Le Berceau de la littérature française: Medieval Literature as Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century France

Summary

Predominantly literate societies have tended to trivialize oral storytelling, dismissing it as a genre belonging to children and the underprivileged, those without the political or intellectual means to record their narratives for posterity. Such attitudes have often resulted in the infantilization of populations that rely largely on oral traditions, despite the complexity and sophistication of their narrative structures and mnemonic systems. This was as evident in British explorers’ disdain for the orally transmitted stories of India and Africa as it was in Caribbean plantation owners’ condescension toward slaves and their ‘childish’ storytelling circles. Within France, such prejudices extended to ‘primitive’ peasants whose stories were thought to stem from an oral tradition unbroken since the Middle Ages, their voices chronicled in nineteenth-century texts such as George Sand's romans champêtres, considered the perfect material to read out loud to French children, along with works from the popular Bibliothèque bleue series which specialized in textual retellings of medieval stories.

While much scholarship has been devoted to the marginalization of nonliterate cultures during the colonial period (both inside and outside of France), less attention has been paid to the ways in which the same biases were at play in nineteenth-century characterizations of the European Middle Ages. This essay explores the double standard applied to medieval texts in the nineteenth century, just as scholars were establishing what would become the canonical works of French literature. Orally recounting the content of medieval texts in modern French was deemed enriching for children and the illiterate, yet the same stories presented textually to adults (in Old French or in modern translation) disqualified them as ‘literature’ because of the alleged stylistic deficiencies of Old and Middle French, characterized as childish bégaiements or balbutiements (stuttering or stammering).

Such bias for style over substance and for text over orality is clear in works such as Désiré Nisard's 1844 Histoire de la littérature française, or Gaston Paris and Ernest Langlois’ 1895 Chrestomathie du moyen âge, the book which first introduced secondary school children to excerpts of works from the Middle Ages (in Old French, Middle French and modern translation).