Such studies as have been carried out on humour across national or racial boundaries tend to suggest that, whilst the cultural environment may differ, and thus the content of humour may change from place to place, the processes themselves display a striking continuity. [1]
In what was to become, for perhaps half a century, the classic manual of French literary history, Gustave Lanson observed that the comic genius of the French people, l'esprit français, had two inferior relatives, one of which was l'esprit gaulois, the other le bon sens bourgeois .
For Lanson, l'esprit gaulois is 'fait de basse jalousie, d'insouciante polissonnerie et d'une inintelligence absolue de tous les intérêts supérieurs de la vie'; le bon sens bourgeois, 'terre à terre, indifférent à tout, hors les intérêts matériels, plus jouisseur que sensuel, et plus attaché au pain qu'au plaisir'.
The division between the highest form, le type français , and the lower orders (bourgeois and gaulois ) corresponds to a simplistic sociological division between the intellectuals, such as (presumably) Racine, Diderot or, for that matter, Lanson, representatives of l'esprit français , then the bourgeoisie and the workers, those in whom an aesthetically deplorable attachment to l'esprit gaulois has not been eradicated by a classical education dispensed at the better class of lycée . Anthropologists might choose to see in the Lanson classification a last vestige of the Indo-European trifunctionalism held to be evident in societies as diverse as medieval Europe and ancient India or Greece.
An appendix to Lanson's manual, written after the First World War, mitigates somewhat the apparently damn ing verdict on the two lower classes of French esprit : for, now, Lanson recognised that their contribution could not be overlooked. Henceforth, just as the mutilés de guerre had seats set aside for them on public transport, so the humour of the poilus of Verdun was grudgingly allowed a special place in the Pantheon of national humour: 'Il y a tout de même autre chose dans l'esprit gaulois et dans l'esprit bourgeois. On l'a vu dans la dernière guerre'.[2] Yet Lanson never really produces much of a definition of l'esprit gaulois. The impression given is that it is something so well known as not to need proper description, a form of coarse humour characteristic of the lower orders of society, and thus inevitably concerned with the baser instincts.
Consultation of dictionaries is not much more enlightening. The Trésor de la langue française suggests that l'esprit gaulois (as one might surmise) is so called because of a supposed connection with the Gaulois, or Celts, the occupants of France before the Roman settlements in the first century B.C. and the celebrated division of Gaul into three parts by Caesarean section. Gaulois (adj.), in the Trésor de la langue française , vol. IX, sub gaulois, B.3(b), is used metaphorically, to refer to something ' qui se présente sous un jour libre, plaisant, grivois, licencieux', this apparently being thought to be typical of these distant ancestors of modern lower-class Frenchmen. L'esprit gaulois is an enthusiasm for the cruder end of the comedy spectrum, risqué music-hall acts rather than the sophisticated donnish wit reputedly much in evidence in recondite disquisitions such as this. Further exploration, in French encyclopaedias, and particularly in the sub-genre of encyclopaedias of literature, uncovers a further (and revealing) point of reference.
The true spiritual home of l'esprit gaulois , we are told, is in the Old French fabliaux , short, comic verse texts. These, for Lanson's generation, were naturalistic, literal accounts of everyday life which present, inter alia, l'esprit gaulois in unexpurgated and unadulterated form. Modern commentators who wish to provide their readers with further information on l'esprit gaulois almost invariably point them in the direction of this literary genre. The Petit Robert, for example, illustrates what it understands by l'esprit gaulois by categorizing it as 'des fabliaux, de Rabelais'. The definition by reference to the fabliaux and indeed to Rabelais has added advan tages: it saves literary historians with delicate sensibilities from having to go too closely into the exact nature of l'esprit gaulois, a potentially embarrassing exercise, and it enables them to hint at their own vast erudition in a suitably arcane area of French literature. The fabliaux, like Rabelais, belong to that body of literary texts which are much cited but little read.
L'esprit gaulois, then, is licentious humour, such as was purportedly favoured by the Gauls, and such as is found (for example) in the Old French fabliaux which flourished during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. French history text-books, which began, once upon a time, with 'Nos ancêtres les Gaulois ...', re mind us that all Frenchmen, by definition, are originally Gauls. This supposed Gaulish lineage automatically ensures that l'esprit gaulois becomes one of the constituent parts of the 'national' sense of humour. [3]
So far, so good. But if this conception of l'esprit gaulois is to stand scrutiny, it seems to me that a number of conditions must be met. Firstly, it would help to know for certain that the ancient Gauls went in for this sort of humour, and that the metaphorical use of their name in this context has some historical foundation. If the fabliaux are the characteristic manifestation of l'esprit gaulois, said esprit must appear in the fabliaux. Finally, and above all, if we are to accept l'esprit gaulois as a national characteristic of the French (or perhaps just of some of the French), then it must, demonstrably, be a form of humour not found elsewhere.
None of these conditions, it seems to me, is met in the case of l'esprit gaulois. Despite Astérix, our knowledge of the Gauls is still fairly rudimentary: few classical authors mention them, and fewer still provide any informa tion about what would now, regrettably, have to be called their 'lifestyle'.
We do know that what was spoken in Gaul before the Roman invasions was a Celtic language of the Brithonic variety, but there is no reason whatever to suppose that it was the same throughout the whole of present-day France. What must surely be the definitive work on the subject, Joshua Whatmough's monumental Dialects of Ancient Gaul, makes it clear that this cannot have been so. [4] Recent genetic evidence about the distribution of ethnic groups in Europe and elsewhere suggests, moreover, that there was a major division between the inhabit ants of northern and southern France as well as (and perhaps at the heart of) the linguistic one between langue d'oïl and langue d'oc. Gaul, in other words, was not populated by a homogeneous, identifiable tribe called the Gauls; rather, it was occupied by a group of loosely-related, Celtic-speaking tribes. It goes without saying that there were also Celts scattered around the rest of pre-Roman Europe, so that the idea of France being in any sense ethnically distinct from adjacent countries is a nonsense. [5]
Needless to say, not a lot is known about what made the Gauls laugh. The archaeological evidence from which we derive most of our information does not, as far as I know, shed much light on the matter. In other words, there is precious little which substantiates the idea that we may attribute the creation of what we now know as l'esprit gaulois to these denizens of pre-Roman France.
What about the fabliaux? There is little doubt that they were much appreciated in medieval France. A hundred and fifty or so, of admittedly varying quality, survive. Their subject-matter does indeed often conform admira bly to modern definitions of l'esprit gaulois . Stock plots include the seduction by passing clerics of young wives whilst their grumpy and usually older husbands are off at work; accounts of slapstick punishments meted out to the hapless husbands; adulterous and fornicatory liaisons prosecuted in the most improbable venues. The tone, so conventional wisdom has it, is frivolous, enthusiastically licentious, and often virulently anti-feminist, crudely realistic, and uncompromisingly vulgar. Four-letter words, the naming of bodily parts, vigorous sexual activity and excretion abound. The fabliaux are not for those with weak stomachs, an impression only re -inforced by the curious fact that those who choose (I assume that they do choose) to write about them often prefer not to discuss adequately the more scabrous stories.
The interpretation of the fabliaux current at the time of Lanson's manual was that advanced by Joseph Bédier, whose book on the subject was published in 1893. [6] It is a view which has survived unscathed until surprisingly recently. The main point of the literary analysis in Bédier's book was the (as it turned out) quite unsustainable theory that the fabliaux were a type of literature designed for consumption by the lower orders, who were judged incapable of rising to the heights of aesthetic sensitivity deemed necessary in order to appreciate the refined style of courtly lyric and romance.
The superimposition of modern tastes leads critics (in both senses of the word) of the fabliaux to the inescapable conclusion that they can surely only have been destined for the lower social orders. Literature, in other words, was sub-divided into sociological categories, rather like Lanson's hierarchy of esprit français, esprit bourgeois and esprit gaulois, although the last two tend to be conflated. Bédier, in the course of his examina tion of the fabliaux, devotes six pages to what he describes as ' fabliaux which correspond to the definition of l'esprit gaulois', [7] and provides a thumbnail sketch of what he understands by this form of humour, with its twin components, 'la verve facilement contente, la bonne humeur ironique'; l'esprit gaulois is:
sans arrière-plans, sans profondeur; il manque de métaphysique; il ne s'embarrasse guère de poésie ni de couleur; il est ni l'esprit de finesse, ni l'atticisme. Il est la malice, le bon sens joyeux, l'ironie un peu grosse, précise pourtant, et juste. Il ne cherche pas les éléments du comique dans la fantastique exagération des choses, dans le grotesque; mais dans la vision railleuse, légèrement outrée, du réel. Il ne va pas sans vulgarité; il est terre à terre et sans portée; Béranger en est l'éminent représentant. Satirique? non, mais frondeur; 'égrillard et non voluptueux, friand et non gourmand'. Il est à la limite inférieure de nos qualités nationales, à la limite supérieure de nos défauts.Mais il manque à cette définition le trait essentiel, sans lequel on peut dire que l'esprit gaulois ne serait pas: le goût de la gaillardise, voire de la paillardise.
[ without afterthoughts, with no hidden depths; bereft of metaphysical concerns, encumbered with neither poetry nor art, displaying neither finesse nor polished style. It consists of good -humoured malice, cheerful common sense, a rather clumsy irony, but well-aimed, and accurate. It does not try to find comedy in fanciful exaggeration, in the grotesque, but in a sardonic and slightly enlarged vision of reality. It is not without vulgarity, it is down-to-earth, ephemeral: Béranger [nineteenth-century satirist] is the pre-eminent example. Satirical? no, but disrespect ful; 'ribald rather than sensuous, a gourmet rather than a glutton'. It lies at the bottom of the scale of national qualities, but tops the list of national defects.
But this definition lacks the essential characteristic, without which l'esprit gaulois would not exist: a taste for the rude, indeed for the downright lewd.]
Noteworthy in this assessment is the rather condescending emphasis on the intellectual limitations of l'esprit gaulois (a type of humour which is facilement contente; l'ironie un peu grosse; le bon sens; terre à terre ) and Bédier's reference to national characteristics. A few pages later, Bédier apologetically disposes of the ' fabliaux obscènes' (twenty-five or so, something approaching a sixth of the total) in less than a page, declining even to mention the titles of many in the footnote to which the list (sub-divided into priapic and scatological stories) is relegated. [8] These, for him, are 'l'about[isseme]nt extrême, et peut-être nécessaire, de l'esprit gaulois '. In the conclusion to his study, Bédier repeats the notion that the fabliau is an 'excellent témoin des qualités inférieures de notre race'. His comment is interesting as a manifestation of the undercurrent of nationalism in Bédier's writings. [9]
Bédier's influential study is sub-titled ' Etudes de littérature populaire et d'histoire littéraire du moyen âge '; the book is divided into two main parts, the first an attack on the then orthodox theory of oriental origins of the fabliaux, the second a more strictly literary study. The aim, in other words, is to demonstrate the popular French origins of the fabliaux: they are French, and they are populaire, of the people. The taxonomy of medieval literature is intended to correlate as closely as possible with the contemporary social hierarchy. Alas, it is not so simple; and, in fact, Bédier himself suggests as much when he discusses the apparent paradox that the fabliaux, created by and for the bourgeoisie and the menu peuple, were in the event also enjoyed by other social classes. [10]
Nor do the problems end there. Firstly, disturbingly few fabliaux present as crude a view of the world as the commentators suggest. The obscenity which is supposedly the appropriate linguistic form in which to describe sex and violence is comparatively rare; as we have seen, only about a sixth of the extant texts are classified by Bédier as -'obscene'. [11]
Contrary to popular misconception, the language of most of the fabliaux is restrained, and the subject-matter often indistinguishable from the courtly romance. It may be presented in a humorous light, but the stories (of adultery, of failed love-affairs, of deceptions and intrigues) are not unheard-of in the romance. They may manifest l'esprit gaulois, but it does not usually descend into the bas-fonds of socially unacceptable gauloiserie . Nor, of course, should we take seriously the notion that the fabliaux are 'realistic', accurate portrayals of life amongst the lower classes: they are no more 'realistic', no more constrained by historical accu racy, than (say) the Arthurian romance or the love-song. [12] And, above, all, the idea that the fabliaux were exclusively by and for the lower classes has been shown to be quite mistaken. The courtly- fabliaux opposition is a fallacy; all the evidence points to enjoyment of the fabliaux across all social classes. [13]
The next problem is, of course, that, even if we accept that there is a current of so-called esprit gaulois in the fabliaux, there is absolutely no evidence that the French alone were entertained by stories of sex and violence, that they, uniquely, enjoyed accounts of husbands being duped, that there is anything specifically French about a taste for lurid accounts of fornicating clerics and merry widows. On the contrary: the fabliaux lie at the heart of a pan-European tradition of bawdy comedy. It is found in Chaucer and Boccaccio, to name two obvious exponents; a substantial number of fabliaux have counterparts in the fourteenth-century German Gesamtabenteuer collection; the Spanish picaresque tradition presents more of the same. In Latin literature of the Middle Ages, the goliardic verse of the Carmina Burana presents a similar picture of licentious clergy as we find in the fabliaux.
Savage treatment of cuckolded husbands is neither unique to the fabliaux nor a particular feature of the French tradition. Nothing, in other words, allows us to think of the fabliaux as a literary or (still less) cultural tradition unique to medieval France: if the fabliaux are the high point of the expression of l'esprit gaulois, then it follows that the grounds for regarding the latter as exclusively French are shaky indeed.
A further nail in the coffin of l'esprit gaulois is provided by the linguistic evidence concerning the term itself. I hope to be able to show that it is not so much a nail as a death-dealing stake right through the coffin of a re markably resilient vampire. Firstly, perhaps unimportantly, there is no trace of the use of the expression during the Middle Ages. I am unable, in fact, to find any indication in any of the dictionaries which I have consulted of when esprit gaulois, as a set expression, is first used. The first French dictionary to give the expression seems to be Littré, who notes it in 1874; the expression is certainly in use in the middle of the nineteenth cen tury, and perhaps earlier. [14] The adjective gaulois itself is not found before the fifteenth century, and then only in a one-off example of a proverbial locution containing it, à la vieille gauloise, 'in the old style'. [15] If, in addition, the next recorded attestation of gaulois is only found a couple of centuries later, in an obscure conflation of folk-songs called the Comédie de chansons first (and probably last) performed in 1640, then the quizzical observer might be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the proposition that the fabliaux could be held responsible for consciously or unconsciously promoting l'esprit gaulois.
But the most conclusive evidence against the notion of
l'esprit gaulois lies not in the (perhaps) chance failure of
examples of the expression to survive from the Middle Ages, nor in
the certain and inevitable failure of medi eval French dictionaries
to pick up absolutely everything which actually has survived from the
Middle Ages. The real case against l'esprit gaulois is the
word gaulois itself. According to which etymological
dictionary you choose to believe, it derives either from Old Low
Frankish walhisk, or (plot B) the adjective
gaulois is a derivative of Gaule, itself from Old Low
Frankish Walha. [16]
In the event, it makes little difference which hypothetical route
is preferred. Both walhisk and gaulois
are cognate with Old High German walh, Middle High German
walsch, used of foreigners in general and 'Ro mance-speakers'
in particular. They are cognate, too, with the English word
wealh (modern Welsh). There is also an earlier French
reflex of walhisk, galeis/galois (now
gallois), which antedates gaulois by several hundred
years. Found from Chrétien de Troyes onwards, it is used
throughout Old French to refer, principally, to Celtic and,
particularly, Welsh language and individuals and, in the parts of
France adjacent to countries where Germanic languages were spoken, to
the French language. This latter meaning is a case of the
influence of nearby Germanic cognates (Middle High German
walsch; cf. also wallon), with the sense of 'Romance'
already discussed. With this second meaning, galois occurs,
notably, in documents (literary and non-literary) from Picardy,
Hainaut and Lorraine, all regions where such interference from nearby
Germanic languages may be easily explained.
In modern times, gaulois (in the sense of l'esprit gaulois) has also generated the noun gauloiserie (attested in Larousse from 1872), a salacious joke or remark, and the adverb gauloisement (from 1875). The most famous use of gaulois, or rather the feminine, gauloise , dates from 25th April 1910, when the greatest French contribu tion to atmospheric pollution was so baptized. [17]
The crux of the problem lies, curiously enough, not with the word
gaulois but with the earlier galois. For galois
('Welsh') has a homonym, in medieval French, in galois from
quite another source, this time the Old Low Frankish
wala (cf. English well ), the noun which
the etymologists have alighted on as the origin of the hypothetical
Proto-Gallo-Romance etymon walare , whence
galer. Galer persists in the modern participial
adjective galant, and in derivatives such as
galanterie. Old French gale, as in François
Villon's compains de galle, [18]
gave Spanish gala' in turn appropriated by English as
gala. French gale has gone, like so much else, with
the wind of post-medieval developments in the French lexis. The range
of derivatives from galer, in Old and Middle French, is much
more impressive than the paltry survivals in modern French
suggest.
In addition to the verb galer (transitive, intransitive and reflexive), the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch and the Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français list between them the following forms: gale s.f. (already mentioned) and galerie s.f. 'amusement, pleasure'; galie s.f., gallière s.f. and (perhaps) galeresse s.f. 'prostitute'; galet s.m. ' surnom d'un joyeux compagnon'; galiier v.refl. and v.n. 'to mock, make sarcastic comments'; esgaller v.refl. and esgaluer v.refl. 'to display pleasure'; trigaler v.n. 'mener une vie de débauche'; trigalerie s.f. 'debauchery'; s.f. trigale 'object of derision' and the hapax trigal s.m. (s.xiv), 'sexual activity'; rigale s.f. 'joyful noise, racket', connected to modern régale and the associated (and slightly earlier) se régaler.
Numerous metaphorical, euphemistic and imaginative meanings for
most of these words can be found in the eleven-page entry under
wala in volume 17 of the
Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
[19] Most importantly
from our point of view, one of the wala
derivatives is galois, from the early thirteenth century
onwards, meaning 'joyful, happy', and the same word used as a noun in
Middle French (in, e.g. Froissart).
Villon's Ballades en jargon talk of galois as late
as the mid-fifteenth century; Huguet has a longish article on it in
his dictionary of sixteenth-century French.
[20] The FEW
confirms that galois, from wala not
from walhisk, is used not only throughout
medieval French and during the sixteenth century, but is alive and
well (or was towards the end of the last century) in the French
dialect of Normandy, the Franco-Provençal Forez region near
Lyon, and in numerous dialects of Occitan as well.
[21] Gal(l)oise
is the female equivalent of galois, with senses ranging from
that of simply 'femme galante' in 1372, and the euphemistic 'jeune
fille gaie et éveillée' in La Fontaine (1668) to the
more venal 'prostitute' in Cotgrave's 1611 dictionary. In 1874, the
writer Huysmans attempted, without much success, to re-introduce
galoise (no doubt as a conscious archaism).
[22]
Significantly, perhaps, the Tobler-Lommatzsch dictionary of
medieval French [23]
makes no attempt to distinguish galois from
wala and galois from walhisk,
listing the senses of both 'Welsh' and 'joyful, happy' ('munter,
lustig') under the same headword galois. Similarly, the
historical section at the end of the Trésor de la langue
française entry for gaulois includes both
meanings. In some respects, this is a legitimate way of honestly
representing the picture in medieval French.
[24] It highlights the
problem of homonymy which lies at the heart of gaulois in the
expression l'esprit gaulois . Medieval French was much less
concerned with the problems of homonymic clash than subsequent stages
of the language, and readily tolerated a plethora of homonyms which
modern French has often officiously tidied up.
[25]
There can be little doubt, from examination of the words
etymologically related to galer which I have just mentioned,
that such homonymic confusion could well have arisen in the case of
galois/gaulois. Two distinct Germanic etyma underwent a
process of phonetic change to yield identical Old French forms with
separate meanings. These are just the circumstances under which
contamination can easily take place. The evidence suggests that
l'esprit gaulois is simply a use of the adjective
galois, an adjective of well-established pedigree, denoting
various forms of pleasurable and pleasure-seeking activity.
Galois (from wala) never seems to have
developed into the form gaulois; phonetically, there is no
reason why it should have done so. [26]
None the less, I believe that it can be plausibly argued that
l'esprit gaulois has far more, semantically , to do with
the galer group than with walhisk and 'nos
ancêtres les Gaulois'.
There are two critical periods in the contamination process. In
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there is an overlap, when (on
the one hand) galois from wala is still
alive and kicking, and (on the other) gaulois (from
walhisk) has already appeared, albeit (so far) as
a hapax in this thoroughly under-investigated period of the French
language. The next attestation of gaulois , in the
Comédie de chansons in 1640, is used in a suspiciously
similar context to that in which we regularly encounter
galois from wala, in a reference to
'compagnons gaulois'. Here, surely, they are not 'Gaulish' companions
(which would mean next to nothing in the passage in question) but
'boon' companions, what Villon, two hundred years before, would have
called his 'compains de galle' or 'galois'.
[27]
Why then, has it become accepted wisdom (an idée fixe , indeed) that l'esprit gaulois is a peculiarly French phenomenon, as much a part of la France profonde (whatever and wherever that might be) as the Gallic shrug, the beret and the baguette? The necessary information for the demolition of the myth of l'esprit gaulois is available in no more inaccessible a source than the Trésor de la langue française; but the myth has survived the assault of the philologists' small print. The answer to its longevity lies, I suspect, in a nationalist ideology which depends, for its survival, on the creation and dissemination of convenient national characteristics and stereotypes. It is no accident that (as far as I have been able to ascertain) the phrase l'esprit gaulois first occurs towards the middle of the nineteenth century, a period when medieval literature, decent and indecent, was drawn on as a source of national and nationalist inspiration.
L'esprit gaulois, in the context of the squabbles between anti-clerical Republicans on the one hand and Catho lics on the other, is initially some sort of vague, pre-Christian inspiration, a source of good or evil depending on the point of view of the writer. Gaulois itself is habitually used in opposition to catholique and chrétien. This sense, and the myth of the Gauls which underpins it, is the sense in which historians like Michelet, Henri Mar tin and Amédée Thierry use gaulois . The modern implications of l'esprit gaulois , implying now bawdiness and licentiousness, come later still, with literary critics and authors like Théophile Gautier and Taine apparently picking up the older sense which the adjective gaulois has in the seventeenth century. From 1844, l'esprit gaulois is used in its modern sense. [28]
Amongst the many national stereotypes, that of humour plays an important part. We all know that the English are eccentric and fond of nonsense, that Germans have no sense of humour (witness a recent excruciating advertisement for Audi), that the French oscillate between being intellectually witty, classically spirituel, on the one hand, and, on the other, a predilection for a very different category of esprit, which tradition (though a less venerable tradition than most people think) calls gaulois. Such ideas about national characteristics seem to me neither helpful nor intellectually acceptable. Historical enquiry is not assisted by uncritical dependence on tired clichés. This is even more true of the investigation of modern France which is becoming an ever more impor tant part of French Studies. There is a lesson, ironically enough, in Gustave Lanson's grudging praise of l'esprit gaulois:
Le bon sens narquois et goguenard implique une volonté de ne pas être dupe, de voir clair. Il s'attaque moins aux grandes choses qu'aux grands mots, aux prétentions qui s'étalent, et à l'idéalisme de façade derrière lequel manoeuvrent des intérêts et des ambitions. [29][Sardonic, mocking common sense implies a wish to keep reality in sight, not to be fooled. It is less a matter of attacking important things than important language, pretentions on display, and a superficial attachment to fine theories behind which hidden interests and ambitions manoeuvre.]
1.
Jeffrey H. Goldstein, 'Cross Cultural Research: Humour Here and
There', It's a Funny Thing, Humour. International
Conference on Humour & Laughter , Cardiff 1976, eds. Anthony
J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (Oxford, 1977), pp. 167-74. Despite
having a chapter entitled 'How to laugh at their [sc.
Frenchmen's] jokes', T. Zeldin's The French (London,
1983), in many respects a tedious compendium of generalization from
the particular, at least points out (pp. 72 -5) that humour is not,
after all, nationally determined.
2.
Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature
française (Paris, s.d. [prefaces dated 1909,
1912], p. 9); the qualification comes only in an appendix at the
end of the book (p. 1183). The passage is quoted verbatim in Lanson's
Histoire illustrée de la littérature
française (Paris, 1923), with the qualification as follows
'... Notons toutefois qu'il ne faut pas trop mépriser l'esprit
gaulois ni l'esprit bourgeois. On l'a vu dans la
dernière guerre' (p. 9). I owe this reference to Lanson to R.
Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago and London,
1983), p. 133 n.28, quoting the Histoire illustrée de la
littérature française (Paris, 1923), p. 9.
3.
No less a figure than the now fashionably unconventional Arthur
Rimbaud mentions (I assume ironically) his 'ancêtres gaulois',
from whom he claims to derive 'l'oeil bleu blanc, la cervelle
étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte' in a passage
seemingly influenced by the poet's youthful exposure to Michelet
(Arthur Rimbaud, 'Mauvais sang', in the collection Saison en
enfer). Bernard Leuilliot, 'Rimbaud, lecteur de Michelet',
Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France , LXXIV (1974),
pp. 852-61, discusses Michelet's influence on this passage, amongst
others.
4.
Joshua Whatmough, The Dialects of Ancient Gaul. Prolegomena
and records of the Dialects (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), preface. Whatmough's intro duction,
'KELTIKA, being prolegomena to a study of The Dialects of Ancient
Gaul', first published in Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology, LV (1944), is reprinted at the beginning of
Whatmough's Dialects. Scholars from J. Jud onwards had drawn
attention to the impossibility of linguistic uniformity in pre-Roman
Gaul.
5.
For a balanced summary, see Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and
Language. The Puzzle of Indo -European Origins (London,
1987), pp. 211-49; and, for linguistic problems, J. Whatmough, op.
cit..
6.
Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux. Etudes de littérature
populaire et d'histoire littéraire du moyen
âge (Paris, 6th edition, 1964).
7.
Bédier, op. cit., pp. 313-9. Quotation from pp. 317-8.
8.
ibid., pp. 325-6 and n.1, p. 326. The quotation is from p. 326: the
text reads 'aboutissant', presumably for 'aboutissement'. Per
Nykrog, Les Fabliaux. Etude d'histoire littéraire et de
stylistique médiévale (Copenhagen, 1957), deals
with obscenity less squeamishly, but stops short of covering
everything in detail, pp. 208-26.
9.
Quotation from Bédier, op. cit., p. 428. A surprising
anti-German outburst also mars the clos ing pages of the treatment of
La Chanson de Roland in Les Légendes
épiques (4 vols, Paris, 3rd edition, 1926-9), III, p. 453.
It is worthy of note, in this context, that Bédier wrote
propaganda pamphlets about alleged German atrocities during the First
World War.
10.
Bédier, Fabliaux, pp. 371-85: 'Il semble donc qu'il y
ait, au XIIIe siècle, jusqu'à un certain point,
confusion et promiscuité des publics' (p. 385).
11.
See n.7, supra.
12.
See Nykrog, op. cit., p. 230.
13.
ibid., p. 224 and, most recently, Philippe Ménard, Les
Fabliaux. Contes à rire du moyen âge (Paris, 1984),
p. 96.
14.
E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française ,
II (Paris, 1874), sub gaulois. See n.27, infra.
15.
Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
(FEW), XVII, 490b.
16.
Most recently, Möhren and Baldinger, in Dictionnaire
étymologique de la langue française (DEAF),
I (1974), 98, suggest that the route is via the French form
Gaule. See also FEW, XVII, 490b-491a: 'Aus * Walha fr.
Gaule. Das zugehörige adj. gaulois (aus
*walhisk) hat dann die bed[eutung] eines wertenden
adj. erhalten', ibid., 491a. The historical section of the
Trésor de la langue française entry for
gaulois (IX, 130-131, published in 1981) visibly derives from
DEAF.
17.
See Antoinette Ehrard, 'Les Gaulois hétéroclites',
Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois. Actes du Colloque International de
Clermont-Ferrand , ed. Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard
(Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de
l'Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1982), pp. 483-86 (p. 484).
La Gauloise apparently used to be called l'Hongroise ,
which doubtless endowed it with suitably Bohemian connotations for
its devotees; but there was another Hongroise, so
terminological nationalization was called for.
18.
J. Rychner and A. Henry (ed.), François Villon, Le
Testament (Geneva, 1974), v. 1720.
19.
FEW, XVII, 473a-484a.
20.
DEAF, I, 84-87. A. Lanly (ed. and trans.), François
Villon, Ballades en jargon (Paris, 1971), III, v. 21; E.
Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du
seizième siècle , II (Paris, 1950), sub
galois.
21.
FEW, XVII, 473b-474a.
22.
FEW, XVII, 483 n.8 and DEAF, I, 86.
23.
TL, IV, 74.
24.
Compare, however, the solutions adopted by the DEAF (entry
sub galer from *wala, separate entry sub galois
= mod. gaulois).
25.
See W. Rothwell, 'Medieval French and Modern Semantics', MLR,
57 (1962), pp. 25-30.
26.
It must be said that there are certain phonetic problems involved in
the suggested etymology of gaulois, and the relationship of
this form with the earlier galois, also from *walhisk.
Presumably the doublet is explained as follows: (1) metathesis of
- lh- in *walhisk (or *walha: it makes no
difference) to produce -hl-; (2) either (a) effacement of
-h- (normal, when followed by l, in (e.g.) Old High
German) to produce gal(l)ois or (b) vocalization of what is
sometimes called 'velar - h-' (i.e. Ach-Laut), after
metathesis, to produce gaulois.
27.
The Trésor de la langue française , IX, 131,
cites the Comédie de chansons example after two
for galois 'gai, joyeux', as 'de nouv. 1640 gaulois
'id.' ', which I take to mean that the editors regard
gaulois, here, as a continuation of galois.
28.
Théophile Gautier, Les Grotesques (quoted in
Trésor de la langue française , IX, 131).
On the (mis)use of the Middle Ages at this time, see Janice R.
Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851-1900
(Oxford, 1973). Other instances of l'esprit gaulois:
Viollet-le-Duc writes in his Dictionnaire raisonné de
l'architecture française (VII, p. 142) in 1844 of
thirteenth-century church sculpture that 'le vieil esprit gaulois
perçait à travers le christianisme'; Ernest Renan, in
1856: 'l'esprit gaulois, esprit plat, positif, sans
élévation ... destructeur de toute no blesse et de tout
idéal' (Oeuvres complètes , II, pp. 211-212).
These texts, and others, are quoted in Dakyns, op. cit., pp. 102-5.
It may well be that a complete combing of the works of the historians
of the first half of the nineteenth century would yield an earlier
attestation. A wealth of information on this whole subject will be
found in Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois. Actes du Colloque
International de Clermont-Ferrand , ed. Paul Viallaneix and Jean
Ehrard (Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de
l'Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1982). My colleague Michael
Pakenham tells me that there existed, briefly, an illustrated
pro-Republican journal called L'Esprit gaulois, in 1881-82
(see Philippe Jones, La Presse satirique illustrée en
France entre 1860 et 1890 [s.l.n.d.], pp. 56-7, who
describes it as 'de tendance nettement républicaine'). See
n.2, supra, on the influence of Michelet on Rimbaud. During
the seventeenth century, Bussy-Rabutin's popular satire on
contemporary society, the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules
(1665), peddled a particular view of Gaul as the mythical era of
galanterie (see Elizabeth Woodrough, 'L'Histoire amoureuse
des Gaules, satire de cour', Rabutinages, 1988).
29.
Lanson, op. cit., p. 1183.