The dynamics of ‘civilised’ sovereignty: colonial frontiers and performative discourses of civilisation and savagery

Introduction

Once seen as the cornerstone of mainstream International Relations (IR), the concept of sovereignty has recently been re-appropriated by critical and post-colonial scholars. Instead of embracing the idea of sovereignty as unquestionable and universal, these scholars have enquired into the origin(s) and cultural specificity of the concept as currently used by most of the discipline. Indeed, if sovereignty is to be accepted as the ‘final and absolute authority in the political community’, ¹ post-colonial scholars have shown how this final and absolute authority – that is, an authority that is worth respecting and that will ensure the independence of the entity concerned – has been associated with a cultural or civilisational framework defined by the West. The concept of sovereignty used in international relations thus celebrates an idealised Western model of statehood and society (and in turn serves to erase alternative sovereignties). ² As Anghie argues, ‘sovereignty became identified with a specific set of cultural practices to the exclusion of others’ and as such has been ‘aligned with European ideas of social order, political organization, progress and development’. ³ Such a cultural definition of sovereignty based on idealised Western values evolves through time, yet one particular moment has attracted a vast amount of attention: the European encounter with the Amerindian populations of the ‘New World’ in the sixteenth century. These populations were described as living in a ‘state of nature’ and in need of the ‘civilised’ teaching of more ‘advanced’ (and thus sovereign) nations. This specific rationale has evolved, yet it continues to inform the contemporary practice of sovereignty. ⁴

One aspect strongly emphasised by critical and post-colonial scholars is the impossibility of understanding sovereignty without looking at the colonial ideologies and practices developed by Western states. Yet despite the recognition that the processes of ‘domestically’ and ‘internationally’ claiming sovereignty are interlinked, ⁵ a detailed analysis of how this interconnection functions when sovereignty is constructed or contested is still lacking. The colonial claims to sovereignty made by Western states are now regularly included or mentioned in critical studies of sovereignty as an intrinsic part of the history of the concept, ⁶ but the domestic and colonial spheres remain analysed separately with a primary focus on the external colonial encounter. This is intriguing as critical scholars have revealed two crucial aspects about the construction of sovereignty: first, that there are strong similarities between the domestic and international claims to sovereignty (such as the ‘presence’ of savage Others in both spheres). ⁷ ‘Colonial’ encounters indeed happened both domestically and internationally and were essential in the process of building sovereignty. Potential synergies are therefore to be expected and could shed light on the conditions required for successfully claiming sovereignty. Second, critical scholars have argued that sovereignty transcends the domestic/international binary and ‘forms the crucial link between anarchy and hierarchy’. ⁸ Studying the interaction, connection and interplay between the domestic and international colonial encounters is thus essential if we are to reveal a fuller picture of ‘civilised’ sovereignty.

In this article, I explore what we learn when we consider together the two processes of constructing sovereignty ‘internally’ and ‘externally’. I analyse the two spheres conjointly in order to be able to answer new questions. How are the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ processes connected and how do they interact? How are these two processes used by political actors and do they play a role in managing the inherent ambiguities that accompany the performance of sovereignty? This article offers an exploration of these questions through the example of France in the sixteenth century. It shows, first, that sovereignty depends on unstable colonial frontiers, that is, differentiations between the civilised and the savage, that are constantly contested and re-established. One of these frontiers is performed ‘inside’ the sovereign state and one between ‘it’ and its ‘outside’ Others. Thanks to the combined analysis of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ colonial encounters, establishing Western sovereignty is shown to be a fragile process designed to place savagery at the domestic and international margins of the sovereign state. Second, the combined analysis of the two spheres highlights how these colonial frontiers reinforce one another and serve as objectified (and naturalised) realities pre-existing their performance by the sovereign voice. In other words, the savage identities developed in the external colonial encounter become used as an objective basis in the process of claiming sovereignty domestically. The artificiality of the constitution of ‘civilised’ sovereignty in the West is thus hidden behind the appeal to the supposedly incontestable savage identities existing in the colonies.

Through this exploration of civilised sovereignty, this article confirms the arguments of post-colonial and critical scholars while also making several contributions. It rebalances the focus of these analyses away from the ‘exceptional’, ‘radical’ and ‘savage’ encounter with the non-West and towards the day-to-day processes through which Western states build their civilised and sovereign identity over both their domestic and the non-Western Others. In addition, and by combining the domestic and international processes through which sovereignty is claimed, I shed light on the way these processes interact – and in particular how they come to provide an ‘objective’ and ‘natural’ basis for one another – through a detailed analysis of primary sources about the construction of sovereignty pre-1648. Finally, this article reveals the inescapable yet threatening reliance of sovereignty on the presence of the ‘savage’, that is, the way discourses of sovereignty (re)create a savagery that they must contain at the same time. The maintenance of Western sovereignty thus depends on a capacity to relegate to the (domestic and international) margins the ‘savage Others’ that are necessary to maintain the illusion of civilised unity and superiority.

This article is divided into four sections. First, I explain how post-colonial and critical scholars have challenged our thinking about sovereignty (and in particular about the universalised yet local notion of ‘civilised sovereignty’) and how this article contributes to this literature. The second section focuses on France in the sixteenth century. I analyse how the ‘civilised’ identity of France is destabilised during a ‘crisis of sovereignty’ in France: the Catholic League’s rebellion against monarchical authority at the end of the sixteenth century. In the third section, I complement this analysis with contemporary French perceptions of the Canadian Amerindians (henceforth Amerindians). I deliberately juxtapose the domestic and international sides of the construction of civilised sovereignty in an attempt to disrupt the naturalised frontier between domestic/civilised on one side and external/savage on the other. This comparison enables me to identify (in a fourth section) how the two colonial frontiers enacted through the discourses of sovereignty interact with one another in the re-establishment of ‘civilised’ sovereignty domestically.

This article is based on sixteenth-century French archival sources in order to explore the conceptual apparatus deployed in discourses of sovereignty, that is, how ideas were used and combined in order to successfully perform the identity of the sovereign state. Situating this conceptual history in the sixteenth century is justified for two reasons. First, this period marks the intensification of the centralisation of the sovereign power in the hands of the European kings. Second, it also witnessed the first European explorations of America and the beginning of modern colonialism. This period is therefore a vital litmus test both for the domestic and international construction of civilised sovereignty. ⁹ This article, however, insists on the specificity of the case under study: instead of claiming universal validity, my ambition is limited to providing an historical example of the way sovereignty was linked to a civilisational discourse and relied on the creation of colonial frontiers. This article does not want to reduce the diversity of processes and actors involved; in particular, other discursive constructions were at play in the performance of sovereignty, and an exploration of civilisation/savagery does not cover all the dimensions of sovereignty. This article therefore captures only one (but a nevertheless important) way through which sovereignty was articulated in this specific historical period and does not pretend to ‘explain’ how sovereignty emerged or was ‘created’. In addition, bringing together an internal struggle for political power with a colonial claim to sovereignty (and highlighting some of their similarities) should not detract from the clear differences that exist between the actors involved in both cases. Compared to the distant savages, Otherised actors in the West remain relatively equal as they share a civilised (yet for some degenerate) status. The distant savage, on the contrary, is portrayed as essentially deprived of civilisation. The actors involved in these claims to sovereignty are thus neither identical nor equal. If sovereignty is claimed in both cases with performances of civilisation and savagery, it is the links made between these two spheres – rather than their similarity – that is at the centre of the analysis.

To achieve the ambitions of this article and deconstruct such naturalised identities as ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’, I approach sovereignty discourses as ‘performative’. Performativity suggests that no state is ‘naturally’ there outside of the sovereign discourses that create ‘it’. Hence, ‘no state possesses a prediscursive, stable identity’, that is, stable foundations on which to ground a discourse. ¹⁰ In other words, discourses of sovereignty build both sovereignty and its foundation or identity. As Weber argued, ‘the identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result’. ¹¹ This understanding of the concept of sovereignty is particularly useful insofar as it enables me to interrogate the discursive construction of the foundations of civilised sovereignty. As such, performativity offers the possibility of a radical deconstruction of the concept. ¹²

Civilised sovereignty and colonial encounters

In the past 25 years, IR has witnessed a flourishing of new analyses investigating how sovereignty is historically contingent and dependent on the dominant values, ideologies and norms of each period. ¹³ In addition, sovereignty has been shown to be a socially constructed concept influenced by the practices of the agents themselves. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, these analyses have remained limited in their ability to problematise the use of sovereignty in international relations and IR alike. Indeed, a large part of this literature has overlooked how sovereignty – insofar as its dominant conceptualisation is defined by the West ¹⁵ – perpetuates exclusions and inequality at the international level. A majority of these scholars has approached sovereignty as a socially constructed yet largely unproblematic concept, thus leaving ‘unchanged the conventional picture as portrayed by mainstream theorists’. ¹⁶

In contrast, post-colonial and critical scholars have made a strong and convincing case for linking the dominant conceptualisation of sovereignty to an idealised notion of Western civilisation. Their first major insight is the fact that ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’ have been restricted to a Western understanding yet imposed universally under the guise of culturally neutral (analytical) tools. As a consequence, the acquisition of sovereignty by non-Western states should not be interpreted as an empowering and liberating movement but rather as debilitating and excluding non-Western peoples further, usually requiring them to surrender ‘important rights in order to achieve independence’. ¹⁷ Because its template is defined by the West, sovereignty gives rise to a complex interplay between inclusion/equality – or, for the non-West, the prospect of achieving them – and the actual exclusion of the supposedly uncivilised and unsovereign non-West. ¹⁸ Post-colonial approaches therefore promote a radical departure from the traditional vision of sovereignty as a tool for emancipation and freedom. By shaping what a sovereign state can (or should) be, the discourses of sovereignty promoted by the West have also silenced alternatives to the state system and alternative forms of sovereignty. ¹⁹ For Strange, ‘non-Western sovereignty was actively delegitimated’ during the period of colonialism, an observation shared by Dunn in the case of the Congo: ‘Traditional, indigenous sociopolitical structures and practices, as well as their autonomy and “sovereignty,” were viewed as illegitimate and erased’. ²⁰ Members of the club of sovereign states impose their own requirements based on what they consider as non-negotiable values such as their ‘conceptions of community, religion, citizenship and property’. ²¹

Post-colonial and critical scholars have thus shown that sovereignty as understood in the West is intrinsically linked to the civilised values that Western societies portray themselves as embodying. Here, this phenomenon is termed ‘civilised sovereignty’ by which is meant the reliance of Western actors on self-constructed civilised identities for the performance of sovereignty. This coupling of the two terms requires some precisions. Talking about ‘civilised sovereignty’ does not mean that claims to civilisation will necessarily give rise to claims to sovereignty. Some entities might perceive themselves as civilised yet not claim sovereignty for themselves or over others. In addition, and while civilisation is thinkable without sovereignty, sovereignty is also thinkable beyond Western civilisation – even though it remains attached to a desirable political state in order to take its full meaning. ²² Sovereignty can be developed outside of the West and outside of the Western normative order. If sovereignty is thus not restricted to the West, the universalised and supposedly culturally neutral concept of sovereignty that dominates international relations has had a clear dependence on the ideal of Western civilisation. In this article, it is this specific ‘civilised sovereignty’ – and not sovereignty more generally – that is investigated. ‘Civilisation’ in this context can be understood to designate the cultural traits of a given population and its sociopolitical organisation but also as a superior and desirable form of these traits and organisation. ²³ In this article – and in the context of the critique of the discourse of Western civilisation – the second understanding will be the one privileged. ²⁴ An important definitional aspect of ‘civilisation’ is that the term can only acquire its meaning through its opposition to savagery ²⁵ – a specificity that will reveal the problematic yet necessary reliance of sovereignty on a ‘savagery’ that must be present yet contained.

Due to this intrinsic link to notions of civilisation, post-colonial scholars have argued that a more complete account of sovereignty necessitates to go beyond the West and to focus on the colonial experience through which Western civilised identity was forged. ²⁶ Indeed, ‘A genealogy of sovereignty that is confined to a Europe with its drawbridges up is necessarily an incomplete genealogy – one that is complicit with the attendant universalization of Europe’. ²⁷ In fact, the colonial encounter is now widely considered as crucial for the understanding of sovereignty. ²⁸ Aalberts, for instance, argues that ‘it is in the colonial encounter that the Europeans are produced as the original sovereign powers who command and impose their universal law vis-à-vis the uncivilised’. ²⁹ The Western concept of sovereignty therefore emerges through the colonial experiences of the West (in a typical Eurocentric fashion, of course, the ‘civilised’ Western state is often separated from these interconnections and reinstalled as a discrete and self-sufficient entity). ³⁰

If the Western claims to civilised sovereignty over their colonies have received sustained attention, how these claims were ‘brought back home’ and the way they interacted with the process of claiming sovereignty internally have not been analysed substantively. In particular, if claiming sovereignty domestically implied the creation of an internal Other (and thus a domestic ‘colonial’ encounter), how these domestic and international encounters interact and how they can reinforce or undermine one another have not been explicitly explored. In critical analyses, the interplay between internal and external constructions of civilised sovereignty is relegated to the margins and the overall focus remains on the external colonial encounter. Some crucial questions are thus left unanswered: how are the two processes (which historically happened at the same time) connected in practice, and for what purpose? Is this interconnection reinforcing or undermining the claims of the self-defined civilised? What can we learn from refusing to choose between a focus on the ‘civilised’ metropoles or on the ‘savage’ colonies? These questions are all the more pressing given the widespread recognition that Western states failed short of their own standard of civilisation ³¹ and that the internal and external colonial encounters shared some important similarities.

This article thus reinforces post-colonial and critical analyses of sovereignty by interrogating together – and as two interlinked processes – the domestic and international constructions of civilised sovereignty. I do not advocate a supplanting but a re-balancing of analyses of sovereignty towards intra-European events but without excluding the extra-European colonial enterprises. Furthering the post-colonial research agenda, my analysis focuses on the connections between external and internal colonial encounters. As such, and by not restricting the idea of ‘frontier’ to the demarcation between the (Western) state and its ‘outside’, this article proposes to assess how these domestic and international processes interact in the creation of the sovereign and civilised identity of the West.

From a sovereign kingdom to a state of nature: attacking the king’s civilised sovereignty

For the purpose of informing this argument, this article focuses on a specific period of French history: the opposition of the League to Henry III and its progressive demise under Henry IV (1584–1598). This conflict started with the death of the younger brother of King Henry III in 1584. As the King had no children, the new heir to the crown became Henry of Navarre, a Protestant. But ‘the French Catholics served notice that they were not willing to accept a heretic on the throne’ ³² and they formed the League in order to impose their own truly legitimate (because Catholic) king. Hence, ‘[f]rom 1585 the union thus formed led to seizure of power and to civil war’. ³³ The prospect of a Protestant becoming king of France thus led to an acute and violent political crisis, ³⁴ these religious disagreements being reinforced by political and social discontent. The conflict was marked by several – attempted or successful – murders against the kings and the leaders of the League (in particular the Guise family). In 1589, when Henry III is murdered, Henry of Navarre was not automatically recognised as king by most of the Catholics. Finally, in 1593, Henry of Navarre ‘decided the fate of France by formally adopting the Catholic faith, and in the following year, supported by the moderate Catholics, he was able to enter Paris in triumph’. ³⁵ Henry of Navarre is sacred king (and becomes Henry IV) in February 1594. He is recognised the same year by the Sorbonne – a stronghold of Catholicism in the kingdom – as the ‘legitimate and real king most Christian, natural lord and heir to the kingdoms of France and Navarre’ ³⁶ and absolved by the Pope in September 1595. The archives used in this section reflect this turbulent period in the formation of the French state and include political discourses, edicts, official declarations and pamphlets. ³⁷ The authors of these documents can be schematically divided into two groups: the two successive kings ³⁸ and their supporters on one side, and the League on the other (with the dominant figures of the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Mayenne and the Cardinal of Bourbon).

The period under study is characterised by repeated attempts at destabilising the image of the king as a guarantor of civilisation and sovereignty (what I term a ‘crisis of sovereignty’, i.e. a ‘de-linking’ of the current holder of sovereignty with the civilisational values that support the concept). The most ardent proponents of this ‘de-linking’ are to be found, unsurprisingly, among the League advocates and those opposing Henry III. Charles of Bourbon talks in 1585 of ‘calamities’ and ‘oppressions’ in his famous Péronne declaration (B.N.F., Dupuy 87: f. 210 and 211v). Charles of Lorraine (a member of the Guise family) ‘describes’ in 1589 a ‘state strongly weakened by the continuous miseries and ruins that it has suffered’ under the rule of Henry III (B.N.F., Dupuy 121: f. 100v). The deputies of Paris also express their concerns in 1588 in a remonstrance to the king: they enumerate the ‘oppressions’, ‘trouble, ruin and confusion’ of the kingdom, its ‘disorders, miseries and desolations’, reminding the king of his responsibility before God for the good administration of the kingdom (all quotes are from B.N.F., Dupuy 844: f. 561 and 561v).

Some go further and openly question the idea of unity necessary to a sovereign kingdom by mentioning the existence of a ‘civil war’. The Duke of Mayenne, for instance, frequently highlights the disorganisation of the kingdom and describes the conflict as a ‘civil war’ (see, for instance, A.E., M.D. Espagne, 331: f. 61). This state of civil war is also associated to ‘sedition’ among the subjects by Bourbon (A.E., M.D. France 761: f. 118), thus further highlighting the distance between the current state of France and the ‘natural’ obedience of the subjects found in a ‘civilised’ and sovereign state. In a discourse to the Duke of Guise discussing the topic of peace and war, one League author estimates that ‘our police is so corrupted that it would be better calling our dispute a seditious tumult rather than a true war’ (B.N.F., Cinq Cents de Colbert 30: f. 11v).

This state of France performed by the enemies of the kings is particularly dangerous as it implies the failure of the king to ensure ‘civilisation’ and therefore his lack of sovereignty. These ‘descriptions’ of the kingdom help destabilise the king’s sovereignty, but a particular strand of arguments also emerges that pushes this ‘de-linking’ further into a dangerous terrain. Indeed, analogies are made between the idea of the state of nature and the ‘descriptions’ of the internal state of France. Associating the kingdom with savagery represents a denial of the colonial frontier that the French kings rely upon in order to differentiate themselves from internal ‘savages’ (and as such to ensure the legitimacy of their sovereignty). That is why the League regularly uses the idea of savagery against the kings and their supporters. The concept of bestiality, for instance, is frequent during the period: after the assassinations of the leaders of the League by Henry III, Mayenne qualifies these murders as ‘cruelties and barbarity’ perpetrated by the king (B.N.F., Dupuy 87: f. 279). A pamphlet published after these same events describe them as ‘cruelties inhumanly exercised’ (B.N.F., Contre les fausses allegations: 39). In another pamphlet of 1589, the author estimates that the factions and divisions experienced in the kingdom transform the inhabitants from ‘reasonable men’ to ‘very wild and very cruel beasts’ (B.N.F., Dupuy 203: f. 110). The remonstrances of the Estates General of 1588 also introduce several similar discourses establishing a link between France and the classic image of the state of nature. In 1598, one such remonstrance explains how those who escaped the troubles ‘had to take refuge in the woods where they hoped to find more humanity among the brute, savage, and unreasonable beasts than among men that they found without mercy or compassion’. ³⁹ This attack is all the more effective as it plays with the association of the ‘woods’ with savagery and an absence of civility. These expressions contrast the king’s expected sovereign conduct – the attainment of a civil(ised) state – with his ‘actual’ achievements as performed by the League (a disordered and barely social way of life). France, for instance, has lost its attainment of justice: in a public discourse to the Estates, one official declares that ‘we can actually call France the Mother of Laws, but a poor protector of them’. ⁴⁰ A remonstrance to the king goes further: ‘As for what concerns justice (the first firmament of the Kingdom, the anchor of the state, and the main link of love and obedience of the People for its prince), it is not half-perverted but completely gone and lost’ in France. ⁴¹

Having lost justice and what makes a sovereign state sovereign, the French kingdom becomes mere chaos. ⁴² It has lost all the traits of a civilised and sovereign state, in particular its ‘valid’ institutions. The colonial frontier that the kings rely upon is dismantled when the leaguers compare France (and here Paris more specifically) to a new Babylon ‘without Law, without King, without Justice, where everyone is pulling in a different direction’. ⁴³ A similar 1985 pamphlet warns the king that his kingdom ‘is today almost without justice, without order and without police’. ⁴⁴ The attacks against the sovereign king thus take the form of a fully fledged depiction of ‘savagery’ in France, like in this 1589 treatise of Louis de Gonzague (a fervent Catholic):

[the consequences of the current troubles are] the entire desolation of this kingdom, so flourishing and formidable to all nations, be they Christian, barbaric or infidel; the depravation of the ecclesiastical discipline; the ruin of several beautiful and important buildings; the cessation of justice, trade, ploughing, communication that we used to have among ourselves. (B.N.F., Dupuy 579: f. 104v-105)

The different elements of this sentence are worth noticing: an absence of religion, of justice, of arts and of agriculture. All the institutions of a civilised – and thus sovereign – society seem therefore lost in France, a clear accusation against the king and his rule. In one of the most violent texts published against the king, one pamphleteer accuses him of ‘sorcery’ and of being influenced by the devil. This is added to a charge against the ‘cannibal’ advisors that surround the king (all references are from B.N.F., Contre les fausses allegations: 20, 22, 34, 38, 43 and 48). ⁴⁵ The League is thus using the classical ideas of savagery and ‘state of nature’ to delegitimise the sovereignty of the king. In doing so, they directly erase or rather invert the colonial frontier that the kings rely upon in order to justify their civilised sovereignty.

Savagery in France and in America

This bleak image of the French kingdom is particularly striking insofar as it moves France dangerously close to the peoples recently ‘discovered’ in America. Indeed, the discursive elements used by the League reveal the presence of a (supposedly external) savagery inside of France. In order to explore more fully this resemblance, I introduce here some of the ideas used by the French to construct their ‘external’ sovereignty over the ‘savages’ of Canada. These ideas were developed when the French first came into contact with the Amerindians in the sixteenth and first quarter of the seventeenth centuries and were thus contemporary to the ‘domestic’ struggles analysed in the previous section. ⁴⁶ While there is not a perfect analogy between these two cases because of the stark inequality of position suffered by the Amerindians, this section demonstrates that the discursive elements used to perform the state of nature of the Amerindians are similar to the discursive elements used by the kings’ adversaries at the end of the sixteenth century. The closeness of these ideas (demonstrated in this section) will later facilitate the invocation of this external colonial frontier in the context of the domestic struggle over sovereignty.

The first striking element of similarity is that of misery and social disorder. The lack of sovereignty of the king(s) is regularly associated with a lack of social order that French explorers also found among the Amerindians. Biard, for instance, discusses the police (i.e. the government or administration) of the Amerindians in the following terms:

One cannot have a police in the absence of a community (…) Yet these savages having no big community, living one day at a time, not being linked to one another, because they are scattered and vagabonds, so they cannot have a great police. ⁴⁷

The poverty and misery of the French people are also signs reminiscent of the Amerindians. The French generally consider the Amerindians to live a miserable life characterised by famine and hunger, ⁴⁸ a situation that is similar to the performed state of the kingdom. The use of references to the ‘woods’ is also one of the tropes of French discourses about the Amerindians that is commonly used by the League in its attacks against the king(s).

The resemblance also extends to the state of war performed by the king’s adversaries: the repeated references to civil war inside of France offer a striking parallel between the (supposedly) civilised French and the performed savagery of the Amerindians. Indeed, the fact that the French are waging unjust wars among themselves seems to mirror the Amerindians’ ‘natural’ and ‘uncivilised’ warfare. Just like the French civil war, the Amerindian wars are considered irrational since they are not motivated by legitimate reasons. As Sagard explains:

There is almost no [Amerindian] nation that is not fighting or in discord with the others, not because they want to possess their lands or conquer their country; but only to exterminate them when they can and take revenge for small wrongdoings or displeasures which are of negligible importance; but their bad [social] order and the fact that they do not punish the faulty citizens is the source of all this evil. ⁴⁹

These small internal conflicts – which are also a sign of the Amerindians’ lack of civil society and institutional organisation (B.N.F., Rothschild 1967: tome 1: 295) – are not considered as a just reason to go to war. Furthermore, these wars are not fought in legitimate (European) ways: for Biard, the Amerindians always attack by surprise and also use treason. ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, and in an ironic way, these characteristics – internal struggles, irrationality and treason – also apply to the internal French situation: the murder of the League leaders by Henry III is considered a treason and the existence of various ‘factions’ in France an unacceptable division of the French people. If the French perceive these Amerindian wars as ‘unnecessary violence’, their characterisation as ‘savage warfare’ seems to similarly apply to their own domestic struggles.

More generally, the king’s adversaries perform an absence of justice in the kingdom, an interruption of religious practice and a clear lack of what makes the French civilised (in particular, agriculture and trade). All three elements are also central in performing the Amerindian state of nature. The absence of justice in France is mirrored by the absence of law in Canada: ‘These people in the main have no law, from what I could see’. ⁵¹ Describing a group of Amerindians, Champlain adds, ‘I do not know what law they uphold, and I believe that for that matter they resemble their neighbours, who do not have a law at all’ (B.N.F., Rothschild 1967: tome 1: 85). For others, their only law is to follow nature and the Amerindians live according to their natural instinct. ⁵² When François I sends explorers to take possession of Canada in 1540, he also mentions this absence of justice and instructs his men to ‘establish laws and justice officers to make them live reasonably and in the love of God’ (B.N.F., Français 5503, f. 190).

This absence of law on both sides of the Atlantic is aggravated by the performed disrespect for religion (an accusation that is all the more important in the context of the War of Religion). Despite the portrayal of religion as central to the existence of a ‘civilised’ society, ⁵³ it appears clearly that the French are similar to the Amerindians in their disregard for religious practices. The texts about the Amerindians regularly mention the absence of religion among them: Verrazano writes, ‘We did not see that they did sacrifices or prayers or that they possessed temples or places for cult’. ⁵⁴ Almost a century later, Champlain reiterates what has become a widespread opinion: the Amerindians ‘do not know how to adore nor pray God, living like brutal beasts’ (B.N.F., Rothschild 1967: tome 1, 126). Hence, it is established as a fact that this ‘brutish people’ has ‘neither ceremony nor any form of praying God’. ⁵⁵ But instead of creating a stark contrast with the French, these very accusations can be found in the French context in order to delegitimise the sovereignty of the king(s); religious persecutions, attacks against priests, interruption of the divine service and more broadly a lack of respect for religion are central elements that are used to characterise the French kingdom by the League.

Ultimately, the troubles deprive France of all the attributes of civilisation, in particular of agriculture and commerce. Just as land becomes uncultivated in France due to civil unrest, the Amerindians ‘do not plough the land’. ⁵⁶ Verrazano also indicates that ‘we saw no trace of cultivation’ in Canada. ⁵⁷ France and Canada seem to become united by the terra nullius idea predominantly invoked by Europeans to qualify the ‘uncultivated wilderness’ ⁵⁸ of America. The once ‘flourishing’ kingdom of France – a clear sign of civilisation – now shares with Canada the attribute of ‘bareness’ that characterises the state of savagery. Combined with the impossibility of practicing trade, this absence of agriculture brings French and Amerindians together in their apparent lack of civilisation and thus of sovereignty. Hence, discourses designed to enact the uncivilised life and the absence of sovereignty of the Amerindians are also found ‘internally’ (thus threatening the existence of ‘civilisation’ and sovereignty in France).

Re-establishing civilised sovereignty: the interaction between internal and external frontiers

Are the French turning into ‘uncivilised’ and ‘savage’ Amerindians? In other words, how could the French kings still be sovereign in the ‘presence’ of a savagery reminiscent of the newly ‘discovered’ peoples of America? As this section will discuss, the re-establishment of an undisputable colonial frontier is the only way for the kings to ensure (the legitimacy of) their sovereignty. The kings need to attribute civilised and savage identities in order to differentiate themselves from ‘savage’ Others. As discussed previously, claims to sovereignty only become legitimate when they are attached to superior and desirable principles. In sixteenth-century France, sovereignty was strongly attached to the principles underpinning ‘French civilisation’ and in particular to a specific form of civilised justice and order. These principles were regularly defined by opposition to the ‘state of nature’ fiction, which reveals the importance of evolutionary thinking and theories of progress for sixteenth-century French sovereignty. ⁵⁹ Logically, then, the accusations of savagery are turned against the League in order to perform the civilised identity of the kings. In the process, one can see how the well-known colonial frontier between Europeans and Amerindians interacts with, reinforces and is reinforced by the domestic colonial frontier between the French kings and their adversaries. Colonial frontiers can thus be invoked in the process of claiming sovereignty in order to naturalise ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ identities. Here, the external colonial frontier is used by French actors in a domestic context in order to reinforce their own claim to civilisation and sovereignty.

In the domestic sphere, then, the discursive (re-)construction of civilised sovereignty involves the identification of the League as an ‘internal’ Other. These attacks can be classified according to their intensity: some imply that the League is at the source of the current troubles, others that the League is a barbaric actor and the last – and more extreme – attacks focus on how the League contributes to the creation of a state of nature inside of France. First, the League is characterised as the main reason for the existence of the troubles that destabilised the ‘civilised’ French kingdom. As soon as 1585, such attacks are frequent: Henry of Navarre estimates that the League ‘troubles today the tranquillity of this Kingdom’, has brought civil wars and a ‘great confusion to all things, poverty to the people, a decline of the Nobility, have ruined the clergy and made justice despised’ (B.N.F., F-47171 (17): 5 and 40). He reiterates this view in 1586 in a letter to the nobility, qualifying the League as acting against the tranquillity of the kingdom (B.N.F., N.A.F. 17874: f. 2). Near the end of the conflict, Henry IV still mentions the

disorders, ruins, murders, pillages, sacrileges and other types of evils that they [the League] have brought to this Kingdom, thus turning it from the most beautiful and flourishing of Europe into the most misshapen, confused and miserable of the entire Earth. ⁶⁰

These attacks become stronger when they further associate the League to the ‘state of nature’ idea through the use of the notions of ‘barbarism’ and ‘inhumanity’. These concepts are used not only by Henry III to qualify the acts of the rebels (B.N.F., FZ-2052: 4) but also by Henry of Navarre to characterise the murder of Henry III as ‘the most barbarous act’ (B.N.F. F-46889 (25)) and as a murder that even ‘the thieves and barbarians, and the enemies of humankind’ would have not executed. ⁶¹ An anti-League pamphlet of 1592 also ‘describes’ the League supporters as ‘deprived of all humanity’ and as only following their ‘violent appetites’. ⁶² The Parliament is similarly concerned by the fact that the League is leading to ‘the entire ruin and overthrow of all police and human society instituted by God, and even of this renowned and flourishing Monarchy’. ⁶³ The dissipation of ‘order’ and ‘hierarchy’ – such crucial ideas when identifying a ‘civilised’ society – are repeated in a 1589 pamphlet stating that ‘all the [social] positions are perverted, the temple of justice polluted, crimes not punished, innocence oppressed [and] laws without authority’ (B.N.F., Français 6546 (3)).

This successful association of the League with the creation of a state of nature in France is also achieved through an invocation of the ‘external’ colonial frontier. In a 1593 declaration written against the League and supporting the new king Henry IV after his conversion, the author estimates that the current troubles

prevent working the land, remove all trade from the fair cities, award impunity to the vices, deprive an infinite number of places of priest, the priests of revenue, the poor people of divine service. In a nutshell, if we do not put an end to these unfortunate dissensions with a good agreement, it will not be long until we see France – the ancient house of the Catholic faith and of all humanity, the main support of the liberty and safety of the Christian countries, the name of a virtuous freedom – become a name for servitude, with her ancient humanity being turned into the most barbaric inhumanity of the Indies. ⁶⁴

It is striking to notice that some of the categories used to perform the lack of civilisation of the Amerindians are being turned against the League supporters who still refuse to swear allegiance to the king. The League thus becomes the reason for the absence of the traditional signs of ‘civilisation’ that turns France into what was supposedly external, foreign and different to itself and its sovereign identity. This re-establishment of the domestic colonial frontier relies on an appeal to an ‘objective’ savagery (in the ‘Indies’), which shows how both spheres are intertwined in order to legitimise the sovereignty of the kings. In the process, of course, one notices how the identity of the colonies is further reaffirmed as savage.

The appeal to America in the French domestic struggles can also be seen when Spain is mentioned in order to reinforce the civilised sovereignty of the French kings. Because Spain helped the League, it becomes an important enemy for the supporters of the king(s). But in their reference to Spain, these supporters insist on one particular element: the ‘unfair and tyrannical domination’ ⁶⁵ of Spain over its possessions in America. This mention of the Amerindians serves to further entrench the frontier between savage and civilised actors that the kings necessitate (see B.N.F., F-46893 (9)). Evoking the promise of the Spanish king to financially help the League, a 1593 pamphlet accuses Spain of barbarism in ‘Peru’:

where he [the Spanish king] drained all the mines and killed two millions of these poor peoples [the Amerindians] in the process due to all the detestable cruelties that Antiquity invented and that time has added (…) [talking to the Spanish:] Fearless butchers, your hands are impatient to find out if the French stomach (…) is softer than the savage one. ⁶⁶

The external colonial frontier is here invoked to differentiate the ‘legitimate’ French rulers from the Spanish and Amerindian ‘savages’. Crucially here, both the Spanish and the ‘savages’ are performed as inferior Others and used to sustain, by contrast, the ‘civilised’ and sovereign identity of the French kings. This is reiterated in a 1590 pamphlet: ‘all the Christian nations, and even the Barbarians and Indians, give ample testimony of the harshness and tyranny that the Spanish use on those who are subjected to their sovereignty’ (B.N.F., Dupuy 579: 158v). This reveals how the two colonial frontiers created by sovereignty feed into each other: the ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ savageries performed by the French sovereigns mirror one another and provide the kings and their supporters with a confirmation of their civilised identity.

Conclusion

This article has shown how the discourses of sovereignty in sixteenth-century France are saturated with references to civilisation and savagery. Both sides appeal to the concepts of ‘barbarism’ and ‘state of nature’ in order to destabilise their opponent(s) while ensuring their sovereignty is preserved or recognised as legitimate. Among this confusion, the French kings are able to successfully perform savagery and attribute it to actors constructed as external to the sovereign state: the League rebels and the Amerindians. The existence of these marginalised subjects is essential for the sovereign centre to maintain its identity, superiority and unity, ⁶⁷ and references to the external colonial frontier play a key role in this process. This also means that sovereignty calls into being the problem (‘savagery’) to which it provides a solution. Indeed, sovereignty is built on the assumption of a unified and civilised political order; but the very performance of this political order requires the presence of an Other from which the sovereign voice can differentiate itself. And this Other – just like the Self – is only temporarily stabilised. The ‘savage Other’ is here both a necessity and a danger: it is necessary for international relations organised around sovereign states to continue to exist and dangerous since this constructed Otherness must be excluded and domesticated.

Successfully performing sovereignty thus depends on the existence of colonial frontiers, that is, the capacity to differentiate civilised (and sovereign) from savage (and unsovereign) actors, and these frontiers are intimately connected. Paradoxically, then, a refocus on the domestic dimension of civilised sovereignty reveals a fuller and more balanced picture of the Eurocentrism of the concept since the same discriminatory processes can be identified on both sides of what are, essentially, two civilised frontiers constructed on similar ideas of civilisation. These discourses of sovereignty are central in the discarding of political alternatives and as such participate in the establishment of (1) a domestic hierarchy between the legitimate ruler (or rulers) and those who have to obey and (2) an international hierarchy between the legitimate (because ‘civilised’) form of rule and other forms of rule that are denied this legitimacy and importance. Sovereignty therefore seems to escape our simplistic binaries and our disciplinary boundaries: it plays a key role both domestically and internationally, and it orders the world in both spheres by constructing civilised and savage identities. These hierarchically ordered identities also reinforce one another: through their performed naturalness, they serve to validate one another and thus to hide their own artificiality. The act of establishing these sovereign and unsovereign identities in one sphere is naturalised by the identities supposedly pre-existing in the other sphere. The crucial role of the ‘external’ colonial encounter is thus not to inform or provide content to the ‘domestic’ construction of sovereignty – after all, notions of civilisation and savagery predate modern colonialism – but rather to reinforce the ‘naturalness’ and ‘objectivity’ of these distinctions.

This key strategy of production and differentiation from external and internal Others is central for sovereignty. Sovereignty is thus the ever-reproduced (and always in need of a further reproduction) performance of a civilised Self and a savage Other. If the specific historical period analysed in this article offers an analytically rich example of a ‘crisis of sovereignty’, ⁶⁸ this episode is not exceptional. Despite its intensity, it is not an isolated incident, and crises of sovereignty were frequent in the process of strengthening of the French sovereign state. Other major crises include the Guerre du Bien Public in 1464 and 1465 or the Fronde between 1648 and 1653. In this last event, for instance, another external frontier (between the civilised French and the barbaric Ottomans) was invoked in order to delegitimise or reinforce domestic claims to sovereignty. As such, these crises of sovereignty represent momentary and explicit examples of a deeper iterative need to perform and re-perform sovereignty on a daily basis. Even once the state is seemingly established, sovereignty still needs to be produced and reproduced in order to be sustained. While these political struggles can achieve great political confusion when they succeed in inverting pre-existing colonial frontiers, the use of the external colonial encounter can play an important role in re-establishing the legitimacy of the Western sovereign.