The Power of Invasion in the Hierarchy of Races

Colonialist Discourse in the Uses of Antiquity by the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges (1928-1944)

Abstract

Founded in the 1920s by a group of teachers opposed to the educational reforms of the French Third Republic (1870-1940), the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges made History one of the central pillars of its intellectual reflection. Although composed of professors of philosophy, literature, and even physics, the past—especially Antiquity—occupied a privileged place in its political-pedagogical formulations. The group’s very name reveals this orientation: it’s an explicit homage to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), the 19th-century methodological historian and author of the renowned La Cité Antique. However, while historiography consecrated Coulanges for that work, the Cercle chose to revive lesser-known texts in which the historian outlines a continuum between the Latin spirit of Antiquity and medieval and modern France. Drawing on reception theory, this article proposes to understand such appropriation not merely as a symbolic dispute between Germanism and Romanism—intensified by the wars of 1870, 1914-1918, and 1939-1945—nor as a simple distortion of the historian’s original thought. It also seeks to investigate the colonialist elements underlying this rhetoric. It argues that Antiquity was mobilized, both explicitly and implicitly, as an instrument for reconstructing national identity in the face of wounds inflicted by revanchist nationalism and the contradictions of French colonial discourse—which required reconciling the experience of having been colonized in the past with the affirmation of France’s role as colonizer in the present.