‘Le Barbare parle Grec’: French Classical Scholars and the Racialisation of Modern Greek

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the use of philology and classical scholarship in the racial categorisation of modern Greeks by French scholars in Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular the members of the French School in Athens, founded in 1846. It argues that modern Greeks are ‘racialised’ by these scholars of antiquity in relation to their perceived proximity with their classical heritage. It thus demonstrates how classical scholarship and philology are used as tools to justify racial inferiority and theories of degeneration through systematic scientific attempts to categorise and create scientific hierarchies grounded in linguistic difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Philology
• race
• Greece
• classical scholarship
• Ecole Française d’Athènes
• Indo-European
• travel writing

Introduction

Are modern Greeks directly descended from the ancient Greeks? For nineteenth-century French scholars and travellers, this question went beyond speculative curiosity. As classical antiquity had long represented the claimed heritage and common cultural foundation of Western intellectuals, travel to Greece triggered confrontations between an aesthetic and ideological ideal of ‘Greekness’ and the contemporary reality of Greece and its inhabitants. In this confrontation, racialisation, defined here as the (fluid and naturalised) ascription of racial characteristics to an individual or a group by an outsider, and the social meaning(s) that are then attached to this racial ascription (Fassin 2011, 422–423) became a central feature of the reception of classical antiquity in the nineteenth century. This process is rendered particularly visible in travellers’ encounters with forms of cultural alterity that cannot be easily subsumed into ‘classicality’, which I understand as a set of idealised, primarily aesthetic, but also ethical qualities assigned to material artefacts, literature and history from ancient Greece and Rome as part of the construction of a European cultural heritage. This article thus investigates the use of philology and classical scholarship in the racial categorisation of modern Greeks by French scholars travelling to Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular in the understudied writings of the early members of the Ecole Française d’Athènes (EFA), a higher education institution founded in 1846 by the French government, and active to this day, for French scholars in classical studies to undertake research in Greece. By scrutinising the change in the Greek language after centuries of postclassical linguistic evolution, the EFA scholars were also evaluating the perceived racial hybridity of Greek people, their analysis showcasing a heavily racialised framework in encountering language evolution, particularly through a focus on the imagined (im)purity of the idiom.

This article argues that the recurrent questioning by French erudite travellers of the authenticity of the Greek language acts as evidence for investigating the broader underlying question of exactly how ‘Greek’ the Greeks should be considered. Nineteenth-century authors follow here a long tradition of French and European travel narratives from the Renaissance onwards which aim to evaluate the transmission of the ‘essence of Greekness’ throughout the centuries, as well as grapple with the gap between idealised expectations of Greece and empirical travel experience (Augustinos 1994, x–xi).

Whilst the question of the ‘purity’ of Greek identity comes to the forefront of French writings in the eighteenth century, with the rise of philhellenism ahead of the independence war (Augustinos 1994, 134), I argue that in the nineteenth century, this attitude takes a distinctive racial turn. This article thus shows how nineteenth-century Greeks are ‘racialised’ by French travellers and scholars in relation to their perceived proximity or distance to their classical heritage. Classical scholarship and philology in particular are used as tools to justify racial inferiority and theories of degeneration through systematic scientific attempts to categorise and create scientific hierarchies grounded in linguistic difference. In doing so, these theoretical tools continue to shape modern representations of Greeks and Greece.¹

This article focuses on the writings of the very first cohorts of EFA members, which have received little academic attention despite the abundance and the richness of the material.² What makes these texts particularly interesting for this analysis is not only the quantity of material produced but also the fact that most of these represent excellent examples of a hybrid genre of learned travel narratives.

Since their development into a modern scholarly discipline in the late eighteenth century, classical studies have been bound up with European racial ideologies. In particular, classical studies have constructed their object of study, Greek and Roman antiquity, as a specifically Western heritage, through the establishment of an intellectual and racial heredity between the ‘Ancients’ and modern Europeans. Classics thus served as a common cultural foundation for Western intellectual and political elites and were deeply embedded in the building of both national and imperial projects (Goff 2005, 11). This privileged position of classical studies is one of the reasons that explains the long and wide-ranging controversy provoked by the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987. In this work, Bernal famously contends that ancient Greek language and culture owed a lot more than previously assumed to the influence of Egyptian and Phoenician civilisations, but that these ‘Afroasiatic roots’ of Greek, and therefore classical, culture, widely recognised in antiquity, were erased by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European scholarship which favoured the hypothesis of Greek settlers of Indo-European origin (the ‘Aryan model’) (Bernal 1987–2006, 35). A major part of Bernal’s reassessment of ancient Greece’s origin, and of the critiques of his thesis, rests upon conflicting linguistic evidence and philological expertise, but also reveals the racial ideologies at play within both modern and contemporary fields of classical studies.³

In the nineteenth century, the burgeoning discipline of philology, the study of the history of languages and their evolution based on written sources, was intent on tracing the origins of languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Noticing similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, philologists started positing a common origin to all three: the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ language. Denise McCoskey explains that the discipline thus became one of the main scholarly tools used by European scholars to establish claims of heredity, particularly with ancient Greeks:

Trying to explain who the Greeks and Romans had been from how they had spoken thus became closely linked to asserting claims about which modern European groups could lay claim to being their ‘legitimate’ descendants, conclusions fraught with racial overtones. (2012, 5)

The question of whether hereditary ‘racial’ relations could be established through the study of language was thus central to the development of philology. As it was used by scholars of different disciplines to determine the heredity of the people they studied, the question of language turned into a question of legitimacy. This, in turn, shifted the use of ancient Greek and Latin towards establishing racial distinctions between the ‘legitimate’ heir of classical antiquity and its others.

Indeed, some argue that philology briefly became the paradigmatic discipline ‘for understanding all things human: history, nationality, ethnicity, migration’ (Kurtz 2021, 750). As Harpham explains, the mutual benefit of intersecting the study of races with the study of languages became central to philological and racial scientific discourses:

The appeal of race, for those interested in language, was that it provided a strong way of conceiving of linguistic groups as kinds of people whose ways of life could be observed; the appeal of philology, for those interested in race, was that it provided an equally strong–that is, empirical and objective–way of describing the capacities and dispositions of those groups. (2009, 42)

Philology, despite the clear ideological interest of those scholars trying to determine both ancestors and descendants of certain groups, as well as the ideological undertones in conflicting theories and their proponents, was perceived as objective and therefore harder to refute than other approaches to the study of different civilisations and their history. This facilitated giving the discipline the legitimacy to develop anthropological theories of different groups of people that went beyond linguistic observations. While it is true that many early philological enquiries and theories, such as the search for a single linguistic ancestor for Indo-European languages (what Bernal termed the ‘Aryan hypothesis’), or the debates around the language spoken in the garden of Eden, are fundamentally framed through racial parameters (Olender 1989), dissensions also rose amongst theorists of race regarding the exact relationship between race(s) and language(s). For example, can one determine who belongs to a race based on the language spoken by their ancestors? If languages have common origins, does this mean that different races share the same common origin? Are visible influences among different languages a sign of racial mixing, or of the conquest of one civilisation by another? (Blanckaert 2007, 142, 149). As Blanckaert shows, attempts to demonstrate the unity and the singularity of races, while constituting a major project of many nineteenth-century sciences, never relied on agreed methods; this explains a shift that occurs in the middle of the nineteenth century when philology fails to sustain a fixed taxonomy of race:

l’unité de race s’entendait différemment selon qu’on choisisse, pour la démontrer, la filiation par le sang ou la filiation par la langue. Au début du XIX^e siècle, […] le maillage des langues et des mythologies donnait l’avantage à la philologie comparative. Dans un second mouvement, les physiologistes réclamaient pour leur spécialité une priorité de fait. (2007, 139)

From the second half of the nineteenth century, racial science dominated anthropology, furthering a complex taxonomy of fixed racial features (whose rigid criteria philology could never provide). Despite this epistemological opposition between ‘blood’ and ‘language’ heredity, racial science and philology continued to inform each other throughout the nineteenth century, as demonstrated, for example, by the active search of a common Proto-Indo-European language and an ‘Aryan’ ancestor for Greeks, Romans and modern western European civilisations. More generally, some authors, such as the racial theorist Gobineau, use language as an important racial trait in their taxonomy of races. Others, like Ernest Renan or Max Müller, sometimes talk ambiguously about linguistic ‘races’, but are in general keener to dissociate the history of languages and of people (Blanckaert 2007).

Languages were thus central to the development of national and racial identities in nineteenth-century Europe, and Greece, which gained its independence from the Ottoman empire in 1821, was no exception. The Greek language itself underwent a series of reforms throughout the nineteenth century. A scholarly effort to substitute or form archaic expressions to replace ‘borrowed’ words from other languages, whilst keeping modern pronunciation, was initiated in the late eighteenth century by Greek intellectuals educated in Western Europe and is inseparable from the Greek independence movement. Western Europe supported Greece in its struggle for independence, hoping that out of the Ottoman empire would emerge an imagined nation, both classical and Christian, which is fully Europeanised (Barau 2001; 2009).

Admantios Koraïs (1748–1833), a Greek patriot and scholar, came to redefine the Greek language on the eve of the Independence War. His work (amongst others) led to the adoption of the katharevousa (from the Greek ‘Καθαρϵύουσα’, ‘purified’, a version of modern Greek constructed by eliminating words borrowed from foreign languages, mostly Italian and Turkish) as the nation’s official language, against the commonly spoken ‘demotic’ (from ‘demos’, the people) (Mackridge 2009a; 2009b). The question of the Greek language and its role in the unification of the Greek nation was thus of primary political importance in the nineteenth century. However, for French scholars and travellers in Greece, the everyday language of Greek citizens appeared far removed from the ancient idiom they had learned. Sophie Basch notes that despite the strength of philhellene sentiments in the early decades of the nineteenth century, French authors writing after the Greek War of Independence (1821–29) experience ‘le désappointement provoqué par la découverte d’un pays portant encore bien des marques de la domination ottomane là où on s’attendait à retrouver les sources de la culture occidentale […] il devient vite notoire que la Grèce n’a pas tenu ses promesses’ (1995, 31). Journeys to Greece were expected to justify philhellenes’ sentiments and to concur with their gratitude for the ‘sources’ of Western culture. When these sources appear to have dried up, travellers find themselves uncomfortable praising a country that remains too ‘oriental’ in their view. Eugène Gandar, one of EFA’s first students, writing to his brother, can thus declare Greece to be ‘[u]n pays qui ne doit qu’au culte de l’Europe pour son antique gloire son existence et sa liberté’ ([1849] 1869, 358). In the eyes of French travellers, like Gandar, the ‘ancient glory’ of the country is no longer sufficient to form the basis of a national identity, as too much of Greece’s history and territory appears so completely foreign to Western sensitivities.

Whilst long-standing, this division between the Occident and the Orient, conceived broadly as a border between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarians’ is central to nineteenth-century European self-conception. The ancient Greek word βάρβαρος, meaning ‘barbarian’, ‘non-Greek’, was used by ancient Greeks themselves in opposition to the ἑλληνικός (‘Hellene’ or ‘Greek’). The word ‘barbaros’ itself supposedly mimics the sounds of foreign languages (‘bar-bar’) that appear incomprehensible to Greek ears. The distinction established in antiquity between Greeks and non-Greeks is thus firstly based on language: the ancient ‘barbarian’ is the one who does not speak Greek. How closely this demarcation between the ‘civilised’ Greek and the linguistically inferior ‘barbarian’ aligns itself with the common opposition in the nineteenth century between the ‘civilised Occident’ and the ‘barbarian Orient’ is difficult to ascertain but it is impossible to ignore the impact that the ‘othering’ of the ‘barbarian’ Persians by the Greeks has had on modern representations of the ‘Orient’, as mysterious, weak and incomprehensible (Acheraïou 2008, 55–56; Said [1978] 2003, 57).

It is therefore not surprising that, for nineteenth-century classical scholars, such as the members of the EFA, the Greek language takes on an emblematic place in their assessment of the survival of Greece’s ancient heritage. However, the reception of modern Greek is mixed at best, exemplifying the recurring tension between idealism and disappointment which characterises many nineteenth-century travel narratives to Greece.⁴

(Dis)continuity Narratives and Language Politics

On the façade of the École Française d’Athènes (EFA), a stele commemorates its 1846 foundation as ‘instituée par reconnaissance pour la Grèce antique et par amitié pour la Grèce moderne’. With this expression of gratitude for the past and appreciation for the present, the School locates its foundation, if not exactly temporally, at least spiritually in the direct continuity of the European philhellene movements which supported Greece during its Independence war.⁵

The EFA was originally founded as ‘une École française de perfectionnement pour l’étude de la langue, de l’histoire et des antiquités grecques à Athènes’.⁶ This wide-ranging but vague programme identifies three areas of study: language, history, and the material remains of antiquity. Crucially, neither the royal decree nor the first programmes of the School specify how these studies should be organised. The ‘perfectionnement’ indicates that the School was open to scholars who had already completed the early stages of their higher education. Accordingly, the first cohort was comprised of seven agrégés of Philosophy, History and Classical Literature, none of whom were trained in archaeology (a discipline which would only become the main focus of the EFA from the 1870s onwards).⁷ The educational benefits expected from their journeys to Greece are closer to those of the eighteenth-century ‘Grand Tour’ than of modern scholarship.⁸ In reality, it was hoped that contact with the material ‘antiquités’ would contribute to research on the three other subjects (Greek language, literature, and history). The first members were tasked with studying the country, its nature, and its monuments, to bring back impressions that would enrich their work and teaching back in France. Despite not undertaking preparatory study in archaeology or modern Greek, the confrontation of their classical training with the modern country was deemed sufficient to foster intellectual productivity.⁹

Combining travel impressions with scholarly reflections on ancient literature, culture and history, Jean-Claude Berchet calls the texts produced by these early cohorts ‘promenades archéologiques’ (1985, 1079), a designation that rightly evokes both historical interest and travellers’ dilettantism. As the governmental decree that established the foundation of the School did not precisely define the scholarly activities of its members, the first members of the EFA benefitted from a large degree of freedom in the pursuit of their studies, in Athens and beyond. As remembered by Charles Levêque, one of the School’s first members, these journeys were envisioned as educational, although no programme of work was established for the students:

On comptait évidemment que les monumens encore subsistans, que les lieux historiques avec leurs montagnes, leurs fleuves, leurs golfes, leurs îles ; que les ruines, les vestiges, que les noms des villes fameuses susciteraient, dans ces intelligences nourries de souvenirs helléniques, des questions intéressantes à rajeunir ou à traiter pour la première fois. On se gardait de dire lesquelles. On se bornait à lancer en avant ce groupe curieux en lui disant : ‘Allez, cherchez, trouvez !’ En d’autres termes, il s’agissait, avant tout, de reconnaître le pays, puis de regarder et d’étudier, comme on étudie un livre, ce qui se présenterait de digne d’être bien regardé. (1898, 93)

It is evident from this programme that the EFA’s members were primarily literary scholars, tasked with studying Greece as if it were a text to be deciphered; the names alone of famous cities from antiquity were to be enough to generate fresh classical scholarship. The Greek land is reduced to a series of unspecific physical features, both historical (‘ruines’; ‘vestiges’) and natural (‘montagnes’; ‘fleuves’) that are expected to inspire the young EFA members. Although no specific targets or outcomes are set for them, the imperative ‘trouvez’ reinforces the presentation of Greece as a land so full of classical history that objects of study would spontaneously appear to the discerning traveller.

Archaeology would become the dominant discipline of the school from the 1870s onwards, in the first couple of decades of its existence, however, the studies undertaken by EFA scholars embraced a wide range of scholarly pursuits. Avowedly to facilitate their excursions outside of Athens and their semi-official diplomatic role in Greece, the EFA scholars were also given modern Greek lessons:

la connaissance du grec moderne était nécessaire. Il importait d’apprendre vite à le parler. Nos chefs y avaient pensé ; en quoi ils visaient deux buts différens, mais connexes : nous rendre capables de nous tirer d’affaire, de nous débrouiller à travers les provinces et à Athènes ; et, en second lieu, nous rapprocher autant que possible des Hellènes, nous associer à leur vie, nous en faire des amis, nous rendre utiles enfin, modestement, mais efficacement, dans un intérêt politique. (Levêque 1898, 94)

The expectation that Levêque and the other members will learn modern Greek epitomises the ambiguous position–both academic and diplomatic–that the French government intended to place them, and the new School, in. Modern Greek is therefore perceived by Levêque as a tool to interact with the local community, both for the benefits of his and his colleagues’ research, but also for the larger political interest of the French government.¹⁰ Whilst the scholars rarely take a direct position or express a refined understanding of the contemporary linguistic debates in Greece itself, their own opinion on the modern language is heavily informed by their classical linguistic culture and their opinion on the independence of Greece. The philological effort of the katharevousa, the ‘scholarly’ version of modern Greek that was the country’s official language until 1976, is praised by those school members that exhibit the clearest romantic and philhellene sensitivities:

C’était la langue toujours vivante d’Homère, de Sophocle et de Platon, qui se parlait autour de nous. Déjà du reste à cette époque la nouvelle génération travaillait avec une ardente et patriotique émulation à rapprocher le grec moderne du grec ancien, à le purifier de ses scories, à lui rendre les formes grammaticales qu’il avait perdues. On dirait que la nation tout entière avait entendu l’appel de Coraï. Car ce n’était pas seulement dans les journaux et dans les livres qu’on suivait cette œuvre d’épuration ; mais toutes les classes de la société s’y intéressaient à l’envi. On sait avec quel succès s’est poursuivie depuis ce temps cette œuvre vraiment patriotique, qui a renoué à travers les siècles la tradition de langue nationale, et l’a retrempé à ses sources antiques. (Benoît 1892, 512)¹¹

Benoit adheres here fully to the Greek project of ‘linguistic purification’ that would bring modern Greek (and by extension, modern Greeks) back to the time of Homer, Sophocles and Plato, and he is willing to reinforce the narrative of continuity between the glory of antiquity and contemporary Greece. Seeing in the katharevousa a popular and patriotic effort, Benoît praises it as a national effort by the Greek people to emulate their famous ancestors. However, this enthusiasm also reveals a contradiction in the perception of modern Greek, which is described here as the language ‘toujours vivante’ of ancient authors, yet also as a language in need of ‘purification’ to recover its ancient form. The desire to see revived a specific form of ‘Greekness’, typically modelled on conceptions of the classical era (fourth-fifth centuries bce), had placed expectations on the Greek population by the Western European philhellene movement. Modern Greeks were thus expected to perform antiquity for the Western gaze (and ear), by clearing their language of postclassical ‘impurities’, and it is through this performance of a classically imagined identity that their legitimacy as a modern nation is recognised by Western Europeans. This attitude reinforces the ‘orientalist’ racialisation of modern Greeks, considered as insufficiently ‘European’ and too ‘orientalised’ when they fail to perform a ‘classical’ version of their national identity.¹² Benoît’s stance is all the more remarkable in that his article was published almost fifty years after his journey to Greece, at a moment when ‘demotic’ (the ‘popular’ form of the Greek language) was experiencing a sustained revival in Greek literature, with widely read authors from the ‘New Athenian School’ such as Ioannis Psycharis and Kostis Palamas using and defending ‘demotic’ against the katharevousa, which serves to show the real disconnect that subsisted between the French members of the EFA and contemporary Greek society (Mackridge 2009b, 204–240).

On the other side of the argument, the katharevousa is scorned by Emmanuel Roux, another founding member of the EFA, as a hybrid language, neither ‘natural’ nor ‘properly antique’, which confuses rather than elucidates linguistic questions. Whereas Benoit appears to embrace the contradiction within the katharevousa policy (that ancient Greek is both alive in modern Greek and to be brought back to life), Roux thus treats its study with barely hidden disdain:

L’effet le plus certain du grec moderne, c’est de vous brouiller avec l’ancien. C’est un patois ; ce n’est plus même un patois depuis que les puristes ont entrepris de le recrépir. C’est quelque chose de bâtard et d’équivoque, où les mots sont anciens et les formes modernes. (1898, 38)

The word ‘patois’, like barbarism, etymologically refers to a form of communication that is not a ‘proper’ language; it probably comes from the Old French patoier signifying ‘agiter les mains, gesticuler’ (Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé 2022) in order to communicate. In a French sociolinguistic context, the concept of ‘patois’, mostly applied to regional dialects, is defined by Henri Boyer as the product of an ideology of ‘unilinguisme’. Imposing French as the national language of France, this ideology establishes a hierarchy of languages with French at the top, a political representation of French as the only national language, and an obsession for the ‘bon usage’ which delegitimises and stigmatises linguistic variations, including ‘patois’ and regional dialects (Boyer 2005, 4).¹³ The nineteenth century is a key period for the implementation of such unilinguisme across the French territory as the French Revolution legitimised the concept of a single national language, whilst, a century later, the introduction of free, mandatory, public education by the Third Republic gave the French state the means of completing its implementation (Boyer 2001, 384). It is therefore not surprising to see Roux mobilise the pejorative connotation of ‘patois’ as he defines modern Greek as an inferior dialect of ancient Greek. What is more, for him, the katharevousa made the situation worse by metaphorically plastering (‘recrépir’) the crumbling wall of the modern dialect with the mortar of the ancient lexicon, resulting in a hybrid version of the Greek language. The use of the term ‘bâtard’ disparages the result of this combination of ancient and modern but also establishes a parallel between the heredity of language and its (il)legitimacy by comparing a ‘hybrid’ modern language to an offspring of an ‘impure’ lineage, relying on a lexical field linked to ‘blood purity’ for his linguistic analysis.

The question of the language’s ‘purity’ remains central but the artificial effort of Koraïs and his followers is scorned and perceived as having had the opposite of the desired effect, as the new idiom is not ‘purified’ but ‘bastardised’ by the katharevousa intervention. Eugène Gandar shares his colleague’s objection and even refuses to learn it:

[P]ersonnellement il me convenait fort peu d’employer deux années à étudier le patois que parlent les Grecs d’aujourd’hui […] j’ai renoncé à l’étude du grec vulgaire, étude tout à fait stérile pour moi, pour m’occuper exclusivement des études qui me plaisent. (1869, 265)

The use of the terms ‘patois’ (again) and ‘vulgaire’–strictly speaking vernacular, as opposed to ‘classical’ Greek but here the term all the more reinforces the hierarchy between different forms of the Greek language–to disparage modern Greek highlights that the only study considered worthwhile is that of ancient Greek, a language that French travellers learned and from which modern Greek can only be a ‘degenerate version’ as explained by Edmond About:

Je faisais des progrès rapides, car le grec moderne ne diffère de l’ancien que par un système de barbarismes dont on trouve aisément la clef. Le tout est d’écorcher convenablement les mots que nous avons appris au collège : il n’y a rien de changé au fond de la langue. (1854, 12)

The travellers proudly display their classical knowledge as a sign of cultural superiority. The distinction between ‘proper’ Greek and ‘Barbarian’ is here revived as the equivalences between the ancient and modern languages are only explained through ‘barbarisms’ (improper usages and thus the etymological designation of a language as unintelligible as if it were foreign).¹⁴ Modern Greek is therefore a ‘barbarised’ version of the ancient language, close enough that About can easily understand it but too different to attain the same elite status as ancient Greek. Like Benoît and Roux, About also highlights the tension between the apparent unchangeability of Greek and its modern ‘barbarisation’. All three authors, like many other educated French travellers to Greece, see their knowledge of classical Greek as a means to access the ‘real’ Greece, which is the Greece of classical antiquity. They therefore use their epistemic privilege to position themselves as deserving heirs of the ancient Greeks, othering modern Greeks as barbarians in order to appropriate a certain classical heritage as their own.

The different opinions of these early EFA scholars thus reveal a focus on classical Greece that often dispenses with philological science and engages with the Greek debate on their national language from the narrow perspective of its relationship with ancient Greek. The inevitable gap between their expectations, set up by the construction of a ubiquitous Hellenist ideal in early-nineteenth-century elite education in France (and Western Europe more generally), and the forms of Greek that travellers hear and describe whilst in Athens, crudely exposes the type of confirmation bias operating within these narratives. The search for an idealised and intact classical Greek language takes precedence over the practical implications of linguistic diversity and evolution. Members of the EFA are often dismissive towards postclassical Greece, and towards the linguistic as well as historical layers that obscure antiquity from their view, considering both the Byzantines and the Ottomans as ‘too Eastern’ and therefore as racial ‘others’ to classical antiquity. This in turn raises the question of how both the Greek language and the Greek people have been transformed by these successive ‘orientalising’ influences. However, some scholars, like Eugène Gandar, seem to still find some redeeming qualities in the supposed continuity, even if ‘barbarised’, of the Greek language:

Les langues étrangères ont laissé quelques mots dans la langue grecque, mais ils ne l’ont pas altérée, elle ne s’est pas laissée absorber plus que le peuple. […] La langue d’Homère et de Platon a dégénéré; je n’ai qu’une chose à constater, c’est qu’elle vit encore. (1858, 58)

Despite its perceived decadence, the survival of their language is taken as proof of the continuous heredity of Greek people, meaning that they are truly the direct descendants of the Greeks from classical antiquity. The effects of migration and imperial occupation on its integrity are seen as minimal. In sum, in a highly romanticised way, Gandar presents the essence of Greekness as surviving through its language, because it is that of Plato and Homer and its classical quality allows it to resist foreign ‘alteration’.

This is not to say that the EFA travellers necessarily overlook how the authenticity of modern Greece’s lineage from antiquity is recreated in the nineteenth century. Another EFA member, Antoine Grenier, notes, for example, the new propensity of Greek parents to give their children names from ancient history or mythology (Aristide, Pericles, Electra, Penelope, etc.) and comments: ‘Cela est, du reste, d’un bon effet sur l’oreille de l’étranger. Ils le savent et ils en ont abusé’ (1863, 67). Modern Greeks perform Hellenism for the benefit of outsiders (tourists, scholars and other travellers) who are happy to buy the often-invented traditions put on display for them (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). This eagerness of Western European travellers to perpetuate a vision of Greece and Greekness as immutable since Antiquity has led to the disappointment of ‘mishellene’ writers from the 1840s, such as About and Grenier.¹⁵ The anticipation of a reunion with Antiquity acted as a filter through which ancient and modern Greece were to be received, with mixed results, which are imputable to travellers’ expectations more than to Greeks’ failings, according to another EFA scholar, Charles-Ernest Beulé: ‘D’ailleurs, entre la Grèce qui luttait et l’Europe qui la contemplait, l’antiquité interposait son mirage. Les Grecs ne nous ont point trompés; ils sont ce qu’ils étaient avant d’être libres, ils sont déjà meilleurs: ils n’ont trompé que nos espérances, dont ils n’étaient pas complices, et dont nous leur faisons expier la vanité’ (1855, 1046). Antiquity is a ‘mirage’, a Romantic construct that hides the real Greece from Western European eyes and a truthful assessment of both modern and ancient Greece requires the science, but also the humility, of an equanimous scholar. French travellers like Beulé are thus likely to adopt a sceptical posture towards Greece, informed by the tension between their desire to find traces of classical antiquity in Greece and the necessity, after the disillusion provoked by post-independence Greece, to appear more discerning. This tension is echoed in the scholarship of the early EFA scholars: the ‘mirage of antiquity’ is the reason they are in Greece, yet their role is to not fall for it. As Gandar draws an equivalence between the survival of the Greek language and the heredity of its speakers, linguistic (dis)continuity and purity are an inherent part of the process of racialisation of modern Greeks.

The Figure of the Barbarian

In general, the language used by EFA scholars to characterise the modern Greek language is strongly racialised, notably through the category of the ‘barbarian’, as explained above. Despite its origin denoting primarily linguistic difference, already in antiquity the opposition between Greeks and Barbarians acquired a new political potency during the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BCE. The othering of the ancient ‘barbarian’ (as opposed to the Greek citizen) thus mirrors relatively closely modern processes of racialisation:

the term was soon applied, and with greater animosity, to the Persians themselves. Later the ‘barbarian’ would also encompass the range of peoples the Persians had added to their own empire (e.g. Egyptians, Phoenicians and Thracians) and ultimately it would connote all non-Greek peoples. This collapsing of all human variation into a single racial opposition–Greek vs. barbarian – is the closest parallel in antiquity to the modern racial binary of ‘black’ and ‘white’. (McCoskey 2012, 55)

As McCoskey notes here, though not originally racially charged, already in antiquity, the category ‘barbarian’ came to encompass for the Greeks the essentialised nature of cultures perceived as ‘other’ and inferior to them. This political meaning of ‘barbarian’ grounds the nineteenth-century usage of the term in a history of linguistic but also strategic racialisation of the ‘oriental’ other.

Relatedly, it is striking to note the linguistic primacy given to the political self-identification of ancient Greeks, and how this concern with language as a unifying factor translates into the nineteenth-century debates around the institutionalisation of the Greek language by the newly independent Greek state.¹⁶ In this context, Mackridge describes the strong, mutually influencing link the new leaders of the modern Greek nation state determined between ‘national identity’ and ‘national language’ (2009a). The interconnection between language and nation that the first leaders of independent Greece encouraged also explains the official imposition of the katharevousa as a national language. This eruditely reconstructed idiom, whilst not widely spoken by the Greek population, reflected the self-image of a modern, educated, European nation that the Greek political elite wanted to project.

The recurrent use of the term ‘barbarian’ by the EFA scholars thus connotes a broader racialised framework in encountering language evolution and a strict casting aside of idiomatic variations. A focus on the imagined (im)purity of the idiom (starting from the Greeks themselves and the katharevousa) is displayed through the above-mentioned use of terms such as ‘dégénéré’, ‘scories’, and ‘bâtard’. The impurity of modern Greek is implicitly seen as ‘betraying’ not only Greece’s classical heritage, but also the hypothesised lineage of Greek people themselves. The question of the authenticity (whether lost, found or reconstructed) of the language acts as a route of investigation into the broader question of exactly how ‘Greek’ the Greeks are considered to be, and how they are falsely perceived as a homogenous social group by nineteenth-century travellers. By scrutinising changes in the Greek language after centuries of postclassical linguistic evolution, the EFA scholars are also evaluating the perceived hybridity of Greek people: are they still ‘essentially Greek’ or have they too been ‘barbarised’? Has foreign influence proved ‘fatal’ to their classical essence or is the philhellene dream still alive?

The continuity (or lack thereof) of language thus raises, for nineteenth-century French classicists, broader questions about the racial descent of modern Greeks. To what extent can they be considered the direct descendants of the ancients? The answer to this question is complicated by the fact that for centuries, few of the Greeks themselves were identifying as such, and the older denomination of ‘romaios’ (Roman) continued to be used throughout the nineteenth century by certain segments of the Greek population (Kaplanis 2014): ‘[u]ndoubtedly, ethnic Greeks spoke Greek dialects and belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church. But they usually referred to themselves simply as Romans or as faithful to the cross’ (Tsoukalas 1999, 9).¹⁷ Until the Enlightenment, the Greeks’ relationship to their antiquity was far from evident, and rarely valued. Nevertheless, the EFA’s members, such as Benoît, are happy to exalt what they perceive as the racial continuity of Greek people:

[N]ous nous plaisions à chercher et à retrouver des ressemblances entre ces Hellènes d’aujourd’hui et leurs grands ancêtres d’autrefois. Oui vraiment, en dépit de tant de vicissitudes et d’invasions barbares qui ont altéré le sang de ce peuple, malgré la fatale influence de l’oppression turque achevant l’œuvre de la domination byzantine, nous pouvions admirer souvent dans la mine héroïque ou fine de certains hommes, dans la beauté si pure de quelques femmes, des types qui nous rappelaient la statuaire antique. (Benoît 1892, 511)

In reality, the qualification of ‘domination byzantine’ would have been incomprehensible for most Greeks, even after the Independence War (at the very least since the Byzantine Empire’s dominant language was Greek, and the dominant religion Orthodox Christianity). The ‘negative’ influence of Turks and Byzantines on Greece plays on widespread orientalist stereotypes of the Ottomans as cruel yet weak, but also of the Byzantines as ‘eastern’ (which is already ‘too oriental’). Despite the focus being on the physical appearance of modern Greeks, one can also see implied in this passage a racialisation of ‘eastern’ religions (Islam, but also orthodox Christianity) being disparaged as sources of ‘dégénérescence’ for Greek culture and their ‘blood’.

The search for the ancients in the moderns is here primarily aesthetic, nevertheless, the fear of ‘miscegenation’ appears very present as Benoît seems to follow prominent racial theories of the time, such as Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines [1853]. In this pseudo-scientific essay, Gobineau argues that the ‘white race’ (including ‘Aryans’) has led human development and that its mixing with other races will engender its ultimate decadence. As Gobineau’s definition of races relies also on physiological characteristics, Benoit remarks here that the Greeks still look like ancient statues.

In the rare cases where Greek figures did not satisfy the expectations of travellers, informed by neo-classical standards for ancient Greek art set by the late eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Potts 1994), this is attributed to an inevitable lack of ‘Greekness’. Since Greece is both source and synonym of beauty, anyone not satisfying classical aesthetic criteria cannot be truly Greek, which is echoed by About:

Les Athéniennes ne sont ni belles ni bien faites […] C’est qu’Athènes, il y a vingt-cinq ans, n’était qu’un village albanais. Les Albanais formaient et forment encore presque toute la population de l’Attique, et l’on trouve à trois lieues de la capitale des villages qui comprennent à peine le grec. Athènes s’est peuplée rapidement d’hommes de toute nation et de toute espèce ; et c’est ce qui explique la laideur du type athénien. (1854, 39)

Athenian women are dismissed as ‘Albanian’, thus ‘foreign’, based on their perceived lack of beauty. Women are here judged primarily on classical aesthetic criteria, their beauty proving or disproving their heredity or their essentially ‘oriental’ quality but also showing how specific racial frameworks tie in with particular gender expectations. We can also note here the link established directly between the Greek language and its usage with Greek identity. Despite the EFA scholars’ criticisms for the changes it has undergone since antiquity, the Greek language remains once again the sign of the continuity and the purity of the Greek ‘race’. This is not only the reiteration of a nation-building discourse around language as a vector of unity, but it demonstrates the pre-eminence of the French and Western European reception of classical antiquity over the inhabitants of Greece. The Greek language has been a tool of this reception and non-Greek speakers in Greece cannot lay claim, even symbolically, to a classical heritage for which Europeans drew the canonical aesthetic rules. Nevertheless, in general, French classicists in Greece wish to underline a strong link between the land and its inhabitants and depict Greeks as having absorbed foreign influences without losing their own identity:

Autrefois la race grecque se vantait d’être née sur le sol qu’elle habitait, et que personne n’avait habité avant elle. On est tenté d’applaudir à ses prétentions en l’y retrouvant encore, impérissable dans son éternelle patrie. […] sans doute, il y a peu de Grecs qui n’aient eu quelque Barbare au nombre de leurs ancêtres. Ils sont Grecs néanmoins car ces Barbares l’étaient devenus. [… | Ainsi l’étranger devient grec, ὁ βάρβαρος ἑλληνέζϵι [the barbarian speaks Greek, my translation], et le Grec, comme le Juif, ne sait pas devenir autre chose. […] au fond du cœur, en tout temps, le Grec est Grec. (Gandar 1858, 57)

The antisemitic assertion of this ‘naturalised’ Greekness or Jewishness, which will be discussed in more depth in the following section, demonstrates how Gandar’s theories about language and heredity aligns itself closely with the racial science of his time and its emphasis on essentialised heredities. The link between the people and their land is revived here with a reference to ancient theories of autochthony, which designate a series of creation myths that present humans as created directly from the earth. Ancient Athenians, in particular, seem indeed to have recurrently claimed to descend from the archaic king Erechtheus, a mythical figure supposedly born from the soil of Attica itself (Isaac 2004, 114):

Thucydides makes Pericles remind his assembled compatriots that their ancestors, ‘always inhabiting the land as the same people, through their courage passed it on from generation to generation as a free country.’ Autochthony thus became closely associated with a complex of core values: the legitimacy of possession of the soil, mutual solidarity, the equality of all citizens, and resistance to foreign domination. (Isaac 2004, 115)

This presumed autochthony is celebrated in the implicit opposition between Greeks and ‘oriental’ non-Greeks (whether the fifth-century bce Persians or nineteenth-century Ottomans) and serves to exalt the superiority of the Greeks through the ‘purity’ of their lineage (Bridge, Hall, and Rhodes 2007). Ultimately, ‘Greekness’ is presented as an inherent quality, strong enough to assimilate ‘barbarians’ within its territory and once again, the assimilation to this identity is realised through language: the barbarian becomes Greek as he starts speaking Greek.

Overall, EFA scholars assessed Greek people through a shifting dichotomy of proximity and distance with the ancient past where Classics became a way to measure ‘Greekness’. The only individuals considered truly Greek were those whose language, appearance, and customs appear close to the ideal of ancient Greek civilisation, one that aesthetically and ideologically values whiteness.

Philhellenism and Antisemitism – Emile Burnouf and the ‘Aryan Question’

The fragility of these attempts to racially essentialize ‘Greekness’ as related to language, particularly the everyday use of a language ‘barbarised’ by centuries of post-classical Greek history, reveals the ambiguities of the relationship of French travellers to an independent Greek nation and its population. There is a constant unease in finding Greece too ‘orientalised’, having kept too visible traces of Ottoman culture, but also of the Byzantine period. The only acceptable model of Greek society is the antique one, the Byzantine period being often overlooked by travellers.

However, all of antiquity is not created equal; the social model to emulate proposed to modern Greeks is necessarily Athenian democracy. ‘Si les Grecs veulent absolument rattacher leur nouvelle histoire à celle des anciens, ce n’est pas aux Constantins qu’ils devraient songer, c’est à Périclès’, suggests Emile Burnouf, former member and then director of the EFA (1869a, 476). This valorisation of the fifth century BCE against later antiquity has an urgent significance in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, European powers were dissuading Greece from actively pursuing its ‘Megali Idea’ (Great Idea). From 1844 onwards, Greek leaders were indeed promoting the ideal of a Greek state encompassing the historical region of Hellenic presence in a revival of the Byzantine empire with Constantinople as a capital (Clogg 2021, 46–47). By encouraging the Greeks to invest in Athens as their historical capital and source of heritage, against the Eastern city founded by Constantine the Great, Burnouf had two objectives. On the one hand, he was attempting to limit Greece’s political ambition; on the other, he was also imposing a racialised hierarchy of heritage that corresponds to Western European valorisation of selective aspects of ancient Greek culture above others.

Having been part of the first cohort of EFA scholars (1846–49), Burnouf became, twenty years later, its second director (1867–75). During his long academic career and his multiple stays in Greece, he published many works related to Greek history and politics, but also to his other major area of expertise, ancient Indian civilisation and Sanskrit philology. Being both a Sanskritist and a Hellenist, this double expertise leads him to write on the link between both civilisations (particularly in La Légende athénienne: étude de mythologie comparée [1872] and La Science des Religions [1872]). In his different interventions, we can trace how he uses his expertise on philology but also his knowledge of other advances in science of antiquity, such as archaeology, to develop racial theories around ‘Aryan’, ‘Semite’ and ‘Greek’ civilisations whose impact was long-lasting. This is strikingly similar, as seen earlier, to Gandar, who makes use of racial theories to justify his comparative study of Homer and modern Greece. For example, probably thanks to his dual role as director of the EFA and scholar of ancient Asian civilisations, Burnouf collaborated with the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who famously excavated the ruins of Troy in modern-day Turkey between 1870 and 1879. Burnouf, who designed multiple maps of the site for Schliemann’s 1880 volume, Ilios: the city and country of the Trojans, was also solicited by the archaeologist to provide an interpretation of the decorative motif of the swastika that the latter uncovered on many different objects in Troy (Schliemann 1880, 351).

Whilst the philologist and Sanskrit scholar Max Müller (1880, 346) insists in his communication to Schliemann, that ‘[Swastika] is a word of Indian origin, and has its history and definite meaning in India’, adding cautiously that ‘the occurrence of such crosses in different parts of the world may or may not point to a common origin’, Burnouf himself is bolder in establishing a direct relation between the Indian symbol and the motif found in the Trojan excavation (Schliemann 1880, 351–352). As a proponent of the ‘Aryan theory’ which postulates, from the hypothesis of an Indo-European language, the existence of an Indo-European (or ‘Aryan’) civilisation as a common ancestor to both Indian and European cultures, he thus draws direct genealogies between Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Greek iconography:

Les archéologues chrétiens pensent que c’est la forme la plus ancienne du signe de la croix; nous le croyons aussi, car ce signe est précisément celui que l’on trace sur le front des jeunes buddhistes [sic] et qui était usité chez les brâhmanes de toute antiquité; il porte le nom de swastika. […] C’est ce même instrument qui se trouve personnifié dans l’ancienne religion des Grecs sous la figure de Prométhée porteur du feu […] A présent le swastika se remarque sur une multitude de vases et d’objets antiques, de Rhode, de Chypre, de Grèce, d’Italie, et sur d’autres. (Burnouf 1872, 239–240)

The Indo-European linguistic hypothesis, first formulated in the early nineteenth century, soon developed to include cultural and anthropological aspects, as Burnouf’s syncretic approach to the ancient Indian religious symbols demonstrates here. Nineteenth-century Indo-European scholarship often relies on forms of racial essentialisation to explain the development of European cultures, and the opposition between the ‘Aryan race’ and others (in particular the ‘Semites’) is found in the racist theories built on the philological distinction between Indo-European and Semitic languages, such as Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, and, as shown by Maurice Olender (1992), in Christian theological conceptions of history and language.

It is thus not surprising that Burnouf himself explicitly adopts a racial framework in his history of Greek literature. He first argues that ‘la religion, la société, la famille, les principaux métiers, la langue même des premiers Hellènes sont autant d’éléments de civilisation apportés par eux de l’Asie centrale, berceau de toute la race aryenne’ (Burnouf 1869b, vi). He therefore essentialises the racial characteristics of the ancient Greeks:

il ne leur était pas plus possible de cesser d’être Aryas et de penser comme des Aryas, qu’il n’est possible à un peuple nègre de devenir blanc ou à un gland porté en pays étranger, d’engendrer autre chose qu’un chêne. (Burnouf 1869b)

This essentialist description of ancient Greeks is very similar to what Burnouf’s classmate from the EFA, Gandar (1858, 57), wrote around a decade earlier (‘le Grec, comme le Juif, ne sait pas devenir autre chose’). However, in considering Greek civilisation as a simple ‘phase’ of Aryan development, Burnouf goes further in discarding non-Aryan influences, and in particular African and Semitic ones, on classical cultures:

Lorsque […] les Hellènes eurent des rapports suivis avec d’autres peuples, il ne faut pas croire que ceux de la race de Cham ou de Sem exercèrent sur eux une grande influence. Car l’expérience démontre que les races humaines n’exercent, physiquement et moralement, les unes sur les autres que des actions superficielles ou passagères et que les races inférieures sont presque sans action notable sur celle des Aryas. (1869b, vi–vii)

As a ‘superior race’, the Aryan Greeks escape the influence of African (‘race de Cham’) and Semitic (‘race de Sem’) civilisations (but not that of other ‘Aryan’ civilisations such as Persia and India); Burnouf embodies here the nineteenth-century scholarly reception of Ancient Greece that Bernal refutes in Black Athena.

Burnouf departs here from the fields of philology, and religious science (both fields that have established influence on the Greek language and culture) to fully embrace racial theories. ‘L’expérience démontre’ is an appeal to empiricism which is not based on Burnouf’s own scholarship, whether of Sanskrit or Greek, but on ideological uses of ancient history. By arguing that some races can influence others both ‘physiquement et moralement’, he emphasises at the same time the blood heredity of the Greeks, and their perceived essential ‘nature’ (and, indirectly, the ‘essential’ and unique quality of their language). This excerpt demonstrates not only that an historical scholarly tradition which disproportionately values ‘classicality’ is directly linked to the development of racial historical and philological theories, but also how, in return, the nineteenth-century French perception of both ancient modern Greek is shaped by racial taxonomy and genealogies.

For Burnouf, this impermeability of the ‘superior’ Greek race to ‘inferior’ influences clearly extended to the Ottomans whose contact with the Greeks spanned the most recent centuries. Indeed, for him, Islam is a ‘Semitic’ religion characterised by the ‘extrême faiblesse de la philosophie musulmane comparée à la puissance de la métaphysique chez les Grecs’ (1872, 128), which, he claims, can be explained by the ‘nature de l’esprit sémitique, toujours inférieur, en matière de science, au génie des peuples aryens’ (1872, 129).¹⁸ Interestingly, in an article on Greece in the Orient, he returns first to a ‘linguistic’ argument (before emphasising religious and racial differences) to explain the impossibility of the assimilation of the Greek population with the Turks of the Ottoman empire:

Le turc au contraire, langue touranienne, était d’une autre origine que le grec, et n’était pas parvenu au même point de développement linguistique ; les mots arabes qu’il adopta ne rendaient pas plus facile sa fusion avec le grec, puisque l’arabe est lui-même une langue sémitique, incompatible avec les idiomes aryens. Ainsi les vainqueurs et les vaincus ne purent se comprendre et demeurèrent isolés. (1878, 210)

In addition to Greek being more ‘developed’ than the Turkish language, Burnouf is also again assimilating the Ottomans to the ‘Semitic race’, even if only indirectly. Indeed, if as a linguist, he knows that Turkish is not a Semitic language, and in the absence of a developed racial theory about the speakers of Turanian languages, he is deliberately using the presence of Arabic words in Turkish to assimilate the Ottomans more closely to a ‘Semitic civilisation’, by nature incompatible with Greekness.¹⁹ In addition, Burnouf identifies religion as the second source of ‘incompatibility’ between the Greeks and the Ottomans: ‘Il y eut donc dans l’empire ottoman deux peuples juxtaposés, mais non confondus, matériellement mêlés, mais moralement séparés, le peuple du Koran et celui de l’Évangile’ (1878, 210). The assimilation of Turkish to the ‘Semitic’ languages serves to reinforce the broader Orientalist racialisation of the Ottomans.²⁰

Consistent with his description of Greece as mostly impermeable to foreign influence, changing only under other Aryan influences into a Christian civilisation, Burnouf (1890) also follows the philhellene position that modern Greek saw very little change from ancient Greek. Crucially, he contends that the native Greek pronunciation is preferable to the traditionally taught ‘Erasmian’ (reconstituted) pronunciation taught in Western European schools (Ballabriga 2006)–a position, as we have seen, that is not widely shared within his EFA cohort. We could thus see in Burnouf a French example of the ‘historical connection between philhellenism and anti-Judaism’ (Gossman 1994, 3). Gossman’s demonstration of this link focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophy and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and establishes that ‘by the middle of the nineteenth century, the antithesis of “Hellenes and Jews” was part of the repertory of antisemitism among the educated classes in Germany’ (Gossman 1994, 9). Under the guise of the ‘race Aryenne’ and the ‘race de Sem’, this is the same opposition that is implicitly reactivated by Burnouf in both his classical and ‘orientalist’ scholarship. The Indo-European hypothesis serves here to essentialise and, of course, argue for a European (and in particular French) genealogical closeness to the ancient Greeks, in opposition to a voluntary cultural and racial distance from ‘the Jews’, justified through linguistic and philological studies.

Conclusion

For French erudite travellers, raised on Hellenic visions of ancient Greece as a cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual model, the Greek language–learned, analysed and valued since school–is their privileged way to access what they consider the classical ideal. For this reason, its usage and its evolution in nineteenth-century Greece was particularly scrutinised and served as a measure par excellence of the continuity or discontinuity of Greekness since antiquity. It also reveals the ambiguous and racialised place of modern Greece in nineteenth-century Western European cultural imaginaries, as a nation which broke away from the ‘oriental’ Ottoman empire, but fails to fully fit the Western identity, both classical and Christian, that was idealised by early-nineteenth-century philhellenes. Amongst French official travellers, the EFA scholars in particular were not attuned to the aspirations of post-independence Greece, whether linguistically or politically and their writings evidenced their discomfort with a country that had a different conception of itself than what they had anticipated. The use by scholars of both Greece and Asia, such as Burnouf, of a racializing philological framework (the ‘Indo-European hypothesis’), thus favours both the inclusion of Greece in a Western racial and cultural genealogy (the ‘Aryan race’) and, against the philhellene ideal, the accommodation of a non-classical version of Greekness. For others, however, despite the occasional perception of a direct lineage between ancient and modern Greeks, the many discontinuities between antiquity and nineteenth-century Greece pointed towards an irremediable ‘barbarisation’ of the classical ideal. For those writers, it thus appeared preferable either to encourage modern Greeks to (re)adopt the language and the culture of the ancient, or to simply exclude them from any symbolic claims to the idealised heritage of classical antiquity.

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful for the support and access provided by the Ecole Française d'Athènes (EFA), as well as the funding of two research stays in Athens (2019, and 2020) which allowed for the development of this research. I also want to thank the editors of this special issue, Dr. Sarah Arens and Dr. Julia Hartley, for their very helpful and perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Budasz

Sarah Budasz is an Assistant Professor in French at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She completed her PhD at Durham university in 2021 with a thesis entitled ‘“Voyages aux pays du passé”: classical receptions in nineteenth-century French travel narratives to the “Orient”’. Her main research interests include literary expressions of cultural heritage(s), representations of Antiquity in nineteenth-century French and Francophone literatures, travel writing, and postcolonial studies.

Notes

1 Philippe Jockey, in Le mythe de la Grèce blanche (2013), provides both a critique and an example of racialised contemporary French attitudes towards modern Greece: ‘Le Grec moderne, obstacle bruyant et haut en couleur, s’interpose entre “elle” et nous. Dans le brun trapu au poil noir et dru qui nous rend la monnaie, nous refusons de reconnaître le lointain descendant de l’Apollon du Belvédère ou de l’Hermès de Praxitèle. La langue grecque elle-même paraît dénaturée : les esprits, ces petits signes sur les lettres, en ont disparu. Le doux et le rude ont été effacés. L’accent grave n’est plus. La réforme orthographique des années 1980 impose à tous sa monotonie. Les tournures anglo-saxonnes en altèrent aujourd’hui la “pureté”. Comme le firent le français, un siècle auparavant, ou les “langues barbares”, comprenons “ottomans”, encore avant. Nous pleurons Homère et ses hexamètres dactyliques. Dans tout autre pays, nous reconnaîtrions dans cette évolution de la langue la marque du vivant même. Mais ici la bigarrure linguistique “fait tache”’ (6; see also 260–261).

2 Catherine Valenti’s work on the history of the EFA uses a comprehensive range of archives and published work but does not provide any literary analysis of the school members’ production (Valenti 2002; 2006). Sophie Basch (1995) analyses in more depth the most famous of these works, Edmond About’s La Grèce contemporaine (1854), as representative of a backlash against the perceived idealisation of Greece by early nineteenth-century philhellenism, but she does not engage thoroughly with the more nuanced narratives of other EFA members.

3 The linguistic, literary, and archaeological claims of Black Athena have been widely discussed and contested, on both scholarly and political grounds. The ‘Black Athena controversy’ has been wide-ranging and has continued more than twenty years after the original publication. For some of the critiques waged at Bernal’s thesis, see Lefkowitz and MacLean Rogers (1996) and for Bernal’s response, Bernal (2001). A thesis (Kastor 2016) provides a more recent survey of the controversy whilst an edited volume (Bhambra, Orrells, and Roynon 2011) offers new analysis of the historical cultural exchanges between Greece, Africa, Rome and the Middle East.

4 Whilst this tension can be traced back to early modern travellers (see Augustinos 1994), Sophie Basch (1995) shows how French travel writing and other discourses about Greece became much more disillusioned and critical of the modern country after the end of the War of Independence in 1829. She coins the term ‘mishellenism’ to characterise this ‘backlash’ against Greece and, above all, against Romantic philhellenism.

5 However, the French discourse around the school’s foundation also places modern Greece in the ambiguous position of receiving French expressions of friendship as both a mark of recognition for the value of its past history and as the target of nineteenth-century diplomatic rivalries, in particular with Britain and Russia (Radet 1901; Levêque 1898).

6 Ordonnance de fondation, art. 1 (11 September 1846), quoted in Radet (1901, 423–424).

7 The ‘agrégation des classes supérieures’ is the former name of the ‘agrégation de lettres’, which in 1959 became the ‘agrégation de lettres classiques’ when the ‘agrégation de lettres modernes’ was introduced (Chervel 1993). As an institution, the specialisation of the EFA as an archaeological research institute occurs comparatively late, in the 1870s, with the excavation on the island of Delos (1873) inaugurating the period known as ‘les grandes fouilles’ (Delos, Delphi, Argos, et al.), that spells the end of the more literary outputs of the School to the profit of archaeological advances. This belated professionalisation is partly a reaction to the rapid development of German archaeology in Greece, as the Deutsche Archäologische Institut (German Archaeological Institute) opened in Athens in 1874 and was immediately granted a monopoly on excavating work in Olympia from the Greek government (the EFA had to wait until 1891 to sign a similar agreement regarding the site of Delphi). The notable exception to this approach is Charles-Ernest Beulé, who stayed in Athens from 1849 to 1852, and excavated the Roman gate and the propylaea of the Acropolis (Beulé 1853–1854). See Valenti (2006, 73–82).

8 This intellectual dilettantism allows Gustave Flaubert to ironically exclaim, in his notes from Athens in 1851: ‘Ces messieurs sont ici payés par le Gouvernement pour retremper les lettres aux pures sources de l’antique!’ ([1851] 2006, 435).

9 ‘Eux-mêmes étudiant les chefs-d’œuvre d’autrefois, dans les lieux où il se sont produits et dont ils se sont inspirés au milieu des ruines, les goûteraient plus profondément, les comprendraient mieux, comme des réalités presque actuelles encore et vivantes. La connaissance de la littérature, de l’histoire, de l’art antique en serait renouvelée et l’enseignement classique vivifié en France’ (Homolle 1897, 8).

10 Not all EFA scholars are favourable to this double mission as seen in a letter by Emmanuel Roux: ‘Nous pensions venir en Grèce dans un but littéraire, tandis que les lettres n’étaient que le prétexte de notre voyage, et un moyen de réussite pour notre politique. Nous nous en sommes bien aperçus, sans en rien dire, du moment que nous y avons mis les pieds, et l’on nous avoue maintenant ce que l’on ne saurait nous cacher’ (1898 [1847], 29). For more details about the EFA’s early missions see: Valenti 2006; Homolle 1897; Radet 1901.

11 Admantios Koraïs, a Greek patriot and scholar, worked to redefine the Greek language on the eve of the Independence War. His work (amongst others) led to the adoption of the katharevousa as the nation’s official language. See Mackridge (2009a).

12 The racialized ambiguity of Greece’s position in Western European travellers’ account subsists throughout the nineteenth century and is well summed up by Duckett Ferriman, an English traveller in his 1910 account: ‘The Greek is racially and geographically European, but he is not a Western. […] He is Oriental in a hundred ways, but his Orientalism is not Asiatic. He is the bridge between the East and West, and he may claim to have moulded the latter in times past. Now it moulds him in certain ways’ (Ferriman 1910, 132–133).

13 Unilinguisme can admit ‘ni déviance (par rapport à la seule norme légitime du français), ni concurrence (par rapport à la seule langue légitime: le français)’ (Boyer 2005, §10).

14 Definitions of ‘barbarismos’ in Le Grand Bailly–Dictionnaire Grec Français (Paris: Hachette Education, 2000), p. 347.

15 See Sophie Basch (1995), who juxtaposes the attitudes of early-nineteenth-century Philhellenes to the ‘mishellenism’ of more critical French travellers in the post-independence period.

16 As Hall notes, even in Antiquity, this linguistic criterion for unification obscured in reality the multiple social and geographical divisions that existed among a variety of Greek-speaking populations. ‘The priority of the linguistic criterion in the Greeks’ self-determination of their ethnicity is not surprising when one considers their geographical dispersal over numerous coasts and countless islands, and the enormous variety in way of life, political allegiance, cult, and tradition amongst the different communities, whether Ionian, Dorian, or Aeolian’ (Hall 1989, 4–5).

17 See also Dimitris Livanios: ‘Despite the impressive resuscitation of the “Hellene” in the nineteenth century, the “Roman” did not die an early death […] The cleavage between “Hellenism” and Romiosýne soon acquired many layers. It also became a battle between two different views of the Greek past: between those who favoured the splendor of antiquity, and their opponents, who longed more for Byzantium and the revolutionary period’ (2008, 267).

18 The classification of both Judaism and Islam under the common umbrella of ‘Semitic’ religions is already found from the 1850s in Ernest Renan’s work. He notably declares ‘l’esprit sémitique est surtout représenté de nos jours par l’islam’ (1862, 13).

19 The hypothesis of a ‘Turanian’ family of language (which would include Turkish, but also Hungarian and Finnish) was discarded from linguistic studies, who now refer to Turkish as part of the Turkic language family.

20 Renan is notably more nuanced on the Turkish language, which he sees as a composite of Tartar grammar, with Indo-European and Semitic lexicon (1855, 369). This does not prevent him from also presenting Turkish people as ‘Semitic’, due in no small part, to their religious practices: ‘Le Turc, dévot musulman, est de nos jours un bien plus vrai Sémite que l’Israélite devenu Français, ou pour mieux dire, Européen’ (1859, 101).