Satire has recently re-emerged as a potent political tool, but it has played many different roles in the past. French reformers waged massive satire campaigns in the sixteenth century to little or no political effect and, even, to their own disadvantage. Satiric forms nevertheless flourished because they fulfilled a devotional purpose. By portraying themselves as lonely travelers passing through the strange and exotic lands of Catholic custom, French reformers found a way to flesh out imaginatively the Pauline injunction to live in the world but not as part of it. The spiritual alienation cultivated in satiric literature allowed reformers to fashion themselves, after Calvin’s recommendation, as pilgrims in this world and confessional foreigners in their home country. At the same time, these satires’ self-presentation and their modes of address implied a reformed audience constituted by those who “got the joke.” The new communion entailed in laughing at Catholic excesses, modeled upon the reformed theological concept of “communication,” imagined a pan-European community held together by a non-local sense of belonging. Thus, French reformers embraced a diasporic identity well in advance of their actual emigration to the New World. But, more surprising still, the attitude of looking at one’s own culture through the eyes of an estranged traveler spread beyond reformed milieus to become a staple of French culture more generally. Through Montaigne, the ploy of acting the outsider in one’s homeland would become one of the signature devices of the Enlightenment’s challenge to the world of the Old Regime.
Reclaiming Identity
