Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

  The Church has adopted two attitudes towards such practices. There are some which it considered to be superstitions and which, as a result, it obstinately fought against for centuries on end, albeit often unsuccessfully. There are, however, others that it attempted to Christianise either by replacing “heathen” practices with a Christian content or by intervening directly and imposing Christian rites instead.

  In 452, for instance, the Arles Council condemned all those who worshipped fountains, stones and woods. In 658, the Council of Nantes ordained their excommunication.

  And yet in the 20th century, the belief that sterile women can acquire the ability to bear children by rubbing themselves against certain menhirs still subsists.

  Faced with excessively fierce resistance, the Church preferred to compromise: cathedrals and monasteries were simply erected in places where ancient sanctuaries had previously stood.

  This fact is particularly striking when it comes to ‘calendar’ customs (which are classified as part of a season-based system): we have the Carnival and Lent cycles, as well as those of Easter and May, Saint-John’s Eve on the solstice of June, and the twelve days of Christmas-Epiphany that mark the winter solstice.

  All Hallows’ Day is set on the 1st of November, on the very day when the Celts celebrated Samhain, meaning ‘All Souls Day’. Christmas, which is commemorated at the height of the winter solstice, adopted the function previously assumed by the winter celebration of the Sun’s rebirth. With its blessing of the palms, Easter took over from the spring feast which celebrated the death and resurrection of the gods of vegetation (commemorated among Indo-Europeans in honour of Ostara408 ). The bonfires of the summer solstice have been replaced by those of Saint-John’s Eve, the ancient festival of Diana by the Feast of the Assumption, the rites of Dionysus’ rebirth by the Feast of the Epiphany, the forty nights of lamentation of Proserpine’s mysteries by the Lenten fast, the Roman Ambarvalia by the Rogation Days, Saturnalia by Carnival, the Parilia or celebration of Rome’s rebirth by Saint-George’s Day, etc.

  In Latin countries, few marriages were, until recently, celebrated during the month of May, since the latter is consecrated to the Virgin Mary. Strangely enough, it is this very same month that the Romans considered ‘harmful to matrimonial union’.

  In Rome, during Saturnalias, masters and slaves would swap roles for a few hours. In the Middle Ages, Carnival fulfilled the same function of ‘compensating liberation’: everything was allowed, including the fact of passing oneself off for another by means of disguise; one proceeded to crown someone the ‘king of fools’; and the list goes on. According to Van Gennep, this period is characterised ‘by a temporary suspension of the rules of normal life, by a right to personal or collective insults, and by the emergence of sexual and even erotic acts or, more often, symbols’.

  Whereas in Ireland, Saint Brigitte has supplanted the Celtic goddess Birgit, whose functions she partly assumed, there are numerous local saints in France who have, likewise, adopted the virtues of ancient pagan divinities, beginning with healer saints — not to mention the ‘Phallic’ ones (Foutin, Phallier, Génitour and Jacut).

  Starting in the late medieval period, at a time when Christianity peaked, one witnessed, on the fringes of Christian rites in their strictest sense, a large number of new ‘superstitious’ practices relating to what Van Gennep termed ‘the fringe folklorisation of Christian worship’. This is evidenced by the presence of Easter eggs, Saint John’s herbs and firebrands, the ‘Queen of May’ rites, the Yule log, christening favours, etc. These are the ‘Christian marvels’ that have enchanted entire generations of faithful believers, exerting, at times, a greater appeal than dogma itself.

  Among the beliefs connected to the archetypal rite of passage which christening undoubtedly is, Nicole Belmont mentions the example of the chrémeau:409 ‘It is an “under-hat” that is worn underneath the actual Christening hat and that comes into contact with the Holy Chrism which the child’s head is anointed with; hence its name. It is kept most painstakingly by the parents and is often used by all the family’s children successively. There is a link of sympathetic magic that ties the child to the hat: should the latter ever be misplaced or damaged, the child’s very life would find itself threatened’.

  A Famous Character

  Displaying greater optimism than Mrs Belmont, Mr Henri Dontenville410 does not believe that Christianisation and the diversity of regional traditions have done much in terms of preventing the development of French national folklore.

  In several recent books, he enumerates the principal characters of our folklore: Mélusine the fairy, Aymon’s sons, and especially Gargantua the giant.

  He views the character of Mélusine as one whose name is an altered form of the ancient ‘Mère Lusine’411 (which, on the toponymical level, is to be likened to Lusignan, Lézignan, Lusigny, Lésigneux, etc.) and refers to a ‘luminous mother’ (as in lux or Lucy).

  As for Gargantua, the mere popularity of Rabelais’s412 books, however great it may have been, does not obviously suffice to explain the multitude of traditions and legends which focus on him, nor is it sufficient to account for the fact that his presence can be encountered in all French regions, especially in the domain of topographical folklore.

  His gigantic height, strength, enormousness, gluttony, and role as a topographical and hydrographical modeller have turned him into a most famous character. As specified by Mrs Belmont, ‘he is given credit for the birth of numerous mountains, hills, mounds, knolls, hillocks, upright stones, lakes, swamps, etc. Gargantua creates mountains and hills either by scraping off the earth that has remained stuck to the sole of his shoes or by dropping the contents of the sack he carries on his back’. The pieces of gravel found in his shoes are huge blocks that he scatters here and there. He leaves entire rivers dry by drinking them up, creates other ones by urinating, jumps over valleys, and so on.

  In 1883, in an essay on Gargantua in Popular Traditions (which was reedited in 1967 at G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose), Paul Sébillot had already highlighted the giant’s extraordinary popularity.

  On his part, Mr Dontenville enumerates an astonishing number of Gargan mountains, Gargonne, Garganne or Gorgeonne rivers, and ‘quoits’, ‘gravel’, ‘impressions’, ‘chairs’ and ‘hammers’ belonging to Gargantua.

  Philologists have established the equivalence of ‘Gargan(t)’ and Gargantua, with the suffix -tua (-atis, -ates) expressing the notion of belonging. The initial form was thus Gargantua-atis. This suffix was also that of Nantua, a city of the Ain department, whose name derives from Nantua-atis (meaning ‘from the vale’). As for the form ‘gargant’, it expresses the giant’s ferocious appetite and is found in the Latin term gurgitis,413 as well as in the Provençal term gargantuan (‘gluttonous man’) and the Spanish word garganton (meaning ‘glutton’).

  Yet Mr Dontenville ventures even further. He pierces the mystery of this ‘national’ giant’s genuine identity by making use of both the ‘gargantuan chronicles’ and chapbooks, in addition to the Welsh chronicles, in which a legendary hero called Gurgunt (Gurgantius with Gerald of Wales414 and Gurgiunt Babtruc with Geoffrey of Monmouth415 ) is mentioned as early as the 12th century.

  The most famous texts recount the manner in which Gargantua’s parents, the giants Grandgousier and his wife Gargamelle, were created by Merlin the enchanter (who belongs to the Arthurian cycle) and how, having undertaken a voyage from east to west (a reference to the solar trajectory), this exceptional family finally arrived in the Mont Saint-Michel bay, where two enormous rocks transported by Gargantua’s parents and then cast into the sea ended up forming the Mont Saint-Michel and the neighbouring islet of Tombelaine.

  In the Welsh chronicles, Gurgunt is the son of king Belinus and his companion Belisama. Mr Dontenville demonstrates, however, that this very same Belinus is but a ‘transposition’ of the Celtic god Belenos (also known as Bélen and Belin), a solar divinity that is sometimes likened to Apollo and commemorated by numerous Gal
lic inscriptions.

  The Cult of Saint-Michel

  One thus gains a better understanding of the fact that Gargantua’s name is associated with that of the archangel Saint Michael, the great slayer of dragons and ‘pagans’. Originally, Mont Saint-Michel was actually known as Mont Tombe,416 where the Celts honoured Bélen, the god of light. And it is for this very reason that the Romans referred to it Mons Tumba Beleni.

  In 1283, local chronicles bestowed upon it the name of ‘Mont-Gargan’ or ‘Mont-de-Gargan’. As for Tombelaine, ‘one cannot perceive it as being anything but the tomb of Belisama’, as specified by Mr Henri Dontenville himself.

  And here is a complementary detail: there is also a ‘Saint Michael’s Mount’ in Cornwall, a mount whose first occupant is said to have been a giant. And when, in 709 AD, Saint Aubert, the bishop of Avranches, completed the construction of the Mont Saint-Michel sanctuary, it was to ‘Mount Gargan’ in Italy that he sent his monks to seek out the archangel’s ‘relics’ after the latter had manifested his presence there. Indeed, the Italian Monte Gargano is the centre of Saint Michael’s and Saint Nicholas’ cult. And if the first of the two — in whom some have longed to see not only the successor of Mercury or Wotan but also the ‘national saint’ of the Lombards (See Olga Rozhdestvenska’s Culte de saint Michel et le Moyen ge latin.417 Augustin Picard, 1922) — is regarded as a fighter, an ‘arch-strategist’ of the celestial militia and, owing to his very name, even God’s rival (Michael = Quis ut Deus), it is Saint Nicholas, whose heavenly sled takes over from the ‘wild hunter’ ’s retinue at Christmas time, that has clearly inherited the sac borne by Gargantua the giant.

  And there is one final clue — Bayart, the horse attributed to Gargantua in the Great Chronicles, is the very same horse encountered in the geste418 of the sons of Aymon and other medieval poems including La Chanson de Maugis and La Chanson de Renaud de Montauban. This solar animal, however, bears a name which, derived from baillar, also means ‘Belenic’. Mr Dontenville writes:

  Despite displaying a bay colour, he belongs to the family of the sacred Germanic horses, which were all white. He is also part of the family of the white horses of Rosmersholm mentioned by Ibsen419 and perpetuated by the memories of the Schimmel celebrated by Theodor Storm.420 Yet he is equally the kindred of the white horses of Gallic France, which have been identified everywhere.

  Gargantua seems to have become, thereafter, a sort of ‘mythical hero’. Tradition has it that at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, in 1453, it was he who drove out the English on the Dordogne, at Castillon.

  Due to a bizarre sort of historical coincidence, it was Rabelais, a church man without any vocation, who would claim the privilege of restoring the honour of Gargantua, a fallen god that had been fought by Christianity (which then proceeded to extend some of his attributes to Saint Nicholas and Saint Christopher), turning him into the hero of the famous adventures known to all school children since 1532.

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  Histoire et géographie mythique de la France421 , an essay by Henri Dontenville. G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose (11 Victor-Cousin street, 75005 Paris, France), 379 pages.

  Arnold Van Gennep, créateur de l’ethnographie française422 , an essay by Nicole Belmont. Payot, 187 pages.

  Mythes et croyances de l’ancienne France423 , an essay by Nicole Belmont. Flammarion, 187 pages.

  Mythologie française424 , an essay by Henri Dontenville. Payot, 269 pages.

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  Established by Mr Dontenville, the Société de mythologie française (SMF) has been publishing a quarterly bulletin known as ‘Mythologie Française’ (Lycée Félix-Laure, 60021 Beauvais) since 1950. Around a hundred issues have been released, all under the management of Mr Henri Fromage, a professor at Beauvais. The SMF has also edited three albums of figurative documents relating to France’s ‘mythical’ heritage.

  During these past years, French ethnography has experienced some important developments, as testified by the success of various books including those of Mr Pierre-Jakez Helias (Le cheval d’orgeuil,425 Plon, 1975) and those of Mr Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie (Paysans de Languedoc,426 Flammarion, 1969; Montaillou, village occitan,427 Gallimard, 1975). In the field of rural ethnography and historiography, alongside some excellent photo books such as the one by Mr Jean Carrière and Michel José entitled Joseph, Noémie, Célestin et autres paysans d’Ardèche428 (Chêne, 1976), one must also mention the highly remarkable Histoire de la France rurale429 , published in four volumes by Seuil editions (in a collective compendium, 1975–77). Another wave of books focusing on the topic of ‘holidays’ has allowed us to gain a better understanding of the origins of French popular traditions and myths: Rosemonde Sanson’s Les 14 juillet, 1789–1975. Fête et conscience nationale430 (Flammarion, 1976); Mona Ozouf’s La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799431 (Gallimard, 1976); Michel Vovelle’s Métamorphoses de la fête en Provence432 (Aubier-Montaigne, 1976); Yves-Marie Bercé’s Fête et révolte433 (Hachette, 1976); and others. For further reading, see also the Ethnologie française434 journal, which acts as the organ of the French Ethnology Society (Musée des arts et traditions populaires,435 6 route du Mahatma Gandhi, 75116 Paris, France) and is published by Berger-Levrault.

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  French Toponymy

  ‘Toponymy has long been the Cinderella of literature’, Albert Dauzat436 once said.

  At the very borders of history, archaeology, linguistics and ethnology lies toponymy, a science that deals with the names of places in relation to the soil’s population and that was, for a long time, compelled to seek a scope of its own.

  Its precursors in France were represented by Quicherat, a mediaevalist, and d’Arbois de Jubainville, a Celticist. Next came Georges Dottin (La langue gauloise437 ), Camille Julian (Gallia438 ), Joseph Loth and Antoine Thomas.

  In 1922, Albert Dauzat decided to reinstate the teaching of place names into his course. Ten years later, he created a ‘chronicle of toponymy’ in the Revue des études anciennes439 and, in 1938, presided over the very first International Congress of Toponymy in Paris.

  Having become the studies director at the Ecole pratique des hautes études440 and attained worldwide fame soon thereafter, Albert Dauzat wrote numerous books including Tableau de la langue française441 (Payot) and some essays on Linguistic Europe (Payot), Linguistic Geography (Flammarion), The Phonetics and Grammar of the French Language (Larousse), etc.

  In La toponymie française,442 he retraces both the history and the evolution of our language.

  Migrations and Conquests

  French is a Romance language largely stemming from the ‘popular’ Latin that was spoken in the northern part of Gaul at the beginning of our era but which underwent a considerable transformation, particularly under the influence of Germanic languages; this makes ‘Francien’ the most Germanic of all Romance languages. In his Tableau de la langue française (which was reedited in 1967), Albert Dauzat gives the following indication in this regard:

  The mixing of the native population with non-native ones resulted in a simplification impacting not only the delicate phonetism of the Latin language but, above all, the complex flexion system, which almost completely collapsed. The tendency towards the analytical type, which already manifests itself in low Latin, is due to other causes: it is the result of a growing change of mentality.

  The names of places are the fossils of human geography. And just like all fossils, they offer a testimony:

  They enlighten us with regard to the migrations of peoples, their conquests, colonisations, language changes, as well as the land’s development and the successive stages of civilisation.

  In his work entitled Les Celtes443 (Albin Michel), Henri Hubert444 was among the first to bridge archaeology and toponymy. As for Albert Grenier,445 he also bestows great importance upon the names of places in his Manuel d’archéologie gallo-romaine.446

  Here is an example given by Mr Dauzat:

  In the proximity of Royan, the so-called “Susac” consisted in a p
ine wood that had been planted (and quite late at that) on marine dunes: it seemed that the place had never been previously inhabited. And yet the toponymy hinted at a Gallo-Roman type of name. And sure enough, when excavations were conducted, the ruins of a Gallo-Roman villa were unearthed.

  In regions that are both mountainous and more or less arid, one encounters pre-Latin and even Indo-European names up to altitudes that border on 1000 metres.

  It is indeed the vocabulary of mountainous areas that offers the highest number of archaisms: the word cala (i.e. ‘stone’, ‘stone shelter’ and, later on, simply ‘shelter’), which has reached us from the depths of time, can still be recognised in the Savoyard ‘chalet’.

  Having come from Central and Meridional Germany, the Celts were the first to successfully achieve the linguistic unity of the future French Hexagon (with the notable exception of the South-West and a certain part of the Alps).

  Their influence was not as great as was once supposed: when one sets aside some minor morphological and syntactic aspects, 80% of the 50,000 words of ancient French are of Latin origin, with 15% derived from a Germanic source. The remaining 5% are divided between the Continental Celtic, Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician languages.

  Some cities owe their names to the Gallic tribes that established them: the Turones of Tours, the Bellovaci of Beauvais, the Namnetes of Nantes, the Atrebates of Arras, and the Carnutes of Chartres.

  1200 Celtic roots and words have survived, most of which are, in fact, toponyms. Renos or rinos (‘impetuous water stream’) gave us the Italian Reno, as well as the words Renne, Renon and Rhine. Noviento (‘new city’) can be found in Nogent, and nanto (‘vale’, ‘river’) in Nanteuil and Nantua. Words with duro (‘fortress’) and ialo (‘clearing’/’glade’), whose presence stretches from South Germany to the Massif Central, date back to the same epoch, as do superlatives with -sama (Uxisama: Ussel, Icolisama: Angoulême, etc.).