‘It may be necessary to seek their origin in the font of common Indo-European’, writes Markale, who adds: ‘After all, the Hellenes, especially the Achaeans, left the Aryan stem at around the same time as the Gaelic Celts. Both have carried with them, in addition to the language, the traditions, beliefs, and also a certain way of seeing things’.
The font is far from being exhausted. Irish storytellers and Breton bards, Johnathan Swift, George Russel, James Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, Flaherty, Padraid Pearse, and Alain Guel — all have drunk deep draughts from this wellspring. ‘We retrieve in this epic literature’, Markale concludes, ‘the myths that interest us. And we place our own myths there. And this is what bears fruit’.
Impassioned War Enthusiasts
Among the characteristic traits of the Celtic civilisation, Guy Rachet cites the aristocratic regime and the role of nobility, the diffusion of cities, blood alliances, the custom of giving, the system of ‘customers’, etc.
Among the Celts of the continent, the authority of the father is very strict. The monogamous patriarchal family structure is the rule. In Great Britain and Ireland, the morality appears more free. In the fourth century, this will provoke the indignation of Saint Jerome. ‘In Ireland’, he will write, ‘no one is married, no Irish person has only one woman, each abandons himself to his passions in the same way that animals do’. Pious exaggeration.
The Gallic woman followed her husband everywhere. ‘When a Celt went into battle’, relates Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘and he was accompanied by his wife, whose eyes flashed brighter than his, a whole band of foreigners would scarcely be able to resist them, for she was endowed with even more strength than he was’!151
Plutarch, in his treatise On the Bravery of Women, cites the example of the Gallic Chiomara, wife of Ortiagon, who decapitated the Roman centurion who had violated her, and threw his head at the feet of her husband. ‘Wife’, said Ortiagon, ‘fidelity is a beautiful thing’. ‘It is even more beautiful’, she responded, ‘when there is only one living man to whom I have belonged’.152
This warlike attitude is no surprise. The Gauls were impassioned war enthusiasts. The ancient authors have emphasised their courage while also deploring their lack of discipline, which contributed to their defeat.
‘The appearance of the Gallic army, and the noise that they made, terrified the Roman soldiers’, writes Polybius. ‘The number of horns and trumpets was incalculable; at the same time, the army made such clamour that one no longer heard only the sounds of the instruments and the cries of the soldiers; the surrounding countryside, returning the echo, also seemed to add its voice to the din’.153
‘All the people belonging to the Gallic race’, notes Strabo, ‘are war-mad, and both high-spirited and quick for battle, although otherwise simple and not ill-mannered. And therefore, if roused, they come together all at once for the struggle, both openly and without circumspection, so that for those who wish to defeat them by stratagem they become easy to deal with’.154
As soldiers, they made for highly-sought mercenaries. In the third century BCE, Justinus affirms that ‘the kings of the east wage no wars without having an army of Gallic mercenaries’.155
Having fought en masse, they perished en masse. The cries of war will be followed, little by little, by the sobs of funeral songs and evocations. As it is said in the legend:
‘Cuchulainn started to laugh, and this was the last time that Cuchulainn laughed. The shadows of death surrounded him. He went out towards a small lake nearby and bathed’. Emerging from the lake, the hero clung to a pillar of stone so that he wouldn’t fall, and died standing.
Many centuries later, the Breton Chateaubriand would evoke ‘these wandering warriors in the midst of the ashes, clouds, and phantasms’ with sorrow and respect.
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Les romans de la Table ronde, texts published by Jacques Boulenger. UGE-10/18, 883 pages (three vols).
La Gaule celtique (des origins à 50 av. J.-C.), and La Gaule romaine (50 av. J.-C–500 ap. J.-C.), studies by Guy Rachet. Culture Art Loisirs, 256 and 258 pages.
L’épopée celtique d’Irlande, texts published by Jean Markale. Payot, 204 pages.
Celtes et Gallo-Romains, a study by Jean-Jacques Hatt. Nagel, 335 pages.
Les Celtes, a study by Jacques Harmand. Fernand Nathan, 172 pages.
La Bretagne et La France, a study by Paul Sérant. Fayard, 441 pages.
L’épopée des Celtes, a study by J. A. Mauduit. Laffont, 282 pages.156
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Among the numerous works recently consecrated to Celtic matters, mention must be made of the important work by Myles Dillon and Nora K. Chadwick, Les royaumes celtiques (Fayard, 1974),157 whose French translation is augmented by a chapter on Gaul in the Celtic world thanks to Christian J. Guyonvarc’h and Françoise Le Roux. This work covers nearly all the sectors of ancient Celtic civilisation, from its prehistoric origins to the invasion of Brittany, and by presenting a panorama, distinctly situates itself beyond the fray of legends, distortions, and fantasies. The translator, Christian J. Guyonvarc’h, oversees the journal Ogam-Tradition celtique (B.P. 574, 2 rue Léonard-de-Vinci, 35007 Rennes Cedex);158 he is also the author of a Dictionnaire étymologique du breton ancient, moyen, et moderne,159 which currently appears in instalments.
Another interesting title: Die Kelten. Das Volk das aus dem Dunkel kam (Econ, Düsseldorf, 1975), by Gerhard Herm, author of numerous documentary films on Mediterranean civilisation made for west German television. This book has also appeared in England (The Celts: The People Who Came out of the Darkness. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1976).
Roman Gaul
‘At the moment when so many voices denounce the misdeeds of colonialism, where the colonising nations themselves are frightened by their unpopularity, Roman Gaul offers the precedent, unfolding over more than four centuries, of a successful colonial enterprise in which the colonised as well as the coloniser have ultimately yielded the greatest profit’.
Jean-Jacques Hatt, a fifty-eight-year-old Professor at the Department of Literature at the University of Strasbourg, originates from a large family of Alsatian brewers. He is an archaeologist. On Sunday he roams the countryside and the excavation sites with the methodical look of a hunter on foot. Coordinator of the Musée d’Epernay, conservator of the Strasbourg Archaeological Museum, former director of historical and prehistorical antiquities, he has previously published studies on the Gallo-Roman tomb, Celtic religion, and Strasbourg in the time of the Romans. To him we notably owe a beautiful interpretation (expanding on Dumézil’s work on the tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans) of the motifs figuring on the silver plaques of the celebrated Celtic cauldron of Gundestrup.
Before him, others have written on the Gauls: Albert Grenier, Paul-Marie Duval, Fernand Benoît, recently deceased. And also Camille Jullian, whose work still holds authority, even though the eighth volume of his monumental Histoire de la Gaule160 dates from 1926. Excavations such as those at Vix near Châtillon-sur-Seine (Côte d’Or), which in 1953 brought to light the princely tomb of a young Gaul of the Halstatt era, along with a treasury containing a magnificent archaic bronze crater of Greek origin, obviously remained unknown to him.
In four hundred pages, Jean-Jacques Hatt, utilising both historical testimonies and archaeological discoveries, provides an update on the subject. His Histoire de la Gaule romaine161 covers a period from 120 BCE to the year 451.
The work is dedicated to the rebels of Gergovia that repelled the legionnaires of Caesar. But the conqueror does not appear any less a noble figure. The author does not share the opinion of Livy, who considers the campaigns of the Roman proconsul against the Swiss and the Germans, and then the conquest of Gaul, as personal initiatives undertaken in opposition to the ‘pacifists’ of the Senate.
‘De Bello Gallico’
‘If his movements had been free’, writes Jerôme Carcopino in the preface, ‘Caesar, who was obsessed with the noble vision of the Roman Empire recruiting less subje
cts than affiliates, would have attempted to realise in Gaul an opus similar to that which Pompey had previously built in Asia: it would be restricted to surrounding the pre-existing province of Narbonne by a belt of Celtic tribes who, promoted to the rank of protected cities by Rome, would have continued, under this aegis, to enjoy a regime that would be defined today as internally autonomous’.
Fate would decide otherwise. In the year 58 BCE, Caesar is called on for assistance by the inhabitants of Narbonne, who are troubled by Celto-Ligurian and Gallic raids. The protectorate that he attempted to install was a failure. Rebellion rumbled. Some Roman negotiators are massacred at Cenabum. This is the beginning of the insurrection: De Bello Gallico.162
Should we conclude that the priests of the Celtic cult were no strangers to the initiation of hostilities? The great pilgrimage to the Celtic gods used to take place for many years among the Carnutes, at the location where the Cathedral of Chartres now stands. And the one responsible for the uprising was a certain Gutuater, who the Roman chronicles present as a hothead. ‘Gutuater’, explains Jean-Jacques Hatt, ‘is a common name which means great priest, or chief of the priests. He was without doubt the chief of the druids’.
The following year, the Arverni arise in their turn. Their chief, Vercingetorix, took lead of a coalition against Rome. He enacted the scorched earth tactic. The beginning of guerrilla warfare.
Caesar counted on the legions. Vercingetorix reasoned by ‘resistance’. The Aidui and the Bellovaci joined in the resistance movement. But Caesar called on the knights of Germania. And the cohorts are finally overcome by the rebels. This is the episode of Alesia, the siege, the capitulation.
The tribes who participated, in −52, in the defence of Alesia came from the farthest regions of Gaul. Inspection of coins found on the battle site have confirmed this. These coins are now displayed in the National Museum of Antiquities of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, in the château built by François I, which Napoleon III, in 1862, made a Gallo-Roman museum. In 1965, more rooms consecrated to Gaul were opened to the public. In 1970, René Joffroy, conservator in chief (also the author of a book on the treasure of Vix), unveiled five rooms on the civilisation of La Tène.
Hermann the Cherusker
In the room consecrated to the conquest, a scale model shows the plan of the labours deployed by Caesar around Mount Aixois (Côte-d’Or), the war machines, the mobile towers, the ramparts, the spears. Numerous iron arrow heads, called ‘socketed’, discovered during the excavations conducted under Napoleon III, attest to the effort of the besieged.
In 51–50, the resistance is definitively liquidated with the submission of the Armoricans, the Carnutes, and the Aquitans. We know the fate of Vercingetorix: woe to the vanquished!
Fifteen years later, the conquest is an established fact. Romanisation has born its fruits. As the borders are stabilised, the Gauls offer absolute fidelity to the Flavian dynasty. They defend it wherever it is threatened. Gaul has become Roman.
Four centuries would pass before it would become Merovingian.
The Germanic peoples, themselves, are intractable. Via the Rhône corridor, the legions raised an assault on the people of the Rhine, but weren’t able to subdue them. Flux and reflux. In winter, the Germanic tribes took back the advantage lost during the summer. Between Metz and Strasbourg, scattered coins and defeated camps punctuate the contours of the battles.
A Roman general of middling rank, Quinctilius Varus, is pressured by the Cheruscer Arminius (Hermann), a noble Germanic who had served as an officer in the Roman army before returning to his people. Beset on all sides, the troops are worn down between the swamps and the forests. The final assault takes place in the region of Detmold. No high Roman officer survives. Three legions and nine auxiliary bodies, 20,000 men, two thirds of the army of the Rhine, are consumed by the defeat. Germania eludes the Senate.
‘Varus, Varus’, cries Augustus in his nightmares, ‘give me back my legions!’
In the year 14 CE, Germanicus, nephew of Tiberius sent to avenge Varus, proceeded to wage a campaign of massacre and devastation between the Rhine and the Lippe. The most celebrated sanctuary of all Germania, that of Tamfana, is destroyed. But two years later, the fleet of Germanicus is wrecked near Heligoland. The Germanic peoples do not give up an inch of their independence. Today the statue of Hermann the Cherusker stands in the Teutoburg forest.
Rome, ultimately, will be destroyed by those who they weren’t able to conquer. But the first invasion of the Alani and the Vandals would only take place in 352. For three centuries, the Germanic tribes did not seek at any moment to exercise reprisals on their enemy.
Jean-Jacques Hatt makes the observation: ‘If we refer to the recent difficulties experienced by the French army for the “lockdown” of Algerian borders, it is stupefying to note that with four legions and a complement of auxiliary troops, that is to say around 50,000 men, the Roman army would manage to hold the border of the Rhine for a hundred and fifty years, from the North Sea to the sources of the Danube. We are forced to conclude that the Germanic tribes did not want to force these defences, and that they preferred to live in mutual understanding with their neighbours’.
The contrast between the attitude of the Gauls and that of the Germanic tribes is striking. Only the Gaul had recognised the benefits of Romanisation, while fully retaining certain characteristic traits of its own personality for quite some time.
‘How did the Gauls, so fiercely independent between 58 and 50 BCE, become for the most part, and from the reign of Nero, loyal and faithful subjects of the Roman Empire?’
The ‘Provincial’ Spirit of the Conquered Gaul
J.-J. Hatt answers by recalling that Gaul, at the beginning of our era, was already the theatre of significant cultural and commercial changes.
‘Hellenism had opened the way to Romanisation, and this is the cause of how the Gauls so rapidly become Roman citizens.
After having suffered under Caligula, Gaul breathed under Nero. ‘The reign of Nero may well have been marked by a systematic reaction against the western provinces’, Jean-Jacques Hatt emphasises, ‘the progress nonetheless having continued in Gaul, in the sense of economic and cultural assimilation and of political integration (…) It develops within itself a provincial spirit, which is no longer indigenous nationalism at all, but is simultaneously made of Roman consciousness and of a reaction against the excesses of the capital and imperial milieu’.
Marcus Aurelius (161–80)163 is one of the last great Roman emperors. A Stoic philosopher, he represents an ideal ‘that paganism had elaborated in the combination and selection of what was best among pagan religions and Greek philosophies’.
Shortly after, some Christians are persecuted at Lyon. The population pays no attention. A letter addressed by the Christian part of the Lyonnaise to their eastern brothers ‘proves that the Christian community, still few in number in this period, were essentially recruited among the Orientals, notably the Asiatics and Phrygians’. Eusebius nevertheless mentions ten martyrs, including the bishop Pothinus, deacon of Vienna. It is the beginning of a confrontation between the nascent cult and Gallo-Roman paganism. Evangelisation commences at the end of the second century with Saint Irenaeus.
After the assassination of Caracalla in 217, the Roman empire degenerates. Macrinus is absorbed in devotions and debaucheries. The Syrian Elagabalus, high priest of Baal, is proclaimed supreme god of the Empire. Exotic princesses rule over Cato’s city. The economy is in crisis. Slaves revolt. Once the Severan dynasty disappeared, periods of anarchy followed. Rome is no longer in Rome. With each pronunciamento, the army rushes from the Rhine to counter the perils, stripping the border and opening Gaul up to the Franks and Alemanni.
A Gallic Empire is planned in north and northeast Gaul. The country is divided into a diocese of Gauls to the north of the Loire, with Trier for the capital,164 and a diocese of Vienna, which covers Aquitania, Narbonne, and the Alps to Geneva.
The coming of Constantine, along with the Ed
ict of Milan, inaugurated a new period of troubles. But Julian, having re-established calm, imposed himself immediately on Gaul. ‘He was gladly received by the city of Vienna’, details Hatt. ‘The inhabitants of the city of Isère saw in him a tutelary genius, capable of warding off the troubles of their time’. The Apostate redressed the political, economic, and financial situation. He reinstituted justice in its rights. Gaul loves its Caesar. It compared him to ‘a sun, which expands serenity in the sky and dissipates the horror of long darkness’.
Roman Gaul saw its last beautiful days under Gratian (375–383). But the situation degraded again. Decadence follows its course. On the borders, the Alemanni are stirred. In the City, the old Roman spirit is no more than a memory. Saint Martin initiates the evangelisation of the countryside. The cities are acquired by the bishops. However, the farmers or peasants,165 the pagani, refuse to abandon the faith of their fathers, remaining loyal to the divinities of the springs, trees, and streams. Theodosius prohibits paganism under pain of death. Parishes, churches, and monasteries are established to make it through the long medieval night intact.
During the fourth century, the frontier of the Rhine collapses. Little by little, Gaul fragments under the excesses of imperial authoritarianism. Hatt states: ‘It is not Gallic nationalism that is the cause, but the flaws in the system of the Late Empire’. In 406, the irruption of the Vandals, Suebi, and Alani put an end to speculations. Gaul ceased to be Roman. It would soon be Merovingian.
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Historique de la Gaule romaine, a study by Jean-Jacques Hatt.166 Payot, 405 pages.
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Since the celebrated study by Camille Jullian (Vercingétorix, Hachette), whose first edition dates back to 1921, several books on Vercingetorix have been published in France, notably by Jean-Jacques Rochard (Vercingétorix le Gaulois. Table ronde, 1967)167 and Jean Séverin (Vercingétorix. Pensée universelle, 1975). Maurice Bouvier-Ajam has also released a useful and very personal work on Les temps des empereurs gaulois (Pavillon, 1976).168
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