This blog post is dedicated to two friends, who, in two different conversations, have convinced me that studying barbarians is not squarely an intellectual pursuit (it only mostly is...).
'L’HISTOIRE nationale est, pour tous les hommes du même pays, une sorte de propriété commune ; c’est une portion du patrimoine moral que chaque génération qui disparaît, lègue à celle qui la remplace'- Augustin Thierry1
Translation: National History is for the men of a country, some sort of common property; it is a part of the moral heritage that each disapearing generation entrusts to the one that replaces it.
The question of national identity and cultural background is one that concerns historians, especially historians of the medieval period. Indeed, the medieval period, and especially the Early Middle Ages have been vastly used in the past as means of defining a national identity. The barbarians were, to quote Ian Wood, used and abused. The nomenclature of some modern countries and regions take their name after a barbarian tribe: France is linked to the Franks, Burgundy, to the Burgundians, Lombardy, to the Lombards (or Langobards), Germany in English to the Germans (from the Roman province) and Allemagne in French to the Alamanni. Furthering the examples is a useless pursuit, what is important is the feeling that there is a direct continuity between ancient peoples and modern ones (there are other links: Attila and Verdi, .
Is there any truth to this? Let's rephrase this question: is there anything pertaining to French culture that would make Clovis French? Aside from territorial tenancy (and even then, his kingdom was more centered around the Pas-de-Calais and Belgium), not much. Furthermore, as Patrick Geary pointed out in Before France and Germany, French history begins with Asterix and jumps to Charlemagne, completely ignoring the Merovingians who are left with the sobriquet: Rois Fainéants or Lazy Kings. But this was not always the case, Augustin Thierry, in the 19th century starts his history of France not with the Celts, but with the Merovingians; so central were the Merovingians to French History that François Hotman, a french protestant of the 16th century, used this idea that the French monarchy originated in Merovingian times to criticize absolutism. In his view, the French monarchy originated from the Merovingians, and the Merovingians were Germanic. Germanic populations, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, were governed by assemblies. Thus, he concludes that absolutism is in some ways, anti-french.
Let us fast-forward to the twenty-first century. A friend of mine was at a welcoming party, and someone told her that the United States has a small cultural heritage, and went on to compare the US cultural heritage to Mexican heritage, which he traces back millenias to the Aztecs first, and then the Mayas. I am not a specialist of pre-colonial and colonial Mexico, so I will leave the examination of this claim to the specialists. However, if we are merely looking at territorial occupancy, the continental US were peopled as early as 11500 B.C., with the peoples of the Clovis culture (and possibly earlier). But if U.S. History books rarely mentions them, French History books have no qualms telling children about Lascaux, a 17,000 year-old cave in Dordogne (worth a visit). So why does the US not mention these cultures?
If one looks at US History, it generally begins with Jamestown, and Captain John Smith. A few chapters (maybe two) deal with pre-colonial America, but in very broad terms, focusing on the well-known Aztecs and Incas, and, to an extent the Iroquois and the Cheyenne. This may be due to the paucity of documents on pre-colonial America (as a whole), or perhaps this is due to the US national identity, that is, the US it is a country founded and built by colons. Emma Lazarus's famous poem The New Colossus echoes this view; addressing the 'Old World', the Statue of Liberty shouts: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.' Where did these poor come from? It is generally acknowledged that there were many waves of immigration, and included Spanish, English, Germans, Dutch, French, Irish, Poles, etc...; furthermore, more than fifty percent of the US was ruled by Spain, and yet, it is to England that the Americans trace their origins (and this makes sense for other reasons, but I am looking at territoriality).
The question then becomes, who decided this? Recently, the Texas Board of Education chose a new path for US history. While the Union was previously born of the Enlightenment, with ideas such as religious tolerance, and the separation of Church and State, it will now be a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While this is true (true, but one could also place the US in a Roman context...), this shift was decided by a panel of elected officials (most of whom are educators but not historians). For more information, see the New York Times article on the matter at www.newyorktimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html).
And this takes me back to ethnogenesis and ethnic identity in the Early Middle Ages. We have seen in a previous post that ethnogenesis is a theory that stipulates the following: 'The leaders and chiefs of “well-known” clans, that is to say, of those families who derive their origins from gods and who can prove their divine favor through appropriate achievements, form the “nuclei of tradition” around which new tribes take shape. Whoever acknowledges the tribal tradition, either by being born into it, or by being “admitted” to it, is part of the gens and as such a member of a community of “descent through tradition” (Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap, p.6). In other words, a group of people decide what is part of the history of their people, and what is not. When Jordanes, a sixth century Goth, wrote a history of his people, he based his account on the much larger work by Cassiodorus, which was commissioned by Theodoric.
What truth is there to this? Walter Goffart and others say none: 'Tales of the early Goths were eventually told […]; and they have nothing to do with our standards of credible history. We can repeat these stories in their proper chronological and cultural context as testifying to a highly civilized desire to reconstruct the origo gentis. But since such tales lay in the future, their contents would be out of place in a background to the Goths in fifth-century Aquitaine' (Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, p.8; he wrote another two books on the subject, the most famous, The Narrators of Barbarian History, is worth a read). Ultimately, I agree with Michael Kulikowski who states in his article 'Nation vs. Army: A Necessary Contrast?' that until we have a time machine, we won't know what the truth is. What matters is what people believed. And so the Goths in fifth-century Aquitaine may have no recollection of their Iron-Age past in Scandinavia, just like most French people have little concept of what life was in the Early Middle Ages, or how most American cannot fathom the hardships of living in post-Elizabethan England or pre-unification Prussia. So again, what is cultural background? It is a generational legacy, written by its elites, and in which is distilled what is valued by that generation.
Next: Slavery and the Slave Trade.
For further reading on ethnic identity:
Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des Civilisations (basically deals with what will be in French History text books).
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations
Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History
Ian Wood (forthcoming), Fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbarian Settlements
Bonnie Effros will also have a book dealing with the 19th century archeology of the barbarians.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
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