According to Krzysztof Pomian in his essay, “Francs et Gaulois,” included in Pierre Nora’s iconic work, Les lieux de mémoire (1984–92), “the sixteenth century, in French culture, [was] the great century of the Gauls.”1 As Pomian resumes, the Gauls became the subject of particular historical interest during four main periods: the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, during which the kings of Gaul replaced the Trojans as ancestors in the French historical imagination; the second half of the sixteenth century, when humanist scholars scoured ancient texts for information on what came to be thought of as the first French people; the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the social and political tensions of the French Revolution were transposed onto the question of the relationship between the Gauls and the Franks; and the period from the 1820s to the First World War, during which a newly historical approach to the Gauls could be enlisted to help contrast a civilized, French identity with German aggression and barbarism.2 At each stage, therefore, the Gauls provided a medium through which to fashion a historical identity rooted in the ancient past that served the particular needs of the moment. Indeed, in focusing on the sixteenth century, Dubois emphasizes the polyvalent character of the ancient Gauls, whose Celtic background could be used to feed a universalizing “celtomanie,” whose predisposition for migration could support French imperial ambitions, and whose presumed ethnic unity could underwrite the notion of the French as an original, chosen people with an innate noble character and superior cultural disposition.3 Despite their uses, however, the Gauls reportedly did not prompt intense historical study at all times. While at least sixty separate works were published on the subject of the Gauls between 1509 and 1599, by the seventeenth century French historians came to focus more exclusively on the Franks. As the founders of the French monarchy, the Franks came to mark the beginning of French history.4
As the previous two chapters have already demonstrated, urban historians of the sixteenth century were just as eager to claim the ancient Gauls as the founders of their communities as their contemporaries were to establish the original Gallic character of the French people as a whole. For local scholars, the Gauls were particularly useful, since while ancient commentators had discussed their united customs and combined territories, each Gallic people retained a separate identity and area of control that tied them firmly to a specific region and thus marked them as the progenitors of a particular, local population. This specificity may help to explain why, as interest in the ancient Gauls faded among historians focusing on the French kingdom as a whole in the seventeenth century, attention to the Gallic past nevertheless remained strong among local writers.5 An Histoire de l’ancienne Bibracte, appresent appellée Autun (1688), attributed to Nicolas Nault, provides an excellent example. Although Daniel Ligou has claimed that Burgundian authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focused exclusively on the Germanic Burgundians as the historical ancestors of the region, Nault dedicated an entire work to describing the greatness of the capital city of the Aedui before its destruction at the hands of Caesar. In a florid style, he described Bibracte as older than Rome, Corinth, or Carthage and claimed all of the Gallo-Roman monuments of Autun as the work of the original, Gallic residents.6 As his unlearned foray into ancient history suggests, a popular appetite for the ancient Gauls as the progenitors of a distinguished local historical tradition persisted well into the reign of Louis xiv, a king who nevertheless strongly favored the Franks.7
This desire to identify the particular origins of individual communities, to exalt their past greatness, and to emphasize the continuities between their ancient character and contemporary importance did not prevent urban historians from claiming a strong French identity as well as defining a local one. Dolan’s assertion that historical works focusing on antiquities helped to form urban identities but failed to contribute to a national consciousness is off the mark.8 Rather, as Yardeni has noted, the development of a French national sentiment in the early modern period was rooted in strong provincial patriotisms. Local writers firmly emphasized the Frenchness of their city or province, just as they aligned the characteristics of this French identity with the qualities they valued in their particular region.9 Thus, urban historians reacted to and incorporated in their works widely expressed ideas about what made the French kingdom and its people unique (and best), just as they sought to contribute to the discussion by foregrounding their own communities’ signal achievements.
It is therefore of some consequence to ask how urban historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries defined France as a historical entity, and particularly how they employed the ancient history of the Gauls, the Gallo-Romans, and the early Christian church in their own areas to establish the crucial elements of Frenchness in their own times. Even as local scholars focused on the history of their own regions, they embedded this discussion within a set of assumptions about the natural extent of the French territory and the composition of its people, as they had existed in the ancient past and endured in the present. These preexisting views meant that although local historians were eager to employ the geographical and administrative divisions of Gaul as they had been conceived from the time before the Roman conquest to the end of the Gallo-Roman period to make arguments about current political hierarchies and cultural relationships, their understanding of the evolving organization of Gaul in late antiquity was subject to numerous misconceptions. Some of this misinterpretation and misdating was highly useful in particular circumstances and was thus at least partly intentional. Other misunderstandings no doubt arose from the same insistence on historical continuity that influenced the debate over the Gallic origins of particular cities, discussed in chapters 4 and 5. Yet, whether particular arguments about the ancient past of individual regions and towns were specious or genuine, they were all deemed of fundamental importance to the place that these localities held within the larger French kingdom. Urban historians may have been focused on arguments about the original, Gallic inhabitants of specific communities, but they used these arguments to assert their fundamental Frenchness and loyalty to the French crown. Further, despite a general tendency to see the Romans as conquerors who prevailed over the Gauls more through craft than superiority, local scholars saw the geographical and administrative divisions of Roman Gaul as essential to understanding and justifying current privileges and jurisdictions. In particular, since the organization of the Gallican church was thought to mirror Roman provincial divisions without exception, Gallo-Roman history became essential for understanding the French church as it was embodied in the sacred traditions of individual communities. Most of this ancient history practiced at the local level thus helped to explain the importance of the city or region in question to the wider French experience, both sacred and secular. Yet, the study of the ancient Gauls could also provide local historians with a way to reflect on and even reject accepted beliefs about the French kingdom. In particular, in focusing on the aristocratic organization of some Gallic territories, local scholars created an intellectual space in which they could imagine other political possibilities for France even if they made no specific arguments about the need for change.
This chapter, then, first examines how urban historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined Gaul and categorized its people in the period before Caesar and under Roman rule, paying attention to the ways in which they represented the continuities or disjunctions between Gaul and France. It then focuses on the importance of Roman categories for understanding the nature of the French church. The Gallo-Roman past was seen as a fundamental guarantor of the legitimacy of local religious traditions and hierarchies, so that claims for a community’s status in late antiquity could be translated into arguments for its current ecclesiastical prerogatives. Finally, the chapter turns to the question of how local historians used the Gallic past to reflect on political structures. While most urban historians emphasized their community’s fundamental loyalty to the French crown, some used the ancient Gauls to delve into the strengths of aristocratic forms of government. In all cases, ancient history was germane to the notion of “Frenchness” and the ways that local communities expressed and contributed to that idea.
1 Ancient Gaul and the Nature of France
In placing their particular communities within the greater construct of ancient Gaul, local historians found it necessary to establish the boundaries of this domain and to define the nature of its people. Here, Caesar provided explicit help, since in book 1 of his Gallic War, he had described Greater Gaul as the territory inhabited by the Belgians, the Aquitains, and the Celts, the latter of whom the Romans more specifically called the Gauls. The boundaries of this Greater Gaul extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhine River and from the English Channel to the Pyrenees Mountains, the Cévennes Mountains, and the Alps. Caesar’s Gaul thus differed from early modern France by including a large territory to the east, up to the Rhine, and by excluding Provincia, the Transalpine province conquered by the Romans by 121 bce, corresponding to the regions of Languedoc, Provence, and Dauphiné.10 The Roman general’s definition of Gaul also notably excluded any mention of Cisalpine Gaul, the region of northern Italy inhabited by Gallic peoples that the Romans had conquered and consolidated in the third and late second centuries bce.11
When French historians sought to define the limits of ancient Gaul, they all turned first to Caesar’s description but nevertheless tended to reimagine Gaul as an earlier version of France. For instance, in 1579 Fauchet followed Caesar in describing Gaul as being divided between the Belgians, Aquitains, and Celts, but nevertheless held that Gaul since the most ancient times had comprised the region extending from the Rhine and the Alps to the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees, to the Atlantic Ocean, to the English Channel. The land of the Celts had thus included the provinces of Languedoc, Provence, and Dauphiné, and if Caesar had failed to include these areas in Gaul, it was because the Romans had since established dominion over them.12 For Fauchet, then, there existed a notional or natural Gaul that was distinct from the entity described by Caesar and that certainly included southern France. This tendency to insist that the natural southern boundary of Gaul had always been the Mediterranean was especially prevalent among historians of the Midi. In 1633, Guillaume Catel thus began his Memoires de l’histoire dv Langvedoc by insisting that his province “had always been included in the general limits of the Gauls in all of the partitions and divisions that the ancients made of them” and described the Mediterranean as one of the “true and seemingly natural bounds” of Gaul.13 To this general rule, however, Poldo d’Albenas, historian of Nîmes, formed the exception. Describing Caesar’s tripartite division of Gaul, Poldo d’Albenas explained that it was composed of Guyenne or Aquitaine, lands inhabited by the Belgians, and a region “properly called Gaul, or France, that the Celts, or true French possess.”14 Not only was Poldo d’Albenas willing to exclude the inhabitants of Belgian Gaul and Caesar’s Aquitaine from the category of true French people but he also did not hesitate to acknowledge that Nîmes, as a city in what became Narbonnaise Gaul under Emperor Augustus, could easily have been described as an Italian city by Stephanus of Byzantium in the sixth century.15
Whereas for some historians of southern France the problem was that Caesar had excluded this region from Gaul, for historians of the area inhabited by the ancient Belgians, the concern was to establish that their Gallic ancestors had been as fundamentally French as the inhabitants of Celtic Gaul. Caesar had certainly included the Belgians in his Greater Gaul, but he had also reported that they, the Aquitains, and the Celts differed from each other in their languages, institutions, and laws, seemingly creating a barrier to viewing them as a single, united people. In his description of the Remi as the original inhabitants of Reims, Bergier was thus particularly concerned to argue for their essentially French, civilized character. It was certainly true, Bergier explained, that the Remi were Belgians, but not only did they compose the Belgian people who resided closest to the Celts but their territory even crossed the border between Belgian and Celtic Gaul. Moreover, as Strabo explained, the Belgian peoples who resided closest to the Celts were not only more civilized than those who lived closer to the Germans but they were also indigenous, whereas other Belgians had migrated from the east and conquered the lands they claimed. For that reason, Bergier felt justified in dividing Belgian Gaul into two regions: nearer-Belgium (Belgique citerieure), including the provinces of Champagne and Picardy, and further-Belgium (Belgique ulterieure), comprising everything else. Whereas the peoples of nearer-Belgium, like all the other Gauls, possessed walled towns, with fortifications, temples, houses, and public buildings, the inhabitants of further-Belgium, like their German forebears, did not.16 Bergier’s concern to identify the Remi as an indigenous people exhibiting the full array of Gallic cultural practices clearly reflected his desire to establish Reims as a fully “French” city from the beginning and to deny any claims for the existence of a separate, Belgian kingdom that could jeopardize that French status.
The ways that urban historians approached the question of Gallic migrations and resettlement further reveal their attachment to an ancient Gaul that fundamentally prefigured the French kingdom. While all French historians who focused on the Gauls gloried in the story of Gallic expansionism and conquest related by Livy in his History of Rome, the historians of Bourges were particularly proud to relate it.17 According to Chaumeau, at the time that the ancient Gallic kings held their seat at Bourges, King Ambigatus sent his two nephews (or was it his sons?), Sigovesus and Bellovesus, abroad at the head of over three hundred thousand Gauls to claim new territory. While the followers of Sigovesus headed to Germany, Bellovesus and his troop crossed the Alps into northern Italy, where they founded Milan, chased the primitive Tuscans from their mountains, and sacked Rome.18 That this account came from Livy made it virtually unimpeachable. Historians might quibble at the composition of the group of Gallic peoples who followed the intrepid captains or, like Sébastien Rouillard, complain that Livy got it wrong in saying that the Berruyers had held dominion over Celtic Gaul and that this honor in fact belonged to the Chartrains.19 Yet, even Catherinot, who held that the early Roman historians were not reliable and that Livy in particular was more a poet than a historian, employing fables to elevate his own people and put down others, still accepted his relation concerning Ambigatus and his two enterprising nephews.20 Yet, despite this virtually universal acceptance that the tribes of Celtic Gaul had colonized northern Italy long before the Romans had become a great power, no French urban historian sought to include Cisalpine Gaul within their definition of France. The Italian Wars (1494–1559) having been definitively concluded at the time that most of these histories were written, it seems that while the idea that the northern Italians owed their origins to the French was a source of pride, it did not lead to any real attempts to claim their territories for France.
The same was true for the lands inhabited by the ancient Germans. Chaumeau pointed out that when Sigovesus and his followers set off for Germany, they established themselves there and produced many descendants, including the Franks.21 Here, the historian from Bourges was reflecting a very common argument among local historians in the sixteenth century that the Franks were not a separate people of Germanic origin who subdued the Gauls by force, but rather a group of Gallic origin who then “returned” to France to liberate their brothers from Roman domination.22 Thus, Rubys, historian of Lyon and procureur of the consulat of his city, expressed his inveterate dislike of all things Italian by arguing that the Romans had never held legitimate sovereignty over Gaul. Having only subdued Gaul through trickery, the Romans saw their oppressive regime overturned by the Franks, who, since they came from the same stock as the Gauls, exercised a completely different sort of political authority from their predecessors. For Rubys, this ancient history demonstrated that the French kingdom was an entirely independent entity and owed no obligations to the Holy Roman Empire.23 Saint-Julien applied the same kind of reasoning to the Burgundian people. According to Saint-Julien, the idea that the Gauls, Franks, and Burgundians had originated from the Germans was preposterous. Criticizing Du Tillet and his adherents for suggesting such an ancestry, he remarked, “truly, they have demonstrated the acts of true fathers, and they should be praised for it, if Medea deserves the name of a good and dear mother.”24 Rather, the notion that these peoples were of German origin derived from the false ambitions of the German humanist Beatus Rhenanus and his circle, when it was evident that the Burgundians, far from being foreign conquerors, “are true Celtic people, indigenous and first sons of the same region they presently inhabit.”25 They had long ago departed from the area, returning to reclaim it and free the Gauls from their Roman subjection. Indeed, this idea of the original inhabitants of Gaul later returning to liberate their brothers from the Romans remained appealing for local historians into the seventeenth century. Thus, Labbe, a respected Jesuit historian and geographer, echoed Chaumeau in asserting that Segovesus and his followers had traveled into Bohemia, Bavaria, Austria, and Swabia, just as their descendants, angered at seeing their ancestral lands of Gaul falling prey to all kinds of barbarians, returned under the salutary name of the Franks to chase them out.26 Yet, while local historians were eager to argue that the ancient Gauls had traveled into Germany and colonized the region, their point was never to argue that the lands east of the Rhine by rights belonged to ancient Gaul. Rather, their concern was to demonstrate that the Franks or the Burgundians, who had established dominion over all or part of France, were not of foreign, Germanic origin, and that the French kingdom was therefore entirely free from any imperial claims of dominion.
Local historians’ ideas about the boundaries of ancient Gaul thus largely conformed to their assumptions or anxieties about what constituted the France of their day. The ancient Gauls, and especially those of Caesar’s Celtic Gaul, were taken as the ancestors of the French, and even if they had overcome other ancient populations and founded colonies throughout Europe, their true homeland still remained within French borders. Many authors then used this Gallic history to argue that the original freedoms of the ancient Gauls were preserved, even restored, with the arrival of the Franks. Of the same stock as the Gauls and once hailing from the same territories, the Franks returned to liberate Gaul from Roman domination and to inaugurate a legitimate system of political authority embodied in the French monarchy. This narrative seemingly had the inevitable effect of portraying the Romans as a foreign invading force and casting their centuries-long rule as illegitimate and tyrannical, and a good number of local historians were inclined to see them that way. Yet, at the same time, the status of particular cities and regions under Roman rule still helped to confer a significant amount of historical prestige. It was important to urban historians to be able to assert that their community had once formed the administrative and cultural capital of a Roman civitas or, even more, the metropolitan city of a Roman province. Thus, if Roman rule was often represented as essentially foreign, the administrative divisions of Roman Gaul were nevertheless crucial in establishing local identities and in arguing for special rights and privileges. Because of the overlap between Roman administrative divisions and the organization of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in France, Gallo-Roman history became especially important for asserting local ecclesiastical prerogatives and fleshing out religious traditions that were said to date back to the early Christian church.
2 Roman Aquitaine and the French Church
Equally important to local historians as setting the overall boundaries of ancient Gaul was establishing the administrative divisions of Roman Gaul as they had existed from the time of Augustus to the coming of the Franks. As the case of Clermont demonstrates, historical continuity constituted an important value and assumption for local scholars, so they were eager to point to the political authority and cultural significance of their city or province under the Romans as evidence supporting its enduring importance and special privileges under the French monarchy. Yet urban historians were faced with a problem that in some cases could also be enlisted as a great advantage: the administrative history of Roman Gaul was extremely complex, and an understanding of its organization during the early empire did not provide a useful guide for later centuries and vice versa. This complexity actually provided French historians with considerable latitude in forming historical arguments based on the Gallo-Roman past. This period, it must be remembered, excited a great amount of interest among groups of local humanists and erudite scholars, who in addition to writing historical works, were often avid collectors of antique coins, statuary, and inscriptions unearthed from local soil. Therefore, despite French historians’ desire to define a Gallic past that would predate and rival the history of Rome, Gallo-Roman history still exerted great appeal and was invested with enormous prestige. That the foundation of the early Christian church in France dated to this period—whether that evangelization was conceived as first occurring in apostolic times or the third century—meant that it was even more important to understand the political organization under which it first took root. For urban historians, then, the Gallo-Roman record fleshed out, contextualized, and lent legitimacy to local historical viewpoints, especially ones relating to the community’s ecclesiastical rights and special religious traditions. Yet, local religious narratives, in attempting to place their subjects within the Roman context, also wound up providing historians with a series of dubious “facts” for understanding Roman Gaul. Just as these authors could invest their local origin stories with an odd juxtaposition of historical discernment and enduring fable, their accounts of their community’s experience under the Romans often rested on an uneasy combination of evidence from classical sources on the one hand and legend from ecclesiastical narratives on the other. Both worked together to reinforce urban historical traditions, sacred and secular, that had been developing over a considerable time and became fully articulated in the early modern period.
The ways that local historians conceived of Roman Aquitaine and the uses to which they put their descriptions of the province provide an excellent example of how the Gallo-Roman past could be enlisted to support arguments for specific contemporary advantages but also become imbricated with numerous local religious traditions in western and central France. Roman Aquitaine inspired a great amount of historical interest but also debate among French scholars, largely because its geographical boundaries and administrative history were so complex. Most enthusiasts of Roman Gaul understood that the province of Aquitaine under Augustus in fact bore little similarity to the Aquitainian Gaul identified by Caesar. Whereas Caesar’s Aquitaine was a small region, bounded on the northern side by the Garonne River, under Emperor Augustus its territory was greatly extended up to the Loire River to the north and the Allier River to the east. Including a great deal of territory that Caesar had once identified as Celtic Gaul, Aquitaine during the early empire formed one of four Gallic provinces, including Lyonnaise Gaul, Belgian Gaul, and Narbonnaise Gaul (the former Provincia Romana).27 This definition of Aquitaine drew much interest from local writers, likely because its boundaries resembled later demarcations of the region, notably the kingdom of Aquitaine created by Charlemagne for his son, Louis le Débonnaire, in 781, and the duchy of Aquitaine amalgamated by the Plantagenets in the twelfth century. Thus, in producing histories of Aquitaine, local scholars such as Bouchet in the early sixteenth century and Pierre Louvet in the mid-seventeenth began their works by carefully defining its Augustan boundaries.28
Yet if the concept of greater Aquitaine, based on the demarcation of the province under Augustus, drew historians’ interest, it was the later division of this area into separate provinces that proved especially significant for local writers. The chronology of this division was not easy to fathom, and indeed, it is still highly speculative. Aquitaine seems to have kept its Augustan boundaries until the late second or early third century, when the area that would later become Novempopulania was separated off. During this time, the capital of the region was successively transferred from Mediolanum Santorum (Saintes), to Lemonum Pictonum (Poitiers), finally to Burdigala (Bordeaux). By contrast, the city of Avaricum Biturigum (Bourges) underwent a serious decline in this period.29 By the early fourth century, the region of Aquitaine had been assigned to the diocese of Vienne and comprised First Aquitaine, Second Aquitaine, and Novempopulania, but there is evidence that the two Aquitaines had been reunited by the 340s–350s. In particular, Ammianus described it as a single province around 355, at the same time that he assigned the city of Bourges to the province of First Lyonnaise.30 By the time of the redaction of the Notitia Galliarum in the late fourth or early fifth century, however, this list of the seventeen Gallic provinces and their metropolitan cities with their respective civitates again identified First Aquitaine, with its capital at Bourges, and Second Aquitaine, with its capital at Bordeaux, both located in the area of the Seven Provinces.31 There seems to be no definitive explanation for why Bourges, and not Bordeaux, became the capital of First Aquitaine.32
Much of this chronology was not apparent to French urban historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, in arguing that Livy had been wrong to assign rule over all of Celtic Gaul to the Bituriges, Rouillard claimed that the Bituriges had only held empire over Aquitainian Gaul—a major misconception no matter what period he meant.33 Louvet, for his part, held that it was Augustus who divided Aquitaine into two parts, with their capitals at Bordeaux and Bourges. Although the highest prerogative should by rights have belonged to Bordeaux, which was in “true” Aquitaine, and not to Bourges, which was only in an accessory part of the province, he explained, the emperor, by this arbitrary measure, wanted to demonstrate that the province had been created by his hand.34 As Louvet’s assertions reflect, the question of the relative status of First and Second Aquitaine and their respective capital cities was of great import to local historians in the early modern period. Since the eleventh century, the archbishops of Bourges and Bordeaux had been embroiled in a dispute over whether the archbishop of Bourges held primacy over the entire region of greater Aquitaine or could merely exercise metropolitan rights over First Aquitaine.35 In the early modern period, this disagreement was still very much alive, with the archbishop of Bordeaux refusing to attend an ecclesiastical council convened by the archbishop of Bourges in 1584 and judicial proceedings still pending in Rome in 1612.36 Therefore, as numerous local scholars weighed in on the issue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the division of Roman Aquitaine and the relative status of the cities of Bordeaux and Bourges in the Gallo-Roman period took on prime importance.
After the city of Bourges had lost its sovereignty due to Caesar’s victory and its condition was reduced to a province by the Romans, they established presidents there to govern it, as they did in the other provinces of Gaul. And as Bourges was the capital of the territory of the Berruyers, and metropolitan city of First Aquitaine, it was the seat of this Roman president.37
For Thaumas de la Thaumassière, there was thus a natural progression from Bourges’s position as the important Gallic head city of Avaricum to the metropolitan city of First Aquitaine and no recognition that centuries had intervened between the two situations. This status also made manifest the archbishop’s right to the primacy of Aquitaine. As his friend and fellow historian Catherinot put it, Bourges’s primacy constituted the twentieth antiquity it owed to the period of Roman rule.38 Examining the logic of the administrative hierarchies of Roman Gaul, many scholars were inclined to side with the adherents of Bourges. Thus, Pierre Bergeron commented that since Bordeaux was the metropolitan city of Second Aquitaine while Bourges headed First Aquitaine, “for this reason it seems that the primacy of Aquitaine so hotly debated between these two archbishops must belong to that of Bourges, since it is in First Aquitaine.”39 For Coquille, as well, Bourges’s primacy corresponded to an obvious historical pattern. As the spiritual divisions of the Catholic Church in France were established according to the Roman administrative divisions, Lyon, the metropolitan city of First Lyonnaise, gained primacy over all of Lyonnaise Gaul, just as Bourges, the metropolitan city of First Aquitaine, held primacy over all of that region.40 It should be noted that even if Coquille’s assertion that ecclesiastical hierarchies generally followed the Roman administrative map was certainly correct, his notion that certain metropolitan bishops were accorded primacy at this time was a major anachronism.41
The historians of Bordeaux naturally refused to accept this logic. In the work he dedicated to the subject of the primacy, Pascal-François de la Brousse, judge in the Parlement of Bordeaux, asserted that when the Romans divided Gaul into provinces, these areas had equal stature and authority, rather than having Second and Third Aquitaine (i.e., Novempopulania) subject to First Aquitaine. Further, it was untrue that Bordeaux and its region were actually founded by the people of Bourges.42 Here, La Brousse was alluding to the related debate over whether a group of the Gallic Bituriges (later to be known as the Bituriges Cubi), who had their head city at Avaricum, had traveled to the west to establish a new territory as the Bituriges Vivisci with their center at Burdigala (Bordeaux). The Bordelais humanist Vinet was certainly inclined to accept this possibility, but it was elevated to an article of faith in Bourges.43 Jean de Boisrouvray, a lawyer in the presidial court at Bourges, thus linked the idea that Bordeaux was once nothing but a colony of Bourges with the assertion that Bourges had possessed an archbishop long before Bordeaux even hosted an episcopal see.44 The implications of the theory were thus obvious: if the ancient Berruyers had colonized the Bordelais region, then Bordeaux’s secondary status was assured. This kind of argument naturally fed into more protracted attempts to compare the size and importance of the two cities under Roman domination, with the goal of assessing whether the Romans could really have meant to promote the interests of Bourges over Bordeaux in making it the capital of First Aquitaine. The idea that Bordeaux, a city with a parlement, should be subject in the ecclesiastical realm to Bourges, a town with a mere presidial court, certainly rankled residents of Guyenne.45 However, as Jérôme Lopès, canon of the cathedral of Bordeaux, pointed out, it was not instructive to compare the two cities during the early Christian period or as they currently existed, but rather as they stood during the reigns of the emperors Constantine and Theodosius the Elder (sic), when, he held (incorrectly), the distinctions between primates and metropolitans were being made. At this time, he noted, the fourth-century author Ammianus described Bordeaux as the first city of Aquitaine, followed by Clermont, Saintes, and Poitiers, but nothing specific was written about Bourges.46 Interestingly, Lopès had lighted upon one of the principal testimonies to the notion that Aquitaine had been reunited as a single province in the middle of the fourth century and possibly excluded Bourges at this time, but, of course, he was not aware of this situation.
The history of Aquitaine in the Gallo-Roman period was thus of great significance to urban historians concerned to promote or to deny the prerogatives of the archbishop of Bourges over the archbishop of Bordeaux, and their tendency to compress a series of transformations in Roman administrative divisions and in Gallican ecclesiastical organization made these arguments seem all the more relevant. Yet, in addition to feeding this debate, the character of Roman Aquitaine under the first emperors was incorporated into a developed religious tradition that united the biography of a local saint with the ambitions of a specific urban community.
This religious tradition focused on the life of St. Valérie (or Valeria), a saint with close ties to St. Martial, and contributed to efforts to catapult the town of Limoges to the status of capital of all of Aquitainian Gaul. By making Valérie the daughter of Leocadius, supposed proconsul of Gaul and governor of Aquitaine (and First Lyonnaise?) under Emperor Claudius (r.41–54 ce) (or was it Augustus?), local clerical writers enhanced the evidence for the apostolicity of St. Martial, while supporting the ambitions of Limoges to rival Poitiers and Bourges in both political and ecclesiastical importance. The figures of Valérie and her father, Leocadius, possessed a remarkable resiliency and came to inform much historical writing on Aquitaine even outside of Limoges. Thaumas de la Thaumassière even enlisted Leocadius in his arguments for the primacy of Bourges. Against the argument that the archbishop of Lyon had actually exercised primacy over all of Gaul, he cited the evidence of a Roman president of First Aquitaine and Lyonnaise Gaul, named Leocadius, who resided in Bourges in the year 252.47
St. Valérie, a virgin martyr for the faith, became central to Limoges’s historical tradition through a gradual process. Her cult seemingly first developed in the ninth and tenth centuries at Limoges, but her story then received considerable development by the 1030s, thanks in part to the efforts of Adémar de Chabannes, Benedictine monk at the monastery of Saint-Martial of Limoges, to promote the apostolicity of his abbey’s patron saint. By this time, Valérie had become the aristocratic daughter of Suzanna, both of whom were converted to the faith by St. Martial. Valérie then took a vow of chastity and refused to marry her pagan fiancé, Duke Étienne, who in a rage ordered her to be executed by a servant for her noncompliance. After her death, she carried her severed head to St. Martial, and the servant died suddenly as she had predicted in the presence of Duke Étienne. Awed by these miracles (and/or by St. Martial’s resuscitation of the servant), Duke Étienne also converted to Christianity and performed many excellent works for the faith.48 For example, he was credited with donating the funds with which St. Martial founded a hospital for the poor.49 Although this progressive elaboration of St. Valérie’s story held great significance for St. Martial’s sanctity, it did not yet speak to Limoges’s political prestige. This connection seemingly occurred thanks to Bernard Gui, the famous Dominican inquisitor, who in addition to his well-known inquisitorial manual wrote an account of the saints buried in the diocese of Limoges in 1305–7 and a “Speculum Sanctorale” in the 1320s. According to Jean-Loup Lemaître, Gui was the first to present Valérie as the daughter of Prince Leocadius and Suzanna. In his version, Leocadius had been sent to Gaul by Emperor Augustus and was confirmed as Prince of Gaul by Tiberius (r.42 bce–37 ce). He then established himself in Limoges, the first city of Gaul, where he took the title of duke, and had Valérie for a daughter. After Leocadius died, Emperor Claudius sent Étienne to Limoges and ordered him to marry Valérie.50
Once Valérie had been established as the daughter of Leocadius, subsequent discussions of her life greatly accentuated her position within a distinguished line of rulers of Roman Gaul. By Jean Collin’s account in the 1670s, the Roman emperors had always valued the province of Limousin and thus granted Limoges numerous privileges. Augustus honored the city with his name (Augustoritum Lemovicum) and established there the general bureau for tax receipts for all of Gaul. The proconsuls also normally resided there, including Duratius, Senebrunnus, Lucius Capreolus, Leocadius, and Junius Silanus. This last proconsul fell in love with Valérie and gained the permission of the emperor to marry her, but the betrothal ended with her glorious martyrdom and Silanus’s conversion. On his baptism, Silanus took the name of Étienne, thus resolving any disagreements over his identity.51 By the seventeenth century, therefore, the life of St. Valérie not only demonstrated the miraculous powers of St. Martial but also contained a specific argument about the importance of Limoges during the early empire. According to the speech that avocat du roi Descoustures made before Henri iv in 1605, already mentioned in chapter 4, these details showed that Limoges possessed all the marks of a second Rome, and as St. Peter was establishing the Roman Christian community, St. Martial was evangelizing Limoges.52 In reality, Limoges was never the seat of a Roman bureau for tax receipts (that honor fell to Lyon), and as we have seen, it was never the capital city of Augustan Aquitaine. Rather, it held no greater position than being the civitas-capital of the Lemovaci, the local Gallic people whose territory was confirmed as an administrative unit after the Roman conquest. Yet, just as these details from the ancient past helped to flesh out the historical specificity of the saint’s life, the manuscript lives of St. Valérie collected in the treasury of the cathedral of Limoges added enormous legitimacy to the city’s otherwise highly questionable claims for historical preeminence in the region.
The figures of St. Valérie and her father, Leocadius, were meant to challenge the historical predominance of Poitiers and Bourges over Limoges in several ways. First, the ring of St. Valérie was reportedly used in the ceremony to confirm Richard Plantagenet, count of Poitiers, as duke of Aquitaine in the twelfth century, and a later version of her life specified that on his return to Limoges from fighting alongside Emperor Claudius, Duke Étienne appointed a count for Poitiers.53 Second, by claiming Leocadius for Limoges and St. Martial, local writers were contradicting the role he was said to play for Bourges and St. Ursin, the latter city’s first bishop. According to Gregory of Tours, Leocadius was the leading senator of Gaul who, when approached by the first Christians of Bourges for a suitable place to worship, gave them his house in Bourges for a pittance. This house subsequently became the cathedral.54 Leocadius’s son, Lusor, led a holy life and was buried in Déols, a village in the territory of Bourges. His tomb then became the site of numerous miracles.55 Thus, Leocadius was an important figure in the early Christian history of Berry, and the attempt to transplant him to Limoges questioned this religious tradition as well as all of the claims of Bourges to have been the capital of First Aquitaine.
Given these implications of the life of St. Valérie as it was elaborated at Limoges, it is surprising to note that the history of the virgin martyr and her father surfaced repeatedly in local histories written in Bordeaux, Poitiers, Bourges, and Châteauroux. In Bordeaux, the “Livre des bouillons,” the fifteenth-century register of urban privileges discussed in chapter 2, contained an origin story holding that the city had been founded long before the birth of Christ by the Roman emperors Titus (r.71–81 ce) and Vespasian (r.69–79 ce) (sic). Later, at the time that St. Martial came to Bordeaux, a descendant of King Cenebrun held the throne. He converted to Christianity at his death and had one daughter (presumably, Suzanna), who married the count of Limoges. Together, they had one daughter, Valérie, who refused to marry Étienne, nephew of the Roman emperor, who executed her for her resistance.56 In Poitiers, Bouchet, procureur and member of the city council, happily incorporated Leocadius into his history of Aquitaine. Drawing on a history of St. Valérie, written in beautiful Latin, he identified Leocadius as first sent to Gaul by Emperor Augustus and then as king of Aquitaine under the rule of Tiberius. As king, Leocadius established his residence in Limoges, which at that time, Bouchet did not hesitate to assert, was one of the principal cities of Second Aquitaine. He then married Suzanna and had a daughter named Valérie.57 Shortly afterward in Bourges, Chaumeau also devoted a chapter on the governors sent to Berry by the Romans to Leocadius, prince of Gaul under the reign of Tiberius and father to St. Valérie. Yet where Bouchet saw no problem in following his Latin source, Chaumeau found many difficulties in following Bouchet. First, although the Poitevin placed Leocadius at Limoges, Chaumeau, following local documents, firmly planted him in Bourges. As governor of Burgundy and Aquitaine, Leocadius certainly frequented the first city of his principality at Lyon, but, given that Bourges was the second city, he actually passed the greatest amount of his time in Berry. Second, Chaumeau was troubled that Bouchet’s version, supplemented by local documents going back two hundred years, did not agree with Gregory of Tours’s information, since by Gregory’s account, Leocadius had lived during the reign of Decius (r.249–51). To resolve the problem, he put forward the idea that perhaps there were two individuals by the name of Leocadius. This possibility also seemed problematic, though, since all of his sources agreed that Leocadius gave his house over to St. Ursin in which to found a church. In the end, Chaumeau decided to leave the discrepancy in chronology, and thus in the two historical traditions, unresolved.58
Part of Chaumeau’s difficulty was that by the sixteenth century, the idea of Leocadius, father of St. Valérie, developed at Limoges, had become mixed up with the local tradition of Leocadius, father of St. Ludre (Gregory’s Lusor) and scion of the line of the princes of Déols.59 The origin of the overlap may well have been the manuscript Histoire des princes de Déols written by Jean de la Gogue, prior of the abbey of Saint-Gildas at Châteauroux, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. While La Gogue did not mention St. Valérie as the daughter of Leocadius, he very likely borrowed the idea that the Roman had been named as governor of parts of Burgundy, Lyon, and Berry in 42 bce from the Limoges tradition. He then identified Leocadius as the ancestor of the later princes of Déols.60 Chaumeau certainly consulted this manuscript in the sixteenth century, and Thaumas de la Thaumassière owned it in the second half of the seventeenth century. Referring to this text, Thaumas de la Thaumassière seconded Chaumeau’s observations that its chronology conflicted with that of Gregory of Tours, but unlike Chaumeau he opted solidly for Gregory’s version. His certainty on the matter was no doubt enhanced by two trips he made to Châteauroux, where in 1657 he visited the tomb of Lusor in the church of Saint-Étienne of Déols and where in 1667 he was able to see the tomb of Leocadius recently discovered in the same church. Yet, although he rejected La Gogue’s dating, he retained the idea that Leocadius had been governor of Aquitaine and Lyonnaise Gaul.61 Indeed, Severus mentions a Leucadius, governor of some part of Gaul in the late fourth century, but if this reference influenced Thaumas de la Thaumassière or any of the other local historians in their identification of Leocadius as a governor, they failed to mention it.62
The fullest evidence for the confusion of the two traditions, though, comes from the Chronique des princes de Déols, written by Father Péan, friar in the Franciscan convent of Châteauroux in the mid-seventeenth century. Like Chaumeau before him, Péan acknowledged that the two traditions concerning Leocadius were contradictory, but unlike his predecessor, he confidently asserted that there had been two individuals by that name. The first, a Roman named Leocadius of Deoulx after his original lordship in Italy, governed all of Burgundy and Aquitaine, married Suzanna, and had a daughter named Valérie, while the second, reported by Gregory of Tours, was first senator of Gaul and lived during the reign of Decius. Although Péan described this second Leocadius as the one who donated houses he owned in both Bourges and Déols to become Christian churches and as the father of both St. Ludre and one Caemusellus, who would ultimately father the line of the princes of Déols, there was still some confusion in his account of the two men. If the second Leocadius was the lord of Déols where he had one of his palaces, then it is unclear why the first was the prince of an Italian territory called Deoulx and why the subtitle identifying Leocadius as the founder of the princely house of Déols preceded the section on the earlier Leocadius.63 Did he envision the first Leocadius as the ancestor of the second, or had he merely elided the two traditions?
Whether local writers were fully conscious of the discrepancies between the two historical traditions surrounding the figure of Leocadius or not, all of these examples show that it was of great import to flesh out the identity of an individual who was described only as a “senator of Gaul” by Gregory of Tours. Placing him within the context of the social and political constructions of Roman Gaul, and particularly of Aquitaine, added weight to the traditions being elaborated by successive generations of monks and cathedral canons at Limoges, Bourges, and the abbey of Déols. Conversely, these hagiographical details then helped to inform the history of Roman Aquitaine. Once these traditions appeared in print, they became available to a wider array of readers and could be reported and used by other historians who logically should have rejected them. Their widespread use suggests that local writers were eager to incorporate any information they could glean on this important period in the history of their city, region, and church, especially since the character of Roman Aquitaine had such important implications for the status of French cities and ecclesiastical hierarchies in the early modern period. As we have seen, local historians largely misunderstood the administrative divisions and governing practices of the Gallo-Roman period, but that did not prevent them from seeing it as a fundamental link in the history of the French kingdom and the Gallican church.
3 Gallic Aristocracy, French Monarchy
For most local French historians, writing about the Gauls and the Gallo-Roman period meant emphasizing the extent to which their community identified with and contributed to the French experience. Bourgueville, retired lieutenant général of the sénéchaussée at Caen, thus insisted on the Gallic and French character of the people of Normandy rather than accepting any descent or influence from the Danish or English, even if the region had taken on the name of its Norman invaders.64 Yet, while the historical role of each locality in shaping the French kingdom was of great importance to these writers, many noticed that the political organization of the Gauls did not match the practices of the French monarchy. Although some of the Gauls had indeed been under the rule of kings or princes, many Gallic peoples had possessed a more aristocratic form of government internally and participated in periodic assemblies to coordinate policy externally. While some local writers, such as Chaumeau, Jean Rogier, and Loisel, clearly took pride in the aristocratic “freedom” of their community during Gallic times, they disarmed any criticism of the French monarchy that this history might have suggested by emphasizing their town’s fundamental loyalty to the crown and tracing the descent of these political experiences to the civic, not the monarchical realm. For a few local historians, however, the aristocratic organization of the Gauls was of more than passing interest. For Munier of Autun, for example, theorizing about the Gauls in general and the Aedui in particular provided an important space for presenting aristocracy as an ideal political form, even if he did not extend the implications of this argument to contemporary France.
that all the other towns and cities modeled their states on and obtained their great privileges from her, according to her form and following her example. And so that this honor would not be hidden from men, those who everywhere enjoy privileges and freedoms, who are in large towns and bonnes villes, are called “bourgeois,” given that they are diligent imitators of those of Bourges.65
Bourgeoisie for Chaumeau constituted a true form of nobility, even if there had been a notable decline since ancient times in the public-mindedness of those chosen to administer city government.66 Bourges’s role as the inspiration for all participatory civic government, however, did not preclude the city’s fundamental importance for the French monarchy. Bourges had after all been the seat of the ancient Gallic kings, and Chaumeau hoped that one day, the kings of France would recognize that they owed their line and authority to his city, which could then return to its original status as best-loved and first city of France.67 The citizens of Bourges possessed such an important role in the French polity, since they had always been free and in ancient times made up the senate that had been charged with electing or deposing the king of the Celts.68 Thus, for Chaumeau, the fundamental freedom of the ancient Berruyers and their embrace of a participatory public life in no way diminished their importance to the French monarchy or their loyalty to the crown—indeed, the one enhanced the other.
Where Chaumeau made a connection between the privileges of the inhabitants of Bourges in ancient times and the form of polity enjoyed in all significant cities and towns of his own day, other local historians made a more direct link between the governing practices of the ancient Gauls and their city’s specific, contemporary administrative structures. As we will examine more fully in chapter 8, historians of Reims in the early seventeenth century laid great emphasis on the idea that their city government owed its origins to the political institutions of the Remi. Thus Caesar, according to Rogier, mentioned the Remois senate, and Pliny testified to the Romans having considered Reims to be an ally and thus allowed the city to live under its own laws in virtual autonomy. Further, once Reims submitted to the rule of the French kings, it retained its form of government, under the name of its échevinage.69 Rogier, as we will see, developed a critical attitude toward the actions of several French kings, but Loisel, an important lawyer in the Parlement of Paris who served as avocat du roi for the royal Chambre de Justice of Guyenne in 1582–84, relayed similar historical pretentions. In his history of his native Beauvais, Loisel explained that in the time of Caesar, the Civitas Bellovacorum was a republic governed by its senate. This form of government persisted throughout Roman rule and was conserved under other names under all three races of the French kings. Finally, when Louis vi came to the throne in 1108, the inhabitants of Beauvais asked him to confirm their commune. Thus, Beauvais’s commune, like Reims’s échevinage, turned out to be a direct descendant of the senate of the city’s Gallic ancestors. This participatory structure in no way diminished the town’s obedience to the French crown, though, since previous kings had recognized and confirmed it by charter.70
Where some local historians emphasized the aristocratic political organization of their city or region’s Gallic ancestors, Munier, avocat du roi in the bailliage of Autun, devoted virtually the whole first section of his Recherches et memoires servans a l’histoire de l’ancienne ville et cité d’Avtvn to the benefits of aristocracies ancient and modern, the ancient Gauls’ fundamental rejection of kingship, and the aristocratic political organization of the ancient Aedui. Written around 1620 but published posthumously in 1660 by Claude Thiroux, the husband of Munier’s granddaughter, the book drew heavily on works of French political philosophy of the previous century, including those by Jean Bodin and François Hotman, to provide a consistent vision of Gallic political organization and to argue for the special virtues and greatness of the local Aedui.71 Given this emphasis on the advantages of aristocracy, we might wonder how much the author meant his treatise to serve as an implicit criticism of Bourbon France. Nowhere, however, did this royal official, who inherited his office from his father and who firmly supported the royal claims of Henri iv during the League period, suggest that his discussion of the Aedui should inform contemporary politics, and that this work was published in 1660, not long after the Fronde, implies that none of his readers took it that way.72 Still, there were things that the French of his day could learn from the ancient Gauls, who, in Munier’s telling, emerged as one of the great peoples of the classical world.
Just as Munier glorified the Aedui for the extent of their power over other Gallic peoples and territories, he admired the ancient world for the vitality of its many aristocratic republics. Therefore, after detailing all of the peoples over whom the Aedui held sway before the arrival of Caesar, he turned to a description of the most successful aristocratic states, which ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle proclaimed as exhibiting the best form of government. God himself had instituted an aristocratic form of government among the ancient Hebrews, and Munier confessed surprise that no author had yet thought to describe the republic of Carthage. Capua and Marseille were also important aristocracies in ancient times, demonstrating the excellence and utility of this form of government. Among modern aristocratic states, Venice held pride of place, and its relevance to the French was especially great since the city had originally been founded by migrants from Vannes, in Brittany.73
The ancient Gauls, according to Munier, joined the ranks of these famous ancient aristocratic republics. In his view, “the universal form of the political government of all of the Gallic nations was purely aristocratic, that is to say, ruled and governed by the most virtuous, noblest, and wealthiest of the lordship and republic.”74 It is true, he pointed out, that in his Commentaries, Caesar described certain of the Gallic peoples as being governed by kings, princes, or magistrates, with some of the royal offices being hereditary and others elective, some lasting for life and others for a year. Despite this characterization of disparate Gallic political forms, however, Munier insisted that these states were monarchies only in appearance. In reality, none of these kings or princes held absolute sovereignty, since their authority was limited by laws and customs, making their titles more honorific than actual. “The ancient Gauls,” he explained, “were so jealous of their liberty that they did not even wish to hear sovereign kings spoken of, nor of royal and absolute power.” It was for this reason that the Arverni had revolted against Celtillus, the father of Vercingetorix, for attempting to make himself king, and chased Vercingetorix himself from their capital for the same reason.75 Far from accepting the rule of kings, then, the ancient Gauls were predisposed to revolt against anyone who attempted to assume a true royal authority. In making this argument, Munier demonstrated himself to be an excellent reader of both Bodin and Hotman, whose actual student he was for a time in Switzerland, most likely Basel.76 From Bodin’s Six livres de la République (1576), Munier acquired the idea that true sovereignty might not coincide with the outward form of a polity. From Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (1573), he retained the view that the Gallic kings did not necessarily hold unlimited authority. Since these kings were just as much beholden to the Gallic people as the people to their kings, the kingdoms of ancient Gaul should in reality be considered permanent magistracies.77
Of all the Gallic peoples, the Aedui had the best laws and the best form of state, comprising both a system of councils and a vergobret, or sovereign magistrate. According to Munier, the Aedui possessed a general assembly or Great Council composed of the nobility, which in cooperation with other, subordinate councils decided all matters related to justice, war and peace, treaties, and pardons. A senate, composed of princes, knights, and Druids, also met in order to deliberate and give advice, as did a privy council, of which the princes and magistrate were members. The senate, though, could not act independently, since this situation would have contradicted the sovereignty of the Great Council.78 This resemblance of the political constitution of the Aedui with other aristocratic states, especially the Republic of Venice, and with the aristocratic forms discussed in contemporary treatises of political philosophy, including Chappuys’s L’estat, description et govvernement des royavmes et repvbliqves dv monde (1585), was no accident. For Munier, it was important to describe the practices of the Aedui within the context of other republics that were well known and formally analyzed.79
Even while resembling other famous aristocratic republics, what particularly characterized the state of the Aedui was their office of vergobret. Holding the power of life and death over the citizens of the republic, he protected the state from harm and preserved its stability. Yet, although the vergobret held more authority than any other Gallic magistrate, there were nevertheless real limitations on his power. He was forbidden to leave the territory of the Aedui during his year of office and so could not command their armies directly. Further, a new vergobret was elected annually, and precautions existed to prevent one family from monopolizing the position. In short, the vergobret did not possess sovereign authority, but he could be described as a sovereign magistrate, if that term merely conveyed the idea that he was superior to all the other officials of the republic.80 For Munier, this organization made the Aeduan state the best that ever existed. “Here we ask the reader,” he wrote, “to consider if there were ever better and holier laws to assure the longevity of any state whatsoever, of the most famous republics of antiquity or modern times.”81
Thus, for Munier, a consideration of the political organization of the ancient Aedui provided the opportunity to praise aristocratic forms of government. The avocat du roi even held that the same rules that assured the fair distribution of offices among the Aedui should be respected in present-day France. Since the “geometrical” distribution of honors and offices guaranteed unity and agreement among citizens, applying the ancient Gallic rules that two brothers could not succeed each other in office or hold office concurrently would prevent numerous current abuses.82 Still, at no time did Munier suggest that aristocratic forms of government were preferable to monarchy, and as we will see in chapter 7, he followed his discussion of the ancient Aedui with a much more traditional account of the counts of Autun, emphasizing the times when these counts became the dukes of Burgundy or even the king of France, in the case of Rodolphe (or Raoul [r.923–36]), tenth count of Autun.83 Nevertheless, his preoccupations with aristocratic forms of government fit well with the tendency of many judicial officials to hold up the law as an important limit on royal power and to see its interpreters as integral participants in the administration of the kingdom. As Michael Breen has argued based on the case of Dijon, provincial lawyers of the first half of the seventeenth century had not yet abandoned a conception of limited royal authority, in which the monarchy was seen as judicial rather than administrative in nature and in which the king shared a part of his power with intermediary institutions.84 In Burgundy, in particular, local historians of this period were disposed to look back to the political structures of the ancient Gauls, particularly their assemblies, as the inspiration and precursor for the provincial estates.85 Likewise, in Autun, the indisputable stature of the ancient Gauls of the region provided Munier with the opportunity to reflect on these political forms, presenting them as historically intrinsic to the life of the town in the endurance of the office of the vierg (mayor), supposedly a direct and continuous descendant of the vergobret, but also largely cordoned off from present realities in a glorious but distant past.
Ancient history was thus of fundamental importance to local French historians. The characteristics of the ancient Gauls of their particular regions helped to define local identities, and the pinpointing of Gallic communities helped to root French towns on the threshold between the knowable past and immemorial time. Although this privileging of the ancient Gauls frequently cast the Romans as foreign invaders and oppressors, the Gallo-Roman period still functioned to provide a great deal of historical prestige. The period of Roman domination was, after all, one more link in the continuous and continuing story of local rights and privileges, and so urban writers turned to this period for proof of their locality’s ongoing significance, especially in comparison to rivals who were eager to claim similar advantages. As communities created or elaborated vital religious traditions, moreover, the elements of Roman political and social organization could become essential to enriching those narratives, just as the historical assumptions of hagiographical texts could help to define the urban past.
In establishing the importance of their own cities, towns, and regions, provincial historians were contributing as much to the question of what it meant to be French as to the historical tradition of their particular community. As they sought to identify the special historical attributes of their own locales, historians approached the question of origins and the ancient past with preconceived definitions of France as an entity in time and space and consciously or unconsciously imposed them on their more locally focused research. In a reciprocal manner, their findings in turn influenced their overall views. Thus, through the accretion of historical examples, self-serving arguments, and innovative or traditional methodology, provincial historians interacted with and contributed to an overall conception of French history and French identity. In the next two chapters, we will examine the ways that these urban historians interacted with well-known erudite scholars associated with the Republic of Letters in a mutual attempt to define these concepts through a focus on local history.
Krzysztof Pomian, “Francs et Gaulois,” in Les lieux de mémoire: III; Les France, 1, conflits et partages, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 41–105, at 65.
Ibid., 93 and passim.
Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois.
Pomian, “Francs et Gaulois,” 65, 67.
Yardeni, “La genèse de l’état”; Grell, “L’histoire en France.”
Nault, Histoire de l’ancienne Bibracte, 6–13; Daniel Ligou, “Du germanisme au celtisme: ‘Nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ vus par quelques historiens bourguignons du XVIIIe siècle,” in Nos ancêtres les Gaulois, ed. Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard (Clermont-Ferrand: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de l’Université de Clermont-Ferrand ii, 1982), 85–96. See chapter 4 for further discussion of the early modern debate over whether Autun was indeed on the site of the ancient Bibracte.
Jean-Louis Brunaux, Nos ancêtres les Gaulois (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 14.
Dolan, “L’identité urbaine et les histoires locales,” 292.
Yardeni, “Histoires de villes, histoires de provinces,” 113, 132–33.
On the Roman conquest of the lands of Provincia, see Charles Ebel, Transalpine Gaul: The Emergence of a Roman Province (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
Ursula Ewins, “The Early Colonisation of Cisalpine Gaul,” Papers of the British School at Rome 20 (1952): 54–71.
Fauchet, Recveil des antiqvitez gavloises et françoises, 1r–2v.
Guillaume Catel, Memoires de l’histoire dv Langvedoc … (Toulouse: Arnaud Colomiez, 1633), 3; Monpays, “L’image du Languedoc,” 37.
Poldo d’Albenas, Discovrs historial, 3.
Ibid., 20–21.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 29–31, 35–39, 52–54, 81–82, 94–108. While it might be supposed that Bergier was merely transposing the later Roman provinces of Belgica i and ii onto an earlier period, in fact his distinction between the indigenous, settled Belgians such as the Remi and the other Belgians, more recent descendants of invading Germans, echoed his classical sources—in particular Posidonius of Apamea, a second-century bce historian and geographer, on whose descriptions of Gaul Caesar, Strabo, and Diodorus of Sicily based their own. See Brunaux, Nos ancêtres les Gaulois, 37–41.
Livy, History of Rome, 5.34.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 8–21.
Sébastien Rouillard, Parthénie, ov histoire de la tres-avgvste et tres-devote eglise de Chartres; Dediee par les vievx drvides, en l’honnevr de la Vierge qvi Enfanteroit: Auec ce qui s’est passé de plus memorable, au faict de la seigneurie, tant spirituelle que temporelle, de ladicte eglise, ville, & païs chartrain … (Paris: Rolin Thierry et Pierre Chevalier, 1609), 24r.
Catherinot, La main de Scevola, 2–3, 9.
Chameau, Histoire de Berry, 13, 74.
Pomian identifies this view as proposed by Jean Bodin and illustrated by Claude Fauchet, but local writers such as Chaumeau voiced it before their works were available. See Pomian, “Francs et Gaulois,” 66.
Rubys, Les privileges, franchises et immunitez, 18–20.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, eiiii v. According to the Greek playwright Euripides, Medea avenged her abandonment by her husband, Jason, by murdering two of their sons. Saint-Julien was reacting to Du Tillet’s arguments in his Les memoires et recerches [sic] de Iean dv Tillet greffier de la covr de Parlement à Paris: Contenans plvsievrs choses memorables pour l’intelligence de l’estat des affaires de France (Rouen: Philippe de Tours, 1578), 1–9.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, 22.
Labbe, Histoire dv Berry, 12.
Drinkwater, Roman Gaul, 20–21, 93–94.
Jean Bouchet, Les annales d’Aquitaine … (Poitiers: Enguilbert de Marnef, 1557), 1v; Pierre Louvet, Traité en forme d’abregé de l’histoire d’Aquitaine, Gvyenne et Gascogne … (Bordeaux: G. de la Court, 1659), 3.
Drinkwater, Roman Gaul, 96, 102, 143.
Timothy D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 201–8, 212–13; Jill Harries, “Church and State in the Notitia Galliarum,” Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978): 26–43, at 26n3.
Harries, “Church and State in the Notitia Galliarum,” especially, 27, 41.
Camille Jullian speculated that Bordeaux may have lost its status as the capital of Aquitaine after Tetricus was declared emperor in Bordeaux in 271 and defeated by Aurelian in 274. See Camille Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule: VIII; Les empereurs de Trèves (Paris: Hachette, 1926), 23n3.
Rouillard, Parthénie, 24r.
Louvet, Traité en forme d’abregé de l’histoire d’Aquitaine, 3.
On this competition for primacy, see Georges Pariset, “L’établissement de la primatie de Bourges,” Annales du Midi 14 (1902): 145–84. The earlier article, Alfred Leroux, “La primatie de Bourges,” Annales du Midi 7 (1895): 141–54, is less useful, since it reproduces various misconceptions of the early modern period. Here, I do not discuss all of the many arguments for primacy between the two cities, but only those focused on Roman Gaul.
Bergeron, “Suite du voiage dItalie et dEspagne,” BnF ms fr. 5560, 485v.
Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 14.
Nicolas Catherinot, Antiqvités romaines de Berry … [Bourges, 1682], 7.
Bergeron, “Suite du voiage dItalie et dEspagne,” BnF ms fr. 5560, 485v.
Coquille, Les oeuvres de Maistre Guy Coquille, 304, cols. 1–305, col. 1.
The idea that some bishops held the authority of metropolitans over others developed slowly and was only recognized as an official principle at the Council of Turin in 401. Meanwhile, the episcopal map of Gaul evolved slowly, from the time that the principle of monarchic bishops was accepted in the third century until well into the fifth. The idea that each archbishop in the Gallican church should be subject to a primate and that primacy should be given to the city listed first for each province in the Notitia Galliarum developed by the ninth century. See Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule: VIII, 305–6; Frank D. Gilliard, “The Apostolicity of Gallic Churches,” Harvard Theological Review 68, no. 1 (January 1975): 17–33; Loseby, “Decline and Change in the Cities of Late Antique Gaul,” 80–83; Pariset, “L’établissement de la primatie de Bourges,” 148.
Pascal-François de la Brousse, Pro Clemente Qvinto pontifice maximo vindiciae, sev de primatv Aqvitaniae dissertatio … (Paris: Cramoisy, 1657), 40–41, 45–46.
Vinet, L’antiqvité de Bovrdeavs, Biii r; Privileges de la ville de Bovrges (1661), 5.
Jean de Boisrouvray de Marçay, Traicté, et decision de l’ancienne dispvte d’entre les archeuesqves de Bourges, & de Bourdeaux, sur la primatie d’Aquitaine … (Lyon: Vincent de Coeursilly, 1628), 58–61, 85. Boisrouvray should be distiniguished from the other historical writers from Bourges discussed here, however, in that he resolutely refused to grant that Roman Aquitaine had ever been divided into distinct provinces, treating this suggestion as a falsehood designed to favor the case of the archbishop of Bordeaux (Traicté, 74–75, 78–79).
Catherinot, Le patriarchat de Bovrges, 19.
Jérôme Lopès, L’eglise metropolitaine et primatiale Sainct Andre de Bourdeaux ou il est traité de la noblesse, droits, honneurs et preeminences de cette eglise avec l’histoire de ses archevesques et le pouillé des benefices du dioceze …, vol. 1, ed. Jules Callin (Bordeaux: Feret et Fils, 1882), 264–66.
Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 14, 504–5. The discrepancy in date will be explained below.
Lemaître, “Sainte Valérie, mythe ou réalité?,” 20–25; John A. Ermerson, “Two Newly Identified Offices for Saints Valeria and Austriclinianus by Adémar de Chabannes (Ms. Paris, Bibl. Nat., Latin 909, Fols. 79–85v),” Speculum 40, no. 1 (January 1965): 31–46.
Ruben, Registres consulaires de la ville de Limoges, 1:252–55.
Lemaître, “Sainte Valérie, mythe ou réalité?,” 27–32. It should be noted, however, that Daniel Callahan pinpoints the identification of St. Valérie as the daughter of Leocadius as coming from a twelfth-century vita, thus placing this addition within the context of Limoges’s attempts to promote itself as the traditional seat of the dukes of Aquitaine during Plantagenet rule. See Daniel F. Callahan, “Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Coronation Rite of the Dukes of Aquitaine, and the Cult of Saint Martial of Limoges,” in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), 29–36, especially 31–32.
Jean Collin, Histoire sacrée de la vie des saints principaux et avtres personnes plus vertueuses, qui ont pris naissance, qui ont vécu, ou qui sont en veneration particuliere, en divers lieux du diocese de Limoges … (Limoges: Martial Barbou, 1672), 677–88.
Chenu, Recueil des antiquitez, 473–75.
Callahan, “Eleanor of Aquitaine,” 29–33.
Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1974), book 1, chapter 31, 87–88.
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), chapter 90, 94–95.
Livre des bouillons, 473–77. It should be noted, though, that later historians of Bordeaux found this entire story preposterous, and Vinet rejected the earlier theories that King Cenebrun and his wife, Galene, were connected with the construction of Bordeaux’s two spectacular Roman monuments, the Palais (or Pilliers) Tutelle and the Palais Gallien. See Lurbe, Chroniqve bovrdeloise (1594), 5r; Cooper, “Histoire et archéologie de la Gascogne antique,” 157–58.
Bouchet, Les annales d’Aquitaine, 6v.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 68–70.
On this tradition as it relates to the founding of the abbey of Déols, see Jean Hubert, “L’abbaye exempte de Déols et la Papauté (Xe–XIIe siècles),” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 145, no. 1. (1987): 5–44, at 6–9.
A partial version of this text is available in [Amador] Grillon Des Chapelles, ed., “Histoire des princes de Déols seigneurs de Chasteau-raouls composée par Frère Jehan de la Gogue maistre en théologie et prieur de Saint-Gildas,” in Esquisses biographiques du département de l’Indre, vol. 3 (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1862), 269–383. Unfortunately, the portion of the text in which La Gogue identified Leocadius is missing, but Thaumas de la Thaumassière summarized this section in his Histoire de Berry, 504–5. Of the two local sources for the hagiographical tradition surrounding St. Léocade and St. Ludre on which La Gogue may have drawn, one is no longer extant and the other, a life of St. Ursin written in Bourges, mentions Leocadius simply as “princeps secularis militie.” See Hippolytus Delehaye and Paulus Peeters, eds., Acta sanctorum novembris … Tomus IV, quo dies nonus et decimus continentur (Brussels: Socii Bollandiani, 1925), 114.
Thaumas de la Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 14, 503–6, 513. These tombs are still extant and assumed to be those of Leocadius and his son, Lusor. See May Vieillard-Troiekouroff, Les monuments religieux de la Gaule d’après les œuvres de Grégoire de Tours (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976), 108–9 and figures 18–19.
Sulpicius Severus, dialogus 3, 11, 209 in Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum: Vol. I, Sulpicii Severi opera, ed. Charles Halm (Vienna: C. Geroldi Filium, 1866). According to Severus, Leucadius was a governor (of an unspecified location, but somewhere in Gaul is to be presumed) who supported Emperor Gratian (r.367–83) against the usurpation of Magnus Maximus (r.384–88). This chronology conflicts with both of the versions of Leocadius’s life presented by local historians.
[Amador] Grillon Des Chapelles, ed., “Histoire ou chronique des princes de Déols et barons de Châteauroux supposée être celle de Père Péan …,” in Esquisses biographiques du département de l’Indre, 385–429, at 388–92.
Bourgueville, Les recherches et antiqvitez, book 1, 4–5.
Chaumeau, Histoire de Berry, 42.
Ibid., 42–43.
Ibid., 8, 166.
Ibid., 7–8, 164, 169.
[Jean Rogier], Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’esheuinage de la ville de Reims: Et des iustes raisons qui ont meu les escheuins à maintenir ses droicts & sa iurisdiction; Pour seruir de factum au procez qu’ils ont contre Monseigneur l’Archeuesque duc de Reims & les officiers de son bailliage (Reims: Simon de Foigny, 1628), 6–7.
Loisel, Memoires des pays, 161–64.
Munier, Recherches et memoires, xiii–xvi.
H. [Harold] de Fontenay, ed., Deux lettres inédites de Jean Munier avec une introduction et des notes (Autun: Michel Dejussieu, [1864]), 3–4; Munier, Recherches et memoires, xiv, xvi.
Munier, Recherches et memoires, 32–47.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid., 56–58, quotation, 57.
Ibid., 110.
Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, ed. Christiane Frémont, Marie-Dominique Couzinet, and Henri Rochelais, 6 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1986), especially book 1, chapter 8, “De la souveraineté,” and chapter 10, “Des vrays marques de souveraineté”; Ralph E. Giesey, ed. and J. H. M. [John Hearsey McMillan] Salmon, ed., and trans., “Francogallia” by François Hotman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 155.
Munier, Recherches et memoires, 66–68, 93–103.
Munier specifically referenced Chappuys’s work in his discussion of ancient aristocratic governments, but Chappuys does not discuss the form of government of the ancient Gauls, being more interested in the Germans. See Gabriel Chappuys, L’estat, description et govvernement des royavmes et repvbliqves dv monde, tant anciennes qve modernes comprins en XXIIII. liures … (Paris: Regnault Chaudiere, 1598 [1585]).
Munier, Recherches et memoires, 110, 113–16.
Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 124–25. Bodin’s influence is evident in this statement, in that Bodin devoted a chapter of his Six livres de la République to the discussion of arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic governance. However, where Munier praises a geometrical distribution of honors, Bodin extolled a harmonic combination of strict equity and separate, analogous spheres. See Bodin, Six livres de la République, book 6, chapter 6, “De la justice distributive, commutative, et harmonique, et quelle proportion il y-a d’icelles à l’estat royal, aristocratique et populaire.”
Munier, “Seconde partie de l’histoire de l’ancienne ville d’Avtvn, contenant la suite de ses anciens comtes,” in Recherches et memoires, new pagination.
Breen, Law, City, and King.
Saint-Julien, De l’origine des Bovrgongnons, 39–41, 64–66; Claude Jurain, Histoire des antiquitez & prerogatiues de la ville & conté d’Aussonne, contenant plusieurs belles remarques des duché & conté de Bourgongne … (Dijon: Claude Guiot, 1611), 65–69.