with a powerful ray of ‘aerial glory.’”63 And yet, in practice, the “multi-colored” Réunionnais troops were often harassed by “French” soldiers and popularly considered inferior.64 The war’s conclusion, moreover, brought greater resources to African colonies, but not to Réunion.

Throughout the Third Republic, overlapping and mutually reinforcing discourses of medievalism and colonialism shaped many expressions of national identity. In metaphoric slippages from the “savage” (autochthonous avatar of ancientness) to the “barbarian” (uncivilized Germanic foreigner from the early Middle Ages) to the “redskin” (prototypical figure of indigenous primitivism), distant times and distant places converged to delegitimize German culture. Similar slippages melded contemporary colonialism to the Crusades, in this case conferring prestige. Maréchal Lyautey (renowned for “pacifying” Madagascar and Morocco) embodied this chivalric notion of colonialism as the valiant extension of France’s oldest and noblest values.65 These contradictions complicated Réunionnais efforts to create a stable place for themselves in the Republic, for while they sought to claim the positive side of medievalism and colonialism, metropolitan attitudes often attributed to them the negative side. This tension, which traverses republican discourse, grants Bédier’s creole medievalism far-reaching national significance. As he identified French prestige with medieval expansionism, he gave the ideals of the Third Republic an ancient lineage. At the same time, he realized the dreams of elite Réunionnais for national recognition.

Epic Nation

After the invasion of 1870, public leaders sought to strengthen France’s competitiveness, partly by reforming the education system. Some blamed an outdated curriculum for battlefield failures, and the new methods were designed to promote both critical thinking and patriotism. Consistent with the emergence of republican medievalism, pedagogical reforms included medieval literature and history—and consistent with the emergence of republican colonialism, medievalists conceived of national history in imperial terms. They sought, specifically, to counteract the perceived superiority of both German philology and German nationalism. While the French had treated the Middle Ages as a source of pleasant diversion, the Germans had honed a critical discipline worthy of the valued name of “science.” By 1870, German analytic methods were far more sophisticated than French approaches, and German scholars paid much more attention to medieval texts, including French ones (French critics expressed relief whenever a Frenchman managed to publish the first edition of a French text). In order to strengthen French education, Gabriel Monod and Ernest Lavisse introduced methods of German philology.66 To disseminate this new scholarship, Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer founded the journal Romania and rearticulated the goals of La Revue critique in patriotic terms.67

Patriotic scholarship privileged epic literature, because epics were understood to represent the origins of the ethnic groups that legitimated the modern nation-states.68 The politics of Roman prestige had long established the Aeneid as the model of significant literary achievement. As attention shifted toward medieval sources, the epic remained the privileged genre of national accomplishment. By this measure, France had appeared shamefully lacking prior to the mid-nineteenth century: it had nothing to rival the Nibelungenlied in Germany or Beowulf in Britain. Indeed, France had established a reputation as a fundamentally “un-epic” culture: rueful citations of M. de Malezieu’s eighteenth-century conclusion abound in French discussions: “The French don’t have an epic mind.”69 Scholars recognized the national import of the epic from the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Edgar Quinet lamenting that foreigners knew more about the French tradition than the French themselves.70 When Francisque Michel published the first edition of Roland in 1837, he opened the door to a dramatic realignment of literary politics. If Roland could disprove M. de Malezieu, its popular diffusion could contribute to a profound reimagining of the national character.

Roland crystallizes the politics of medievalism in the aftermath of 1870. Consolidating the patriotic gestures of the previous decades,71 scholars focused on securing the poem’s French identity. For even though it had been published first in France, and had gained a certain popularity (soldiers sang of Roland in 1870),72 it could not legitimize French national origins without some inventive interpretation: the oldest manuscript resided in Oxford (Bodleian Library, Digby 23), written in an Anglo-Norman dialect (that is, not directly connected to continental France); the poem’s heroic Franks functioned as ethnic predecessors of both the French and the Germans. German scholars, for their part, understood the epic as the product of ancient oral tradition (turning the Franks into proto-Germans); the French supported more recent dates of composition (turning the Franks into proto-Frenchmen). Aside from dating, scholars also debated the degree to which Germanic culture had influenced early medieval “French” institutions (and thus the epic). By highlighting the relative strength of “Gaulish” culture even after the Germanic invasions of the fifth century (as Quinet had done decades earlier), scholars could connect the epic to the most distant origins of French identity. These arguments focused attention on race, conquest, and the immutability of national feeling.

The academic promotion of Roland as the quintessential text of French national identity began in immediate reaction to the Prussian invasion—in fact, while Paris was still under siege. During the first week of December 1870, three scholars of very different mindsets turned to Roland to express the need for a new kind of patriotism. On December 3, Charles Lenient opened his course at the Sorbonne with a lecture on Roland; five days later, Gaston Paris began his own course at the Collège de France with Roland; that same day, Léon Gautier signed the introduction to his new edition of the epic.73 These interventions reveal a rather remarkable consensus on the epic’s potential to fortify the weakened nation. All three scholars embrace Roland as a repository of immutable and shared national values. For them, the epic illustrates the superiority of French national life over others (especially German); they call on educational programs to communicate this national character more clearly.74 The state of siege gives particular significance to their treatments of conquest and imperialism. While using colonialist metaphors against the Germans, they seek to decolonize medieval French culture by minimizing the effects of previous Germanic conquests. A generation or two later, Bédier voices similar patriotic interpretations that expose the nationalist commitments of his creole medievalism. Throughout all of these discussions, medievalism and colonialism, together, secure a central place for Roland in republican discourse.

Lenient’s approach to Roland is the most stridently political of the early commentators. He speaks of “patriotism” rather than of the “nation”; his sense that the Germans have invaded the French literary domain (as well as French territory) with nefarious intent is particularly militant. Nonetheless, he voices a philosophy of the nation widely shared at the time, and subsequently, quite influential: he defines the nation as a feeling rather than a particular geographic area: “what constitutes the homeland, and with it nationality, is the community of ideas, interests, and affections, the free accord of wills and the fraternity of souls.”75 By foregrounding the constitutive power of the desire to belong, Lenient diminishes the impact of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine: geography and political treaties cannot define the frontiers of “une patrie morale” [spiritual homeland]. Most importantly, Lenient turns to France’s colonial legacies to illustrate the portability of this national feeling: “Ask the soldier who carries his homeland across the seas in the folds of his flag. Ask those colonists from Louisana and Canada, whose grandchildren still remember, after two centuries, that they are French.”76 Colonial history here proves the validity of Lenient’s understanding of the nation’s immutability. This conception of national identity, inspired by the pressures of the Prussian invasion, grants overseas territories new significance in the national imaginary: geographic distance no longer impedes national belonging. In other words, the alienation of Alsace brought the colonies (including Réunion) closer to the nation. With geography diminished in favor of sentiment, national belonging became available to everyone with the proper depth of feeling.77 And for Lenient, Roland (“true French Iliad”) modeled the kind of purely French patriotism that could sustain these profoundly national emotions.

Gaston Paris’s lecture on Roland covers surprisingly similar ground. Like Lenient, Paris grants literature a privileged place in the conception of national identity. Indeed, he begins by defining literary history as nothing less than the history of national consciousness (he had already consecrated the epic as the highest form of national poetry).78 For Paris, literature expresses and preserves the essence of national feeling. Nations function through the shared loved of their members, rendering “true nations” impervious to territorial challenges.79 The epic propagates this “patrie morale”—a particular feeling rather than a particular place. To remedy the current crisis, then, the French should emulate medieval literature: “Let us make ourselves known as the sons of those who died at Roncevaux and of those who avenged them.”80 Paris draws a double lesson from Roland: the French should follow in the footsteps of both Roland (who died gloriously) and Charlemagne (who exacted vengeance for his death). Defeat, in other words, is not the end of the story. And even defeat can signify admirable valor. Indeed, without a grand defeat, there would be no Roland. By pursuing the epic model, Paris suggests that France can achieve even greater glory than before the war. Since the epic shows a resounding victory after seemingly disastrous defeat, it can serve as a vital source of national renewal.

Paris not only shares Lenient’s idea of the epic’s national value, he gives colonialism a similarly influential role. Indeed, Paris portrays colonialism as constitutive of the French national character. According to him, France’s two greatest medieval creations—the Crusades (“œuvre française par excellence”) and the epic—witness the foundational role of force in the French nation. For Paris, France has always had an “organic” need to expand.81 Roland thus lies at the basis of French national identity because it glorifies successful conquest. It thereby secures the prestige of colonialism as a national project. At the same time, Roland illustrates the dangers of colonial excess—a second, problematic tendency of the French national character, according to Paris. As an example, Paris cites Charlemagne’s conversion at sword-point of the residents of Saragossa: “Do you not recognize, in these naively atrocious procedures, some of the errors that are not completely extinguished in our country?”82 Force makes this scene “imperial” rather than “national” (earlier, Paris contrasts “natural” French expansionism with “artificial” imperialism based on force; he also presciently critiques the mission civilisatrice decades before its popularization).83 Since even “natural” expansion involves force, Paris suggests that the French must vigilantly monitor their actions—adopting medieval models of justified national glory and avoiding medieval models of imperial tyranny. Both tendencies appear in Roland, which powerfully condenses the “positive” and “negative” strains of medievalism adopted by republican discourse.

Gautier, for all of his differences from Lenient and Paris, takes a similar approach to national feeling. Like Paris, Gautier posits the self-conscious nation as the epic’s inspiration, and finds the Crusades its natural counterpart.84 And like both Paris and Lenient, Gautier minimizes geography’s role in national identity as he describes Roland’s typical noble reader: “He loves France passionately, without really knowing how far it extends. His patriotism is not a question of borders.”85 As for Roland itself, Gautier makes its material existence the object of his patriotic attentions: he recommends that no sacrifice by spared to “repatriate” the manuscript held in Oxford.86 Likewise, he praises Francisque Michel’s 1837 edition as a fated French triumph against German philology: “Thanks be given to God, whose providence extends to literary studies: it is a Frenchman who had this glory and not a German.”87 Gautier, like Lenient, draws an explicit parallel between the literary and military domains: “the Prussian fights in the same way that he critiques a text, with the same precision and the same method.”88 Gautier states explicitly that the events of 1870 have given Roland, and France’s relation with German philology, newly urgent significance.89 In the end, Gautier suggests, like Paris, that the French can take consolation from the poem’s grandeur, and derive from it hope for future victory.90

Gautier, like Lenient and Paris, also embraces colonialism as a basis for French national prestige. At the same time, he draws on colonialist metaphors in his passionate dismissal of Germanic cultural achievements. He credits Charlemagne with saving the French from descending “to the level of a small Germanic tribe.”91 In the introduction to his edition, he asks:

Where were they when our song was written, our haughty invaders? They were wandering in savage bands in the shadow of forests without names: they knew only how to pillage and kill. When we were holding with a hand so firm our great shining sword alongside the armed and defended Church, what were they? Mohicans and Redskins.92

Here and elsewhere, racialist and colonialist metaphors define Gautier’s notion of the primitive—a transhistoric foil to French civilization.93 Some years later, Bédier takes up the same North American reference in defense of medieval French culture: “Let us not refuse to the people of the Merovingian period [fifth–eighth centuries] what even the Redskins or the Botocudos have: singers, devil’s songs, dancing songs, spectacles, fables.”94 Bédier and Gautier both use the names of indigenous American tribes to articulate the cultural differences that, for them, define France from its earliest medieval moments. The grandeur they claim for French culture lies ultimately in its “universality.” For Gautier, Roland can thus serve a vital role in the modern French empire: “under every latitude, among all races, always and everywhere, the death of Roland will quicken the heart of an Indian or an Arab, just as it quickens ours.”95 Gautier attributes to the poem such universal appeal that even colonial “primitives” can appreciate its values; he imagines Roland as an instrument of the mission civilisatrice that will inspire identification among readers of all races. In this assessment, the epic serves the Republican empire by dramatically conflating medievalism and colonialism.

The colonialist metaphors used by Gautier, Paris, and Lenient serve to “decolonize” medieval France, a vital historiographical project in the wake of 1870. Anti-German medievalism made “France” appear separate from “Germany” as early as the fifth century. Among the most influential writers in this vein was Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, who had taught at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace until 1870. Fustel published several essays around 1870 that denied Germanic culture any formative role in France’s origins, despite the fifth-century Germanic occupation of “French” territory. Whereas the literary scholars (including Gautier) took for granted that France emerged from a double conquest by the Romans and the Germans, and from a fusion of races, Fustel sought to demonstrate that the Germanic tribes had not in fact brought any lasting cultural institutions, and were not even really conquerors. In Fustel’s view, a properly national understanding of medieval France was needed to end both internal strife and external challenges: while the Germans had unified their country through shared love of their past, the French fought amongst themselves over historical interpretation and had grown weaker as a result.96

Fustel’s method depends partly on the same emotional understanding of the nation expressed by Lenient, Paris, and Gautier. Indeed, the phrasing of a famous letter published by Fustel in October 1870 echoes through the December writings of Lenient and Gautier. Fustel proclaims pithily: “La patrie, c’est ce qu’on aime”—and since Alsatians loved France, Alsace belonged to France.97 Elsewhere, Fustel defines the nation in distinctly nonterritorial terms: “True patriotism is not love of the soil, it’s love of the past, it’s respect for the generations who have preceded us.”98 This combination of history and genealogy emphasizes communal continuity irrespective of a nation’s geopolitical contours. This definition of course targets the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. Indeed, Fustel draws the same parallel between German scholarship and German warfare as Lenient and Gautier: “This people has in erudition the same qualities as in war . . . Its historians form an organized army.”99 While the French public looked forward to ending German control of Alsace-Lorraine, Fustel set about reclaiming control of the medieval past. This turn to the Middle Ages aimed to counteract the negative effects of the recent conquest on the national psyche.

Fustel’s views of medieval history presage those of another historian who became an immensely influential theorist of French national identity, Ernest Renan.100 Fustel and Renan both challenged German justifications of the annexation of Alsace. Renan did so partly in agreement with the medievalists, eventually adopting Fustel’s anti-Germanic historiography of early medieval France. Renan echoes Fustel, Paris, Lenient, and Gautier by linking both the epic and colonialism to the emotions of national belonging.101 Renan moved quickly to embrace feeling, rather than territory, as the basis of national integrity: while he wrote in 1870 that France without Alsace was not France, in 1871 he declared: “A country is a soul, a conscience, a person, a living effect.”102 Likewise, he moved from an anti-imperial definition of the nation to a clear commitment to colonialism: “Large-scale colonization is a political necessity of absolutely first order.”103 Renan thus makes the same distinction as Paris between the oppressive “artificial” empires of other European countries and France’s “noble need” for expansion. The French nation, moreover, begins just prior to France’s first colonial endeavors, the Crusades: “As of the tenth century, Francia is completely national.”104 Bédier will characterize France’s origins in almost identical terms, positing a durable national integrity that also coincides with the genesis of the epic. Not incidentally, this nonterritorial definition of the nation provides the conceptual ground for creole national belonging: once “France” becomes more of a feeling than a specific territory, distant lands are as “close” as they feel.

Renan elaborates on his understanding of national identity in his famous 1882 speech at the Sorbonne, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation” [What Is a Nation?]. The speech follows closely the structure of Fustel’s 1870 letter, dismissing successively race, language, and history as bases for national belonging. In the end, only feeling remains: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle, a moral conscience.”105 In Renan’s argument, feelings of national unity emerge when people have forgotten their histories of conquest and racial mixing. Renan’s focus on feeling makes “consent” the basis of territorial jurisdiction—a clear plea for Alsatians to decide the fate of Alsace.106 Despite dismissing historical determinants, Renan maintains ancestor worship in his conception of national cohesion: “The cult of the ancestors is most legitimate of all; the ancestors made us who we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (I mean true glory), that is the social capital on which one builds a national idea.”107 And the “national idea” of France begins with the epic: “In the tenth century, in the first epics, which are such a perfect mirror of the spirit of the times, all the inhabitants of France are French.”108 While previously Renan had judged Roland lacking in beauty and Charlemagne “a course German stablehand,”109 the concerns of national identity after 1870 ultimately prompted a reversal—stripping the epic of Germanic associations and imbuing it with purely French culture. Renan thus participates in the diffusion of republican medievalism and epic nationalism after 1870.

Decades later, Bédier articulated a vision of early French history nearly identical to his predecessors who wrote in the 1870s:

The Middle Ages is the indefinite mixing of the supposed Aryans of the Saxon forest, the so-called sons of the She-wolf, the Gallo-Romans, the Hispano-Romans, the Celts of Great Britain, until the days when, around 1000, at last the five nations took some vague conscience of themselves, still uncertain of their fundamental being—France, England, Italy, Spain, Germany—which ever since have worked best for the good of men.110

Bédier here recognizes the absence of pure racial genealogies in Europe, while affirming the absolute integrity of national genealogies. The conquests that led to pan-European métissage long forgotten, nations emerged and have remained unchanged ever since. The “French people,” according to Bédier, is not an amorphous mass but an infinitely renewable fixed character transmitted from generation to generation; their emotions explain everything there is to know about the epic.111 The formation of this people’s collective “consciousness” remains somewhat mystical: neither Bédier nor Renan explains how or why it came into being in the tenth century. The broad similarities between Bédier’s summary of national origins and Renan’s, however, locate Bédier’s medievalism at the heart of French national thought. Conversely, Renan’s famous formulations consecrate the medievalists’ vision of national history, including its epic origins. The consistent recourse of all of these thinkers—from Fustel to Lenient to Paris to Gautier to Renan to Bédier—to a national identity founded on emotions illustrates how the events of 1870 opened conceptual space for both the Middle Ages and overseas territories to enter the national imaginary.

Alongside these definitions of the nation as a tenth-century phenomenon reflected in the epic, revisions to early medieval historiography also privileged the enduring integrity of ancient Gaul as France’s ultimate origin. Recourse to the Gauls racialized French identity, thereby strengthening national unity and minimizing the significance of the territorial losses of the Franco-Prussian war. Fustel, for example, installed the Gauls as France’s heroic founders, a view with immense appeal after 1870 (even if it contradicted archeological evidence).112 Commentators drew numerous parallels between the Gauls and the modern French as resistors of Germanic invaders.113 France’s Gaulish origins appear in numerous popular forms, including history books and public displays.114 The success of Gaulish nationalism can be measured by Charlemagne’s somewhat precarious status as a national hero in the 1870s (before the widespread influence of Roland): in 1878, the government of Paris criticized a proposed statue of him on the grounds that he was not a Gaul and therefore “foreign” to properly French tradition.115 France’s Gaulish origins became a matter of national policy in 1884 when Lavisse published the first edition of his history textbook, which popularized a Franco-Gaulish genealogy, “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois.” It offered all children of the empire a curriculum devoted to a French prestige anchored in the Gauls and the Middle Ages (“Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” still epitomizes the absurdities of colonial education and the mission civilisatrice).116 The Gauls also served to justify French colonialism: if Roman conquest had been good for them, then French conquest could be good for Africa.117 All of these arguments claim the earliest possible date for the “French Middle Ages,” which in turn serve as a model for later national and colonial projects.

Historians like Lavisse worked to integrate the Gauls and the Franks into a continuous national genealogy. Roland played a significant role in this process. Largely as a result of Gautier’s vigorous promotion of patriotic pedagogy, the epic became obligatory reading in French secondary schools in 1880 (for girls in 1882); the first translations for young children appeared in 1885.118 Gautier aspired to an exceptionally broad audience (including children, women, peasants, and factory workers), and hoped to inspire every citizen’s admiration and respect for France’s greatest epic—and for France itself, “the most epic of all the modern nations.”119 In preface after preface, and in the monumental revision of his Epopées françaises (1878–92), he extolled the virtues of a traditionalist Catholic nation inspired by the Middle Ages. Indeed, reformers of all kinds believed in the epic’s power to fortify national identity (although some complained that excessive reliance on German methods betrayed French values).120 Many tied the epic directly to the project of educating French youth about the importance of revanche against Germany.121 Others found that reading Roland provided children with effective lessons in citizenship: it could turn them from primitive foreigners (“ils vivent parmi nous comme des étrangers”) into civilized members of French society; it could also warn them about the exploitative excesses of the colonial mission to civilize the “inferior races.”122 By 1900, Roland anchored a patriotic literary history for all students in France, from primary school through university. The epic was thus an important part of the broader educational reforms that aimed to strengthen national cohesion as well as technical proficiency.

The first generation of students to experience these educational reforms included Joseph Bédier. In 1880 Bédier began his final year at the Lycée de Saint-Denis, where his teachers placed great emphasis on the scientific and moral advantages of the new methods;123 he went on to pass one of the first agrégations (1886) to include Roland. Bédier’s initiation into the discourse of epic nationalism, however, began much earlier: in 1878, at the age of fourteen, he received a copy of Gautier’s Roland when his teachers awarded him top honors in French composition. Whether Bédier received a copy of the hefty 1872 edition (with the introduction signed during the siege of 1870) or one of the later editions designed for schools (4th and 5th ed. 1875, 6th ed. 1876), he would have read Roland through a patriotic prism formed by Gautier’s nationalism, colonial pedagogy, and elite creole society. Bédier later located the origin of his interest in medieval studies in this formative encounter with Roland, under the mango tree of his family home in Saint-Denis.124 In this moment, the epic generated creole medievalism—and the creole reader recognized his culture in the epic.

As a professional medievalist, Bédier went on to argue strenuously in favor of Roland’s purely French identity. He concluded that the poem represented France’s most “national” text:

We find in it what is most specifically national in our poetry—the classical sense of proportions, clarity, sobriety, harmonious force. We recognize in it the spirit of our nation, just as well as we do in the work of Corneille [seventeenth-century dramatist].125

Bédier here echoes the vigorously nationalist esthetics of Lenient, who also compared Roland’s language to Corneille’s, and Roland himself to Corneille’s Cid.126 Like Lenient and the others who wrote about Roland around 1870, Bédier lauded the epic’s ability to fortify national feeling in the modern era.127 When he arrived in Germany to study in 1887, he encountered a monumental reminder of the national rivalries sparked by the text he had first read a decade earlier in Saint-Denis: a giant statue of Roland in the town of Halle (“half fierce, half weak”).128 He later opened his first course at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1893) with the wistful observation that Germany had ten times more specialists working on medieval France than France itself.129 Later, in the Légendes épiques (1908–13), he directly attacked German theories of French literary history. Critics heralded the four-volume work for its timely contribution to French national interests.130 Bédier even cast the virulently patriotic Gautier as excessively germanisant because he had accepted that the epic had a Germanic base.131

Bédier’s anti-Germanism mirrors that of other scholars of his generation, who continued the scholarly politics that emerged from the national traumas of 1870.132 He makes the same comparisons between philology and battlefields as Lenient and Gautier—only for him superiority has shifted to the French side.133 In a sense, Bédier cast the entirety of his international career in terms of revanche: he saw his teaching appointment in Fribourg as a way of resisting German dominance on the faculty; he recommended France do more to counter German influence in the United States; his greatest aspiration in 1913 was a professorial chair at a repatriated University of Strasbourg: “And we’ll see [Alsace’s return], soon, when we will have given them a licking, which is easier than they think.”134 Beyond academic concerns, Bédier expressed negative ethnic prejudices: downplaying events in the Balkans in 1912, he affirmed that “the only thing that lasts in our national sentiment is our hatred of the Germans”; during the war he referred to German philologists as “pigs”; he declared himself more proud of his wartime work than of his Légendes épiques “because it will make the Germans scream with anger and humiliation”; after the war, he publicly vowed to maintain his hatred, “I am resolved, for my part, never again to have anything to do with a German: any German, for as long as I live, will remain for me a Kraut.”135 Bédier reportedly considered the war an ongoing national conflict and remained vocal on matters of patriotism.136 His positions may have been known in Germany, for the Nazis reportedly visited the Collège de France soon after entering Paris in 1940, seeking documents related to the recently deceased Bédier.137

Bédier contributed to epic nationalism throughout his war-related writings. While working at the Ministry of War on Les crimes allemands (presented as official proof of German war crimes),138 Bédier also adapted the epic Légende d’Aliscamps into a short play, La chevalerie, which opened at the Comédie Française at the beginning of 1915. La chevalerie, like Roland, makes killing and dying beautiful. Focused on the ritual dubbing of three noble brothers, the play extols the virtues of serving France with the sword: the young men are all impatient to begin shedding blood (their own and that of their enemy); they resist service in a peaceful court in favor of battle, defying their fathers’ wishes by swearing never to retreat. In both La chevalerie and Roland, idealized violence underwrites the legitimacy of French national action. When Bédier died in 1938, memorialists praised both La chevalerie and Les crimes allemands (even though the play had a relatively short run); Marcel Prévost specifically advised the French to re-read Les crimes allemands: “It will help us predict the future.”139 The simultaneity of La chevalerie and Les crimes allemands, as Alain Corbellari points out, symbolizes the intimate union of Bédier’s medievalism and his politics.140

Bédier also adopts an epic voice in one of his last military publications, “La pression allemande sur le front français” (1918). He begins by praising French virtues as “hereditary, the kind that can’t be improvised.”141 This racialist view of the national character, in which only autochthonous Frenchmen participate, derives from an idealized medievalism. In conclusion, Bédier masterfully replaces his individual voice with that of the “national soul”: after a detailed statistical analysis of how reduced resources have not weakened Germany’s military performance, Bédier urges France’s leaders, in the name of mass public opinion, not to hesitate to raise more troops.142 By claiming to speak for the whole citizenry, Bédier renders his personal conviction collective. He thus writes in an “epic” vein, expressing ideals that have remained unchanged since the Middle Ages.

In this period of acute nationalism, Bédier produced his edition of Roland, first published in 1922. Bédier expresses epic nationalism most succinctly in his presentation of extracts from the forthcoming book. He situates the poem squarely within the patriotic practice of epic criticism initiated by Lenient, Paris, and Gautier. He begins by stating that he has designed the edition, not for scholars, but for the general reader: “it is fitting that all educated people read the old poem and find it pleasing.”143 Reading Roland, in other words, is the most natural activity for educated citizens. Even if they read the translation, they will connect with France’s epic origins. For Bédier asserts that originals shine through even the most tendentious renderings. The original language, moreover, possesses an aristocratic style “impregnated with the influences of Latin Antiquity” [“imprégnée des influences de l’antiquité latine”]. This phrasing places Roland in the direct lineage of the Aeneid, underscoring the transfer of cultural prestige from Rome to France. Bédier goes on to posit the pure unity of the French language at the moment of the poem’s composition:

This style is already that of a classic, it is already a noble style. As of the beginning of the twelfth century, the France of the first Crusades moves toward creating, constituting in dignity, above the diversity of its dialects and patois, this marvel, a national language, that of its elite, a literary language.144

Bédier here nationalizes the very beginnings of French literature on the basis of a language for which there is no direct evidence in the Oxford manuscript of Roland. To the degree that broad-based conventions for literary expression developed in northern “France” during the twelfth century, they hardly constitute a national sentiment. The glories of Roland’s French style thus derive solely from the projections of epic nationalism.

The efforts of literary scholars, historians, and new generations of writers formed by the pedagogy of patriotic medievalism combined to make “epic” and “national” virtual synonyms in the course of the Third Republic.145 This conflation appears succinctly in Senator Fabre’s 1901 translation of Roland, “épopée du patriotisme,” dedicated to the national army. Epic nationalism surfaces with particular verve in publications celebrating French heroism during the war of 1914–18.146 Various writers refer specifically to Roland, while French generals held up epics (and Bédier himself) as laudable sources of military valor.147 Admirers praised Bédier’s own book, L’effort français, as a great epic honoring French soldiers: “France, the sweet France of Roland, has never been more noble, more crusading.”148 These comments directly praise Bédier’s fusions of chivalry, nationalism, and literature.

The epic also expressed the national significance of colonialism, as evidenced in the widespread use of such phrases as l’épopée coloniale and l’épopée africaine.149 The Leblonds, in fact, defined colonial literature as essentially epic in nature.150 As French conquests overseas accumulated, they were often cited as proof that France did indeed have a “tête coloniale,” contrary to the popular image of Frenchmen as sedentary and geographically ignorant.151 The nationalization of the epic genre, and of Roland in particular, thus proved doubly valuable: it refuted assumptions about France’s incapacity for both epic literature and colonial action. Quite probably Roland gained its “disproportionate” role in national discourse in part through its depiction of a North African enemy—an image congenial to France’s pursuit of dominance in Algeria and other regions.152 The epic genre thus proved instrumental in reforming French identity on multiple levels, including the military, the historical, and the academic.153 As the epic became national, colonialism gained an ancient heroic lineage, and medievalism a republican pedigree.

In the course of the Third Republic, historians and literary scholars forged powerful connections among the Middle Ages, its imperial legacies, and the ideals of modern France. Their lessons reached a broad and impressionable audience through the education system—including the young Bédier. As a colonial subject educated in both Saint-Denis and Paris 1870s and 1880s, Bédier is both a product and a shaper of republican medievalism. His scholarship ultimately ratifies the nationalization of the epic begun by Gautier, Paris, and others in the 1870s, ensuring its political vitality through the first half of the twentieth century. The colonial genesis of Bédier’s medievalism, moreover, provides an important index of the formative roles of both colonialism and medievalism in the consolidation of republican nationalism. Shuttling between Réunion and Paris, Bédier’s creole medievalism captures the dualistic tensions of French republicanism—a prestigious yet barbaric Middle Ages, a valuable yet primitive colonial empire, a nation defined by emotions yet dependent on territorial conquest. Bédier’s creole medievalism, while unique, participates fully in these broader republican dynamics.

Colonialism and medievalism together form the ground from which creole medievalism emerged and the fertile terrain in which it took root. Medievalism, inflected with colonial memory, could address the very foundations of the national imaginary. Steeped in idealized visions of aristocratic tradition, a Réunionnais creole could approach the Middle Ages as an indigenous patrimony. From the perspective of Réunion, where elites identified themselves as faithful echoes of primordial French culture and champions of colonial expansion, the contours of the imperial nation look particularly broad and deep. They run continuously from Roncevaux to Réunion, converging on the uncanny scene of a young creole reading Roland under a mango tree in Saint-Denis.