Panel discussion

Scholarship on early modern European empires has always marginalized France.  On one level, this tendency has to do with the perceived importance of British and Spanish colonization, the institutional history of which has, for some, simply appeared more relevant to the evolution of New World societies.  Perhaps more to the point, the integration of French experiences into the broader history of Atlantic imperialism has been hamstrung by the sense that Bourbon monarchs regarded overseas expansion as a mere sideshow, subordinating colonial matters to dynastic concerns within Europe and their never-ending quest for la gloire – glory.  My presentation, however, will explore a hidden point of contact between the early modern French state and the Atlantic world that may help reshape and interweave the historiographies of each.  Examining the intellectual concerns and personal relationships among early theorists of absolutism – men like Jean Bodin, author of Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) – and sixteenth-century cosmographer-explorers such as André Thévet and Leo Africanus, my remarks will suggest that French notions of kingship developed in conversation with rapidly evolving European views of African and Amerindian sovereignty.  Considering these unusual roots of French absolutism can, I think, illuminate the early modern European state’s dual identity in an expanding world – at once mirroring the new realities of Atlantic politics and straining to project its own power onto the confused jumble of peoples, commercial arrangements, and geopolitical concerns that constituted the colonial world.