Pax Gallica: bearing the mantle of Rome
France’s association with Rome was somewhat different. It began during its first overseas empire, as Malik Ghachem has shown in his discussion of the formulation of the Code Noir, some clauses of which were consistent with Roman law.28 It was not, however, an attempt to emulate or draw comparisons with Rome.
For this reason, no doubt, the demise of that empire, which coincided with the French Revolution of 1789—1799, did not produce any work comparable to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Rather, during the First Republic the Jacobins referenced their concept of a virtuous republic on classical Greece and Rome. Given their education in the Classics, it is quite natural that such allusions to Rome should occur among scholars and politicians, particularly when it came to Republican ideals. The Revolutionary period spurred the desire to spread France’s newly developed ideological ideas, and the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century were in some ways an extension of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that spread French ideas across Europe. Napoleon himself was perceived as a latter-day personification of a Roman Consul, intent on militarily spreading Revolutionary ideals across Europe. (Indeed, if the frieze on the walls around his tomb in the Invalides is anything to go by, that image has endured.) France’s self-perception was certainly that of a civilising force comparable to Rome but its notion of civilisation was different from that of Britain. To be sure, there were references to Roman law and pacification, but unlike Britain, which envisioned its civilising project framed by law, order and British structures of governance, France sought to emphasise itsLatinite, and the power of that Latinite as an extension of Frenchness, to embrace the peoples it was colonising. It thus marked out its imperial role as an heir to Rome rather than its equivalent.
In much the same way as Roman citizenship was a privileged status defined by established rights and bestowed on certain conditions, so too was French citizenship. Acquiring the right degree of Frenchness to qualify for bona fide citizenship was a tool of assimilation as was Roman citizenship a tool of Romanisation. The perception that France was assuming the Roman mantle was privileged not only because of its language, its republican values and its assimilatory drive but also because Algeria, the ‘jewel in its colonial crown’, was centrally situated on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. France would seek to spread its influence around the Mediterranean to create its own version of a Mare Nostrum. As the popular author and amateur historian Honore Fisquet, put it, ‘The Mediterranean, now a French lake, has regained its liberty.’29 Attempts had been made to deploy the concept of Latinite elsewhere, but they had been framed differently and had met with less success than the Maghreb, which, with its multiple sites of Roman ruins and its Roman past, became the real focus of France’s affiliation to Rome.30The officers, scholars and scientists who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in 1798 had been awed by the Ptolemaic and Roman ruins they found there. That the ruins had endured for so long without being totally eroded by the desert wind and sands was perceived as a sign of the endurance of the civilisations that had constructed them.31 In spite of its negative outcome, the Egyptian expedition set the tone for developments in Algeria.32 Not only did the French find ruins in relatively better condition, but they also had Roman texts that foreshadowed their experiences of conquest and ethnographic categorisation and definition.33 Tacitus’ Germania, in which scholars found parallels between the Germanic peoples and the Kabyles, Sallust’s Jugurtha as the prototype of wars with the Berbers and Livy’s account of Rome’s Mediterranean empire were all consulted not only by the scholars who established themselves in the area, but also by the officers who came with or in the immediate aftermath of the conquest.34 Although the conquering army started by damaging the ruins in their endeavours to remove the stones for their constructional needs, such activities were brought to an end by archaeologically minded officers and scholars who started to catalogue the ruins within a decade of the conquest.
The 1837 capture of Constantine, the Roman city of Cirta and hence a significant archaeological site and a potent symbol of Rome’s legacy to France, prompted the Academie des Inscriptions in Paris to issue directives as to how archaeological, historical and geographical research was to be conducted in the area.35 The establishment of a series of scholarly societies, such as the Societe Historique Algerienne (1851) or the Societe Archeologique de Constantine (1853), which were concerned with the history and preservation of Algeria’s past, in particular its Roman past, fed into the idea that France was reclaiming the area for Western civilisation. As the Rector of the Academy of Algiers, Gustave Boissiere, put it, ‘we [in Algeria] were called upon to take up the civilising work (I'oeuvre civilisatrice) of the Romans, under conditions which I believe are less facile and not as favourable, [but] we nonetheless have the attraction if not the advantage of their example’.36 Boissiere was convinced, furthermore, that the Algerians accepted, even if reluctantly, the French role as the ‘legatees of Rome’.37The civilising mission, however, was not Rome’s only legacy. The French army followed in Rome’s martial footsteps: ‘it may be said that there is scarcely any country in our African possessions, however distant, however barbarous it may be, in which there is proof that they did not settle before us. Wherever out soldiers have ventured they have found... some trace of their valiant predecessors.’38 Gaston Boissier, the renowned classicist and Academician, from whose work this quotation is taken, was convinced that French patterns of warfare, in their failures and successes, were similar to those of the Romans. Indeed he pointed to similarities between Jugurtha and Abd-el-Kader and emphasised Metullus’ role in turning the tide against Jugurtha with his razzias and scorched-earth tactics.39 These methods were among those that were eventually used to subdue the local population.
Boissier also highlighted the fact that the flexible columns adopted by Bugeaud to surround the enemy were modelled on his Roman predecessor, Tacfarinas.40 The French military may have employed Roman strategies and tactics, but they had outstripped the Romans in the speed with which they managed to dominate the area; what had taken the Romans centuries they had managed in a mere sixty years.41Boissiere and Boissier, and scholars and authors like them, were writing well after the military regime in Algeria had been ousted and replaced by a civilian administration. It was a symptom of the ideological conviction that flowered during the fin-de-siecle that Algeria was the site of the emergence of a new Latin race. The chief ideologue of this notion was Louis Bertrand about whom I have written extensively elsewhere.42 I shall, therefore, restrict myself to a few observations. The idea of the emergence of a new Latin race had been tentatively raised in 1873, but it was Bertrand who developed it into an ideology, stressing that the non-French immigrants into the colony from the northern shores of the Mediterranean, all ‘Latins’, were developing into a hard-working virile race that would serve to regenerate France, which he deemed was in the throes of decline. Bertrand had been struck by the ruins at Tipasa in Algeria, which he had first visited in the company of the archaeologist Stephane Gsell. He had immediately identified with the site, sensing that Tipasa and ruins like it were the architectural, cultural and historical manifestation of the ‘true’ North Africa, a Latin Africa that the French oeuvre was reclaiming for the West. Bertrand, who became one of the literary lights of the colony and was eventually inducted into the Academie Franqaise, wrote a series of fictional and non- fictional works in which he explored and presented his ideas on the Mediterranean lands, most especially Algeria, as the site of Latinite.43
By the twentieth century, when Tunisia and Morocco had been enfolded in the French- occupied Mediterranean lands, the notion that France had come into its heritage was reinforced.
Tunisia was, according to Sir Lambert Playfair, the British consul-general there,one large archaeological museum... Triumphal arches, city gates, ruins of temples. Mausolea, and Roman forums, are still found in their classical grandeur, [although] some have fallen before the savage inroads of the railroad constructors, who look upon Roman ruins as quarries of good bricks.44
By 1912, however, the French had the situation in hand thanks to the new Director of Antiquities and Fine Arts, Alfred Merlin, ‘a man of great knowledge and experience’ who had been sent out to Tunisia by the French government to take charge of the preservation of classical ruins not only in Tunisia but in all of North Africa.45 Merlin’s support of the archaeological activities in Tunisia contributed to the enrichment in classical artefacts of local museums, especially that of the Bardo.46 In Morocco it was Louis Chatelain who was appointed curator of the sole Roman site, Volubilis. Edith Wharton was enchanted when she visited it in 1918, stating that Chatelain was so absorbed by his task as curator that ‘as soon as conditions permit, every inch of soil in the circumference of the city, will be made to yield up whatever secrets it hides’.47 Merlin and Chatelain were expanding on the archaeological mission, first established in Algeria by Adrien Berbrugger (1801—1869), founder of the Societe Historique Algerienne, editor of its journal, the Revue Africaine, and archaeological enthusiast who assiduously promoted archaeological and historical scholarship and activity in the colony.48
Tunisia and Morocco, which were protectorates rather than extensions of France, as was Algeria, were not subject to the same ideological utterances linking the Roman and French colonial oeuvre. Nonetheless, by the end of the First World War the two countries formed part of an extensive French Mediterranean territory. In the interwar period the Ecole d'Alger, whose adherents included Albert Camus, promoted the idea of the Mediterranean as a unifying concept formed by language and culture.49 Although Camus envisaged all the peoples of the Mediterranean coming together in a spirit of unity, it was the Romance languages and cultures, not the Arabo-Berber ones, which would cement that unity.
Camus, in much the same way as Bertrand, found intellectual sustenance at Tipasa to which he returned multiple times, writing about his identification with the site in Noces.50The positive evaluation of Rome’s oeuvre in Africa and its connection to France was not merely a justification of the French presence in Algeria; it was also an endorsement of the Western imperial tradition as opposed to the Eastern conquests of the Arabs and the Turks. If, for the settlers, it was a way of creating unity where little existed and stabilising an inherently unstable situation, the Roman ruins provided sites of ‘ancestral memory’ and established Algeria as a region of France whose historical and cultural traditions, like those in France, were of ‘Latin’ origin. The concept of a modern Latin Africa as a continuation of Roman Africa promoted the Eurocentric narrative of cultural superiority and fostered the notion of Western primacy when it came to the force of civilisation.