While the nationalist complicities of medieval studies in Europe have been well established, rather less attention has been paid to relationships between scholarship and France’s colonial interests. At the same time, scholarship needs to attend to the particular place of the colonies-turned-departments in current debates of postcolonialism. The geographic diversity of this group makes generalizations even at this level quite difficult to sustain.

The personal, political, and scholarly life of Joseph Bédier affords a revealing look at some of the complexities of the colonial, postcolonial, and national processes that have shaped twentieth-century “France.” Bédier’s complex emotional relationship with the spatially distant French colony became deeply intertwined with his intellectual relationship with the temporally distant Middle Ages. His influential re-evaluations of French literary history ultimately reveal a double effort of cultural translation—between the eleventh century and the twentieth, and between France’s south-eastern colonial edge and its metropolitan center. The combination of this scholarly production with Bédier’s personal history shapes a compelling narrative of one individual’s efforts to overcome colonial history—to become literally post-colonial.

Bédier’s letters, speeches, and anecdotal legacy reveal an adult life shaped by homesickness—a desire for national belonging. In this respect, his psychological and intellectual profile resembles that of more recent migrants who have theorized the psychic status of “home” in postcolonial contexts (e.g. Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha). The structures of identity at work in Bédier’s writings differ, however, in that he always lived within France (the colony became a département in 1946). Born in Paris, Bédier’s “return” there at age seventeen is, legally speaking, neither emigration nor immigration; in experiential terms, it is both. Through his studies of the Middle Ages, he seeks to resolve this fractured relationship with “greater France” into a permanent belonging undisturbed by colonial migrations and the sense of “foreignness at home.”