The Origins of Vandalism1

ANDREW MERRILLS

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

The notion of Vandalism is common to all modern western languages, and yet the
metaphorical origins of the term are frequently forgotten. When the barbarian Van-
dals of the early medieval period are remembered, it is often assumed that they were
particularly violent, even by the bloody standards of that time. The present article ex-
plores the origins of the notion of vandalisme in the aftermath of the French Revolu-
tion and examines the varied representations of the historical Vandals in the
Enlightenment It argues that the Vandals enjoyed a complex series of associations dur-
ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and appeared in a variety of guises in the
prose, plays and political tracts of the period. It concludes that the wholly negative
representation of the group arose ultimately from a specific school of French histori-
ography in this period, which sought to contrast the creative energies of the idealized
Franks with the demonized Vandals.

I
n the late summer of 1794, the Abb Henri Grgoire, Bishop of Blois, pre-
sented the National Convention with his Rapport sur les destructions opres
par le vandalisme, et sur les moyens de le rprimer.2 The report considered the
damage caused by widespread rioting during the early months of the French

1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at seminars in Birmingham, Not-

tingham, Manchester and Leicester. Many important points were raised in these
discussions, and I am grateful to all who attended for their valuable advice. I
should also like to thank Lesley McFadyen, Richard Miles, Christina Pssel, Dave
Edwards, Jen Baird and Wolfgang Haase, the editor of this journal, for their sug-
gestions and criticism. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
2. The text is found reconstituted in Oeuvres de labb Grgoire (Nendeln: KTO Press,
1977), II, pp. 257-78. Dated 14 Fructidor An. II (August 31, 1794). The term van-
dalisme was first used (by Grgoire) in a mmoire read to the Convention in Janu-

Andrew Merrills, School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester,

Leicester LE1 7RH, UNITED KINGDOM
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 155-178.
156 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

Revolution, discussed its likely origins and sought appropriate responses to

this destruction. Over the months that followed, Grgoire produced two fur-
ther reports on the same phenomenon.3 Throughout, his intention was to put
an end to what he regarded as a hateful distortion of revolutionary principles:
I created the word in order to kill the thing, he was later to declare in his M-
moires.4 He was only half right. His reports did not manage to establish a na-
tional policy towards heritage that would have to wait for the restored
monarchy of Louis Philippe but they did successfully introduce a metaphor
which became commonplace thereafter.5 With astonishing speed, Vandalisme
became the standard term, not only for systematic revolutionary violence, but
for any act of cultural desecration, particularly against art and architecture.
In 1798 Vandalisme was included in the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de
lacadmie franaise,6 and within weeks of Grgoires coinage, the term had
crossed the channel and the Rhine.7 By the middle of the nineteenth century,
the metaphor had become so pervasive that it had effectively eclipsed its ref-

ary of the same year. On the reports, see Eugne Despois, Le Vandalisme Rvolu-
tionnaire. Fondations littraires, scientifiques et artistiques de la Convention (Paris: F.
Alcan, 1868); on the vandalisme which prompted them and Grgoires response
compare Stanley J. Idzerda, Iconoclasm during the French Revolution, American
Historical Review, 60.1 (1954), pp. 13-26; Pierre Marot, Labb Grgoire et le van-
dalisme rvolutionnaire, Revue de lArt, 49 (1980), pp. 36-9; Joseph, L. Sax, Her-
itage Preservation as a Public Duty: The Abb Grgoire and the Origins of an Idea,
Michigan Law Review, 88.5 (1990), pp. 1142-69; Anthony Vidler, The Paradoxes of
Vandalism: Henri Grgoire and the Thermidoran Discourse on Historical Monu-
ments, in Jeremy D. Popkin and Richard H. Popkin (eds), The Abbe Gregoire and his
World, ser. International archives of the history of ideas = Archives internationa-
les dhistoire des ides 169 (Dordrecht Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2000), pp. 129-56 and esp. the papers in Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Marie-Claude
Chemin and Jean Ehrard (eds), Rvolution franaise et vandalisme rvolutionnaire.
Actes du colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand, 15-17 dcembre 1988 (Paris: Uni-
versitas, 1992). Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abb Grgoire and the French Revo-
lution. The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005) provides an excellent English-language introduction to the life of the Abb
Grgoire.
3. Second rapport sur le vandalisme, sance du 8 brumaire lan III (Paris: Impr. nationale
des lois, 1794), (October 29, 1794) and Troisime rapport sur le vandalisme, sance du
24 frimaire lan III (Paris: Impr. nationale des lois, 1794), (December 14, 1794).
4. Grgoire, Mmoires, ed. Jean-Michel Leniaud, Mmoires de LAbb Grgoire (Paris: A.
Dupont, 1834; repr. Paris: Impr. SAGI, 1989), p. 60: Je crai le mot pour tuer la chose.
5. Sax, Heritage Preservation (above, n. 2), discusses the heritage policy of nine-
teenth-century France. On Joseph Lakanals improbable claim to have anticipated
the Abb Grgoire in his usage of vandalisme, see the comments of Michel
Morineau, Appendice 2: Notes dinformation, in Bernard-Griffiths et al., Rvolu-
tion franaise et vandalisme rvolutionnaire (above, n. 2), pp. 439-53.
6. Dictionnaire de lAcadmie Franoise, Revu, corrig et augment par lacadmie ell-mme,
Cinquime edition (Paris: Chez J. J. Smits et Ce., Imp.-Lib., rue de Tournon, N. 1133,
Faubourg St. Germain: an VII [= 1798]), vol. II, p. 776.
7. Reports of Grgoires coinage appear in The Oracle and Public Advertiser from Fri-
day September 12, 1794. The term is employed without reference to Grgoire in Sir
Francis dIvernois, A cursory view of the assignats, and remaining resources of French
Merrills 157

erent those who destroyed art or architecture were simply vandals (with a
small v). The point of comparison to the barbarians of the dark ages had
largely been lost.
Grgoires neologism had a dramatic effect upon the way in which the
Vandals were remembered within modern Europe.8 Prior to that date, the Van-
dals had certainly been regarded as violent agents in the fall of the Roman
Empire, and had been invoked to condemn more recent acts of barbarism.
Poets, preachers and jeremiad writers of every hue compared contemporary
sins to the worst excesses of the dark age barbarians, and the Vandals were
commonly featured alongside the Goths, Huns and other warlike groups in
their tracts.9 But this chauvinism was tempered by a more romanticised view
of the heroic Germanic peoples, and here too the Vandals enjoyed some
minor celebrity.10 The group had a starring role in a small number of novels
and plays during the seventeenth century, one eighteenth-century opera, and
had a walk-on part (through their king Gelimer) in the celebrated Belisarius af-
fair of the 1730s.11 Dubious claims to Vandal heritage were posited by a num-
ber of Hanseatic towns and by the royal families of several different states,
and the group came tantalisingly close to having a fourteenth American
colony named in their honour. But Grgoires coinage all but stripped them of

finance (September 6, 1795) (Dublin: printed by P. Byrne, 1795), p. 66. The reception
of the term in Germany is discussed below, pp. .
8. Studies of early modern attitudes to the Vandals have been sparing. Roland
Steinachers important research in Vienna has done much to assess scholarly per-
spectives on the group. See esp. his Vienna dissertation Studien zur vandalischen
Geschichte. Die Gleichsetzung der Ethnonyme Wenden, Slawen und Vandalen vom Mit-
telalter bis ins 18. Jahrhundert (2002). Discussion of popular representations have
rarely progressed beyond the cursory treatment in Hanno Helbling, Goten und
Wandalen. Wandlung der historischen Realitt (Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1954),
pp. 53-62 and Christian Courtois, Les Vandales et LAfrique (Paris: Arts et mtiers
graphiques, 1955), pp. 58-60. Claude Bourgeois, Les Vandales, le vandalisme et
lAfrique, Antiquits africaines, 16 (1980), pp. 21328 purports to examine the ques-
tion of vandalisme, but simply represents an apologia for the group. Catherine
Volpilhac, Dany Hadjadj and Jean-Louis Jam, Des Vandales au vandalisme, in
Bernard-Griffiths et al., Rvolution franaise et vandalisme rvolutionnaire (above,
n. 2), pp. 15-27 provides a better assessment, and considers several of the themes
developed more fully in the present paper.
9. A selection of this material will be discussed briefly in A.H. Merrills and R.T. Miles,
The Vandals (Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
10. The terms Germanic and Barbarian Invasions are used throughout this paper
with respect to each concept as it was generally understood in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries (respectively the shared cultural and biological traits of
the northern European peoples of the late iron age, and the period of extensive
social and political upheaval of the period AD 400 800). Neither concept is com-
monly employed in the modern literature. On contemporary understanding of
each see esp. Guy Halsall, The Barbarian Invasions, in Paul Fouracre (ed.), The
New Cambridge Medieval History, I. c. 500 c. 700. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2005), pp. 35-55.
11. John Renwick, Marmontel, Voltaire, and the Blisaire affair, Studies on Voltaire and
the eighteenth century 121 (Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation, 1974) provides an
158 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

their Romantic associations. Within a matter of months, the group had lost
their relatively minor role in the idealized medievalism of the early modern
period, and were remembered solely for their violence and destruction. It is
the purpose of the present paper to examine this transformation.

A brief history of the Vandals

The Vandals first appear in the textual record in a small handful of classical ge-
ographical texts, which ambiguously place the group (or groups) somewhere
in the vast territory to the east of the Rhine and the north of the Danube.12
From the second century, a scatter of historical fragments hint that a number
of warbands bearing the name were active along the Middle and Upper
Danube during the Marcomannic Wars and their aftermath. None of these
bands seem to have been particularly large, nor were they conspicuously suc-
cessful. Over the century and a half that followed, the Vandals appear only fit-
fully in the historical record and never for very long. It was only with their
involvement in the Radagaisus campaign of AD 405, and their later appear-
ance on the Rhine frontier of the empire that the narrative history of the Van-
dals may be written with any confidence.
In the winter of AD 405 or 406, several warbands bearing the Vandal
name crossed the Rhine into Gaul, and occupied the northern provinces of
the region for two or three years. Despite causing some damage to the towns
of the region, the Vandals did not represent a major military threat; whenever
they were faced in pitched battle they seem to have been defeated, and a rep-
utation for cowardice followed them even after they crossed the Pyrenees into
Spain in AD 409. Once established in Spain, defeats continued to plague the
Vandals and their allies: in 416 a federate Gothic army under King Wallia ut-
terly crushed the so-called Siling faction of the Vandals, and put their Alan
allies to flight. Only good fortune and an unexpected military reverse pre-
vented the remaining Hasding Vandals from defeat at the hands of the
Roman general Castalius in 422, but thereafter the group was allowed a period
of respite in the southern province of Baetica. In or around 429, the group ex-
ploited a major political schism within the western Roman empire and crossed
into the rich lands of North Africa perhaps at the invitation of one or other
of the warring generalissimos Bonifatius, Felix and Aetius. In short order, they
found their fortunes dramatically changed. In 439, under their king Geiseric,
the group occupied the African capital of Carthage, where they were to re-
main for almost a century.

overview of the Belisarius affair. Johann Georg Conradis opera Gensericus was
first performed in Hamburg in 1693 with a libretto by Christian Heinrich Postel.
Both score and libretto have since been lost, but the work was revived sporadically
during the 1720s and 1730s and was the first opera to be reviewed in the influen-
tial journal Critica Musica 1.3 (1722). On the opera see Alfred Loewenberg, Annals
of Opera 1597-1940 (London: Rowan and Littlefield, 1978).
12. Courtois, Vandales (above, n. 8) remains the definitive treatment of the Vandals as
a historical group. The narrative which follows broadly follows the account in
Merrills and Miles, The Vandals (above, n. 9), including several revisions of Cour-
toiss interpretation.
Merrills 159

The Vandal occupation of North Africa is viewed by modern historians

as a paradoxical combination of violent excess and cultural sensitivity. As shall
be discussed, the origins of this contrast may be identified in the historiogra-
phy of the late Enlightenment. Following the capture of Carthage, and the ap-
propriation of the North African fleet, the Vandals dominated the shipping
lanes of the western Mediterranean. For the most part, Geiseric was content
with a strong-arm, sail-boat diplomacy, but in AD 455, responding to a com-
bination of provocation and opportunity, he led the Vandals in an attack on
Rome. This was not the first time that the imperial city had been sacked, even
within living memory: the Visigothic attack of AD 410 still remained a sensi-
tive subject for contemporary writers, and was certainly the more profound
ideological blow. But the attack of 455 was followed by the kidnap of three
imperial princesses, and represented something of a turning point in Vandal
diplomacy. Over the generation that followed, the Arian rulers of Carthage
withstood two (or perhaps three) imperial campaigns against them, and grew
increasingly estranged from their Catholic subjects. These religious differences
culminated in a short but bloody period of religious persecution during the
reign of Geiserics successor Huneric, which was recorded with macabre en-
thusiasm in the extant Historia Persecutionis of the African priest Victor of Vita.
Thereafter, however, things seem to have improved. Epigraphic and numis-
matic evidence hints at an economic upturn under the later Vandal kings and
the possible institution of fiscal and monetary policies in the last years of the
fifth century. The kings Thrasamund and Hilderic are known to have been
patrons of the arts from the corpus of poetry known as the Latin Anthology
which survives from the period. But this renaissance proved short-lived. The
Vandal kingdom in Carthage lasted only until the early sixth century. In 530,
the pretender Gelimer seized the throne of Carthage, and prompted the east-
ern Roman emperor Justinian into an ambitious programme of conquest. In
534, the Byzantine general Belisarius reoccupied the city with little resistance.
Thereafter, beyond some minor revolts in Byzantine Africa, the Vandals
drifted out of history forever.
In many ways, the Vandals were fairly typical of the players on the world
stage in the fifth and sixth centuries. More successful than some groups,
markedly less so than others they experienced moments of extraordinary vi-
olence, but also proved themselves to be patrons of the arts. As such, they
were appropriate enough as a point of comparison for violent behaviour, but
they would not have been a particularly obvious choice. Indeed Edward Gib-
bon, writing less than two decades before Grgoires Rapports, suggests that
it was the Goths and not the Vandals who were most frequently invoked
as a shorthand for excessive violence:
So memorable was the part which they acted in the subversion of
the Western empire that the name GOTHS is frequently but im-
properly used as an appellation of rude and warlike barbarism.13

13. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: W.
Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776-1789), ed. David Wormersley, 3 vols (London New
York: Penguin Books, 1994), ch. 10.
160 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

Indeed, a recent survey of the historical allusions suggests that the Goths were
far more frequently invoked than the Vandals in the writing of eighteenth-
century France.14 Why was it then that Grgoire turned to the Vandals in his
search for an appropriate metaphor for destruction?
Several answers have been put forward to respond to this question. On one
obvious (but not insignificant) level, vandalisme , like barbarism has pleas-
ing phonic quality that strikes the ear rather more gently than Gothicism,
Hunnism, or (to stretch the point) Langobardism.15 Such considerations
may well have influenced Grgoire and doubtless helped the term spread
throughout the modern European languages.
Crucial to Grgoires choice of language, however, was that he was
French and was writing (at least initially) for a French audience. As such, both
the Abb and his putative audience were brought up within a French histor-
ical tradition, and reflected in their choice of language the intellectual envi-
ronment in which they developed. The position of the Vandals in
eighteenth-century France was complex, but within the academic tradition in
which Grgoire was educated, the Vandals filled an important (if somewhat
minor) role. As shall be discussed, it was the discrepancies between this
French historical tradition, and the academic and popular discourses else-
where in the continent in this period that make Grgoires choice of language
so fascinating.

Grgoire and the Vandals in the French Enlightenment

When Grgoire sought a parallel for recent revolutionary violence in the final
years of the Roman Empire, he turned to the Fall of the Roman Empire a pe-
riod which held a perennial fascination for the historians and philosophers of
the Enlightenment.16 Within France, the paradigm for the study of the bar-
barian invasions had been established by Franois Hotman with the publica-
tion of his Francogallia in 1573.17 Hotman argued that the contemporary French
aristocracy could trace their origins to the invading Franks of the fifth and
sixth centuries, and that the establishment of their military authority over the
indigenous Gauls in that bloody conquest provided the foundation for the hi-
erarchical society that developed over the course of the medieval period. Hot-

14. Volpilhac et al., Des Vandales au vandalisme (above, n. 8), p. 17. See also Pierre
Michel, Les Barbares, 1789-1848: un mythe romantique (Lyon: Presses universitaires
de Lyon, 1981), pp. 45-58 on the varied use of the rhetoric of barbarism during the
Revolution.
15. Volpilhac et al., Des Vandales au vandalisme (above, n. 8), p. 23, n. 32.
16. Ian Wood, Barbarians, Historians, and the Construction of National Identities,
Journal of Late Antiquity, 1.1 (2008), pp.61-81 and idem The Fall of the Roman Em-
pire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Simon Barton and Peter Line-
han (eds), Cross, Crescent and Conversion. Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom
in Memory of Richard Fletcher, Medieval Mediterranean, 73 (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2008), pp. 327-47 provide important recent discussions of this material.
17. Franois Hotman, Francogallia (Geneva, 1573), ed. by Ralph E. Giesey and with tr.
by John Hearsey McMillan Salmon (with parallel English text), Franois Hotman,
Francogallia, ser. Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Merrills 161

mans text, in other words, placed the origins of the modern French state and
its principal institutions firmly in the crepuscular world of the late empire. As
a result, later historians of the French monarchy, like Franois Eudes de Mez-
eray in a number of seventeenth-century histories, conventionally included
the mythical king Pharamond and the Merovingians Childeric and Clovis
among the first portraits in their splendid galleries of French kings.18
Hotmans conclusions were challenged from the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century. In a series of unpublished essays, Henri Comte de Boulainvil-
liers returned to the question of the Frankish origin of the aristocracy.19
Boulainvilliers argued strongly that the Frankish occupation had been a vio-
lent one, and had generated a close bond between the monarchy and the (now
dispossessed) aristocracy. According to Boulainvilliers, the gradual decay of
the aristocracy had been exacerbated by the unnatural alliance of the crown
and the tiers tat - a perversion of the natural order of the state. This position
won many adherents at the time - and was later regarded by Michel Foucault
as a major turning point in the development of politicized historiography -
but also faced some sharp criticism.20 Chief among these critics was the Abb
Jean-Baptiste Dubos, who published his immensely learned Histoire critique
de ltablissement de la monarchie franaise in 1732.21 Duboss combination of
philosophical reflection and wide scholarly reading in the dispersed minutiae
of late Roman sources was not to be matched until Edward Gibbon two gen-
erations later, but his nuanced reflections on a gradual (and relatively peace-
ful) Frankish occupation were largely dismissed at the time as the nave
assertions of an apologist for the monarchy.22
The last chapters of Montesquieus De lespirit des lois vividly illustrate
the prominence of the early medieval past within intellectual thought of the
period, and the hostility with which the Abb Duboss conclusions were re-

18. Franois Eudes De Mezeray, Histoire de France (Paris: M. Guillemot, 1643-51), idem,
Abrg chronologique de lhistoire de France (Paris: Jolly, 1668), and see also his re-
vised second edition of the Histoire (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1685). For a stimulating
discussion of De Mezerays developing historiography, see Phyllis K. Leffler,
From Humanist to Enlightenment Historiography: A Case Study of Franois
Eudes de Mezeray, French Historical Studies, 10.3 (1978), pp. 416-38.
19. His final thoughts on this issue are best illustrated by the posthumous collection
Henri Comte de Boulainvilliers, Essais sur la noblesse de France (Amsterdam: s. n.,
1732). On Boulainvilliers see now Wood, The Fall of the Roman Empire (above,
n. 16), pp. 36-8 and the references therein.
20. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collge de France 1975-
76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, tr. David Macey (London: Allen
Lane & New York: Picador, 2003), esp. pp. 141-65 (= Michel Foucault, Il faut
dfendre la socit: Cours au Collge de France (1975-1976), ser. Hautes tudes [Paris:
Seuil/Gallimard, 1997], esp. pp. 125-48), with brief discussion in Wood, Barbar-
ians (above, n. 16), pp. 63-4. On the later influence of this thought, see esp. Thor
J. Beck Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature (1755-1855). A Study in
Preromantic Ideas, Volume I: The Vagina Gentium and the Liberty Legend, Publications
of the Institute of French Studies, 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934),
pp. 75-85.
21. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Histoire Critique de ltablissement de la monarchie franaise dans
les Gaules (Paris: Osmont, 1734).
22. Wood, The Fall of the Roman Empire (above, n. 16), pp. 337-45.
162 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

ceived.23 Montesquieus own conclusions about the origins of the French

monarchy, and particularly the development of the Frankish fief, betray a deep
immersion in the primary literature, but his relentless criticism of Duboss his-
tory as a bad work by a famous author also hints at the contemporary po-
litical relevance of these disputes.24 In the event, it was the position taken by
Boulainvilliers and Montesquieu which won immediate support. The Abb
Bonnot de Mably, and later Franois Guizot, adopted similar narratives of vi-
olent conquest in their own histories of France, although the later nineteenth-
century scholarship of Fustel de Coulanges may be read as a movement
towards the opinions of the discredited Dubos.25
The hostility with which Boulainvilliers, Dubos and Montesquieu de-
bated the history of the fifth and sixth centuries should not disguise the fun-
damental historical assumptions that the scholars shared. All believed that
the Merovingian period represented the founding moment of their nation; all
also agreed that the Franks were responsible for marrying recognizable Ger-
manic institutions of personal freedom and feudal interdependence with the
cultural inheritance of the Roman state. This is the central theme of Mon-
tesquieus own essay Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et
de leur dcadence, which argues essentially that it was the corruption of the
Roman state which led to its downfall, and the moral strength of the barbar-
ians which ensured their succession.26 However much Boulainvilliers and his
successors would have debated the violence with which the Franks overran
Gaul, or the nature of the institutions which they introduced to their new king-
dom, all essentially agreed that the Franks were A Good Thing (in the ap-
posite language of Sellar and Yeatmans spoof history of England, 1066 and
All That [London,1930]), and represented the best that the Germanic world
had to offer.
Crucially, this positive view of the Germanic inheritance in French his-
toriography was limited to the Franks. Other barbarian groups were viewed
less warmly, and the Vandals with a particular vitriol. Hotman has relatively
little to say on the Vandals, but De Mezeray is typical of the later historians
cursory treatment of the invasion of Gaul in 406:
The last day of the year 406. The Alans, and the Vandals, brought
along with them the Burgundians, the Sueves and various other peo-

23. Montesquieu, De lespirit des lois (Geneva: Barrillot et fils, 1748), ed. and tr. Anne
M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone, Montesquieu, The Spirit
of the Laws, ser. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge
University Press, 1989), VI.30-31.
24. Montesquieu, Espirit (above, n. 23), VI.30.15.
25. Cf. Gabriel Bonnot de De Mably, Observations sur lhistoire de France (Geneva: Par
la Compagnie des libraires, 1765) and Franois Guizot, Essais sur lhistoire de France
pour servir de complement aux Observations sur lhistoire de France de labbe de Mably
(Paris: J.L.J Brire, 1823). On the reception of these pan-Germanic ideals cf. Beck,
Northern Antiquities (above, n. 20) pp. 79-85 and Michel, Les Barbares (above, n. 14).
26. Montesquieu, Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur dca-
dence (Amsterdam: J. Desbordes, 1734), tr. David Lowenthal, Montesquieu, Con-
siderations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, ser. Agora
Editions (New York: Free Press, 1965). On the text and its influences, see Beck,
Northern Antiquities (above, n. 20), pp. 19-44.
Merrills 163

ples, passed the Rhine and made an irruption in Gaul, the most ter-
rible that had ever been known.27
The treatment is cursory but hostile: an approach shared by Boulainvilliers in
his own brief treatment of the barbarians who invaded Gaul before the Franks,
and in Montesquieus brief allusions to the Vandals.28 While the Abb Dubos
disputed many of Boulainvillierss conclusions on matters of Frankish history,
he shared his rivals frosty view of the Vandals. In a striking passage, Dubos
suggests that the Vandals, Alans and Sueves who entered Gaul in AD 406 were
largely motivated by a thirst for Gallic wine, just as Brennuss Celts had once
been in their invasion of Italy, a point which he elaborates through brief com-
parison with the modern savages of America and Africa.29
Dubos was consistent in his denigration of the Vandals. Three broadly
ethnographic chapters conclude the first book of the Histoire critique. The
first, and longest, of these is dedicated to the Franks; it narrates the earliest
campaigns of the group, discusses the complexity of their relations with the
empire and stresses that the Franks were the least barbarous of the barbar-
ians by virtue of their long contact with Rome, and their inherent courage.30
The second, rather shorter, chapter is devoted to the peoples of the Gothic
nation and is concerned almost exclusively with the Vandals. Here, the Abb
Dubos stresses the seditious and perfidious nature of the Vandals, notes their
extraordinary cowardice and implies that their successes within the empire
were largely due to their vast numbers. Their traditions of monarchy (and
hence their capacity for state-building) are also said to be weaker than those
of the Franks.31 Duboss third ethnographic chapter is concerned with the
Alans, Huns and other Scythian peoples, and includes the usual litany of
stereotypes about nomadic peoples, as a further contrast to the sedentary
morality of the Franks.32 But it was the Vandals who remained the Abbs
favoured targets. Elsewhere in his text, Dubos refers to the Vandals as most
hated of the barbarians:

27. De Mezeray, Abrg chronologique, tr. John Bulteel, General Chronological History of
France (London: Printed by T.N. for Thomas Basset, Samuel Lowndes, Christo-
pher Wilkinson, William Cademan, and Jacob Tonson, 1683), p.3.
28. Alluded to briefly in Boulainvilliers, Essais (above, n. 19), pp. 24-5. Montesquieus
treatment of the Vandals is limited but noteworthy. In Espirit VI.30.7 he argues
that the Vandals were the only barbarian people other than the Franks who sim-
ply seized their lands, rather than settling by treaty with the empire. He includes
nothing on the establishment of state institutions in Vandal Africa: an omission
which speaks volumes on his conception of the group. Considrations XX alludes
to the particular cowardice of the Vandals, and notes the indolence into which
they fell after the occupation of Africa.
29. Dubos, Histoire Critique (above, n. 21), II.1.
30. Dubos, Histoire Critique (above, n. 21), I.17.
31. Dubos, Histoire Critique (above, n. 21), I.18.
32. Dubos, Histoire Critique (above, n. 21), I.19. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chs 8-10 in-
cludes a similar survey (of Persians, Germans and Goths), but lacks the chauvin-
ism of Duboss account. On these chapters see J.G.A. Pocock Barbarism and Religion,
Volume Four: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), pp. 11-16. Note also Gibbons comment in his Lausanne Journal from
October 1763 that the Goths, Vandals and Franks had all largely shed the worst ex-
cesses of their barbarism upon entering the Empire. Cited by Pocock at p.96.
164 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

De tous les barbares qui avaient envahi le territoire de lempire, les vandales
dAfrique devaient tre les plus odieux au peuple romain, parce quils taient
ceux qui lui faisaient le plus de peine.33
Of all the barbarians who had invaded the lands of the empire, the
Vandals of Africa must have been the most hateful to the Roman peo-
ple, because they were the ones who caused them the greatest suf-
fering.
Dubos clearly knew his source material exceptionally well, and his hostility to
the Vandals had some justification. There are several references to Vandal cow-
ardice in the fifth-century sources, for example.34 While most scholars would
now suggest that the warband which invaded Gaul in 406 was actually rather
small, many still argue that the total number of Vandals who entered the em-
pire was close to 80,000.35 And the Vandals certainly were hated by many in-
habitants of the empire: including some of the more vocal political writers of
fifth-century Gaul.
What is significant here, of course, is not that the historians of the eigh-
teenth century had some historical justification for their denigration of the
Vandals, but that their condemnations took the form that they did. The Huns,
Alans, Lombards or Goths might equally have been the subject of Duboss vit-
riol, but they offered a far less straightforward point of comparison with the
Franks. Like the Franks, the Vandals had invaded Gaul. But where one group
had laid the foundations for a lasting French kingdom, the other had simply
attacked the region and passed on, creating a kingdom of their own in Africa
which lasted little more than a century. The French historians may have dis-
agreed on the precise nature of the Frankish accomplishment, but all could
agree that the Vandals were conspicuously unsuccessful in their own attempts
to establish a nation.
It was from this national historical tradition that the Abb Grgoire drew
his metaphor of Revolutionary vandalisme. His neologism effectively carica-
tured the iconoclasts as the most destructive barbarians of the dark ages, while
distancing them from the intellectual and social ideals that had motivated the
great events of 1789. Just as Hotman, Boulainvilliers and their successors de-
nied the Vandals a founding role in the French state indeed represented them
as the very antithesis of the Frankish spirit of liberty and feudal authority so
Grgoires pointed metaphor excluded the riotous excesses of the contempo-
rary vandals from the divinely-ordained narrative that he saw in the Revo-
lution.

33. Dubos, Histoire Critique, III.3.

34. Compare Orosius, Historiarum Adversus Paganos Libri Septem, ed. and tr. M.-P. Ar-
naud-Lindet, Orose, Histoires, 3 vols, ser. Collection des universits de France
(Paris: Belles Lettres, 1990), VII.38.1 and Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei, ed. C.
Halm, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi I (Berlin: Jos.
Ksel, 1877), VII.7-8.
35. On this debate, see the succinct summary in Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans
AD 418584. The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), pp. 231-4 and the comments in Merrills and Miles, The Vandals (above,
n. 9).
36. Grgoire, Mmoires (above, n. 4), p. 60.
Merrills 165

The Backlash against Grgoire

The Vandals became popular as a metaphor for Revolutionary destruction in
both France and Britain: in each country the notion of vandalism(e) caught on
remarkably quickly. On the other side of the Rhine, however, the association
of the ancient Germanic peoples with contemporary destruction was viewed
rather more coldly. Grgoire confesses this in his Mmoires:
Des savants estimables, ns dans cette partie de lAllemagne, do sortirent
jadis les Vandales, prtendirent que lacception donne par moi au terme
vandalisme injurait leurs anctres, qui taient guerriers, mais non de-
structeurs.36
Esteemed scholars, born in that part of Germany whence the Van-
dals had once come, asserted that the usage of the term vandalisme
that I established was insulting to their ancestors, who were war-
riors, but not destroyers.
Grgoires aside obscures the hostility that his neologism generated, and the
erudition which his critics brought to bear in their responses. The most promi-
nent of these critics were the historian August Ludwig Schlzer, the polymath
Friedrich Meyer. The latter firmly denied the charges of uncouth barbarism as-
cribed to the Vandals in his Fragments sur Paris, a travelogue that was trans-
lated into French by Le Gnral Dumouriez and published in 1798.37 Both he
and Schlzer argued that the enthusiasm with which Geiseric plundered
Rome in 455 might be read as evidence for the kings aesthetic taste: after all,
the fact that he stole the ornaments of the imperial capital, rather than simply
destroying them, indicated some cultural appreciation on the kings part.
Meyer further argued that the large compensation which accrued from the in-
jury of musicians according to early medieval Germanic law might be read as
proof of the artistic sensitivities of all of the groups that originated in the re-
gion.38
Meyers text ends with a plea to the people of France that they abandon
a metaphor that was as offensive as it was historically inaccurate:
Citoyens, cest un acte de justice que je vous demande, cest une rparation
que vous devez un peuple libre de lAllemagne. Avouez votre tort, et re-
dressez-le. Faites ce peuple un rparation dhonneur authentique, afin que
lautorit littraire dont vous tes en possession ne perptue pas cette in-
justice; car, cette dnomination de Vandalisme, applique par vous, est dj
gnralement rpandue parmi vos concitoyens; imposez vous-mmes un
autre nom ces infamies fltrissantes de vos compatriots, que les Allemands
dsignent comme lexcs de barbarie dune tourbe dgnre dun grand

37. Friedrich Johann Lorenz Meyer, Fragmente aus Paris im IVten Jahr der franzosischen
Republik, 2 vols (Hamburg: Karl Ernst Bohn, 1798), tr. (into French) by Charles
Franois Du Prier Dumouriez, Fragments sur Paris, 2 vols (Hamburg: Karl Ernst
Bohn, 1798), II, pp. 184-94. Schlzers letter is included (in French translation) at
pp. 184-85.
38. Meyer, Fragmente (above, n. 37), pp. 188-90.
166 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

peuple, indigne de faire corps avec les Franais clairs du dix-huitieme

siecle.39
Citizens! It is an act of justice that I demand of you; it is a reparation
that you owe to a free people of Germany. Admit your offence, and
redress it. Make a genuinely honorable reparation to this people, so
that the literary authority that you possess does not perpetuate this
injustice; for this designation of Vandalisme, which you have applied,
is already widespread among your fellow citizens; give another
name to those withering infamies of your compatriots, which the
Germans regard as the barbaric excesses of a degenerate rabble
among a great people, unworthy of the enlightened Frenchmen of
the eighteenth century.
But these pleas came to nothing. Little could halt the rapid adoption of the
new metaphor and Grgoire himself seems to have been unconcerned by the
hurt feelings of German academe.40
Of particular interest here, however, is the fact that Meyer and Schlzer
particularly noted the offense that Grgoires coinage might cause to contem-
porary Germans, and that both of these champions of the Vandal cause were
themselves inhabitants of the territories east of the Rhine.41 Among historians
of the twenty-first century it is generally assumed that when the Vandals
crossed the Rhine in 406 (and indeed when they moved to the Rhineland from
the Middle Danube in the previous decade) they did not leave anyone be-
hind.42 Any groups who did remain in their original homeland would surely
have been absorbed within neighbouring polities almost immediately. At the
very least, we hear nothing of any Vandals in either area between the begin-
ning of the fifth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. If any Vandals
were left behind, they stopped being Vandals fairly quickly. Yet both Meyer
and Schlzer imply that the Vandals remained a distinct German people, and
that their thin-skinned descendents were to be found close to the French bor-
ders. Where Grgoire and his contemporaries viewed the Vandals as a his-
torical people, then, lost in the dark ages, German rudits clearly viewed the
group in rather different terms. The origins of this distinction are worth ex-
ploring briefly.

Other historiographies. Sweden, Germany and the Vandalia Colony.

Grgoires observation that his slur upon the Vandals was coldly received by
German antiquarians reflects the different scholarly perspectives dominant

39. Meyer, Fragmente (above, n. 37), pp. 189-90. On an intriguing (and probably apoc-
ryphal) parallel to this in 1943, see Charles-Antoine Cardot, Appendice I: Note
sure la prohibition du mot vandalisme en France, en 1943 , in Bernard-Griffiths
et al., Rvolution franaise et vandalisme rvolutionnaire (above, n. 2), pp. 437-8.
40. Grgoire, Mmoires (above, n. 4), pp. 60-1: A mes yeux la chose nest pas problma-
tique; dailleurs lexpression nouvelle cre par moi a t sur le champ naturalise dans
toutes les langues cultives de lEurope, et fuss-je tomb dans une erreur, il ne serait plus
en mon pouvoir de la rectifier.
41. Meyer, Fragmente (above, n. 37), pp. 184-5.
42. See Merrills and Miles, The Vandals (above, n. 9), with references.
Merrills 167

on either side of the Rhine.43 Of central importance here was the rediscovery
of Tacitus Germania in the fifteenth century, and particularly through the
widespread popularity of Justus Lipsius scholarly edition from 1575.44 Inter-
est was further stimulated by the manuscript collation and edition of other
classical texts which related to the Germanic barbarians, including Plinys
Natural History and Ptolemys Geography, the study of early medieval law
codes as the monuments of prehistoric German cultures and the understand-
ing of the so-called national histories of the same period: most obviously the
Getica of Jordanes, the Historia Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon and the
Merovingian Decem libri historiarum of Gregory of Tours and the Chronicae of
Fredegar.
Drawn by the wealth of newly uncovered historical material, scholars
turned to the twilight years of the Roman empire and the early centuries of the
medieval period in the search for their national origins, just as Hotman and his
successor had in France. Scholars like Olaus and Johannes Magnus, and
Drouet de Maupertuy traced Swedish history back to the heroic Gothic past.45
Robert Sheringham did much the same for the English Angli and Johann
Jacob Mascov for the German Germani in their own publications De Anglorum
gentis origine Disceptatio (1670) and Geschichte der Teutschen (1726-37).46
As Guizot noted in his lectures on French history in the late 1820s, the
antiquarians of the German territories were primarily concerned with writ-
ing the histories of barbarians who remained in the north, rather than with
those groups which passed into the Empire to establish successor kingdoms,
and the same was true of contemporary Scandinavian scholars.47 One result of
this was that the barbarian histories written in this period often devote rel-
atively little space to the political events of the fifth, sixth and seventh cen-
turies the period when the barbarian invasions took place and the successor
kingdoms were established and instead are concerned with the largely
mythic prehistoric past and the later medieval histories of the groups con-
cerned. In the case of the Vandals, where the century or so between AD 406
and 534 is really the only period which is well enough documented to be dis-
cussed with any confidence, the resulting histories make peculiar reading.
Some historians did attempt to compose histories devoted entirely to the
Vandals, and the problems that they faced are illustrative. In 1517, Albert
Krantz published his Wandalia, a firm statement of the continued relevance of

43. These differences can, of course, be overstated. For the interdependence of French
and other antiquarianisms, see Beck, Northern Antiquities (above, n. 20). Within the
context of Vandalic studies, however, the simplification may stand.
44. See Frank L. Borchardt, German antiquity in Renaissance myth (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 177-81 for discussion and references
45. Kurt Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths in sixteenth-century Sweden: Johannes
and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians, tr. James Larson (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1991) provides an important overview of the Magnus
brothers and their contribution to this scholarship.
46. Beck, Northern Antiquities (above, n. 20), pp. 45-9.
47. Guizots lectures are most easily accessible in the typically fluid English transla-
tion of William Hazlitt, The history of civilisation, from the fall of the Roman Empire to
the French Revolution (London: D. Appleton, 1846). His observation on this con-
trast is at pp. 419-20 in this edition.
168 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

the Vandals within modern Europe.48 Krantz alluded only briefly to the nar-
rative of the Vandal state in North Africa, and devoted the majority of his text
to the more recent history of the Hanseatic towns of Lbeck, Rostock, Stral-
srund, Greifswald, Elbingen, Knigsberg, Wismar and Lueneburg. In local tra-
dition, the origins of these towns were traced to the Slavic Wends, and were
collectively referred to as the vandalicae urbes (a term which could be trans-
lated as either Vandal or Wendish towns).49 This ambiguity allowed
Krantz to combine references to the prehistoric Vandals with more recent his-
torical accounts of the Wends, and hence to create a coherent impression of re-
gional antiquity that was at least the equal of Swedish and Danish pretensions
to Gothic ancestry. Conspicuously, Krantz himself was a professor at the Uni-
versity of Rostock, and he concluded the Wandalia with an elaborate en-
comium to Duke Magnus von Mecklenburg: the most prominent champion of
Vandal heritage within the region. The confusion of the Wends and the Van-
dals did not withstand scholarly scrutiny for long, but proved to be so con-
venient politically that it took a long time to disappear entirely. Martin Cromer
convincingly refuted Krantzs argument in a publication of 1555, only to see
the Wandalia reprinted in 1575. Thereafter, a succession of Swedish and Finnish
antiquarians returned to the issue throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.50
Inspired by the inventive histories of savants like Krantz, the Vandals
also enjoyed a certain political cachet during this period, albeit scarcely one
which rivalled that of their cousins the Goths. From the early sixteenth cen-
tury, the Swedish and Danish royal families both listed the Vandals in their of-
ficial titulature.51 This claim was preserved in the royal title Svecorum Gothorum
Vandalorumque rex (King of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals), and in the three
crowns of the Swedish royal standard: a fiction only relinquished at the ac-

48. Albert Krantz, Wandalia (Cologne: Ioannes Soter alias Hei, 1519). On the Wandalia,
see Viljo Anton Nordman, Die Wandalia des Albert Krantz. Eine Untersuchung, Suo-
malaisen Tiedeakatemian Toimituksia / Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fenni-
cae, 29 (Helsinki: s.n., 1934). See also the discussion in Roland Steinacher and
Stefan Donecker, Der Knig der Schweden, Goten und Vandalen. Identitt und
Geschichtsbilder des 16.- 18. Jahrhunderts, in Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz
(eds), Vergangenheit und Vergegenwrtigung, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mit-
telalters, 14 (Vienna: Verlag der sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, in
press). I am grateful to Roland Steinacher for letting me see a copy of this paper
in advance of publication.
49. P.M. Barford, The Early Slavs: culture and society in early Medieval Europe (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 97 and Florin Curta, Slavs in Fredegar and Paul
the Deacon: medieval gens or scourge of God?, Early Medieval Europe, 6 (1997), pp.
141-67 discuss the earliest origin myths of the Wends.
50. Discussed in Steinacher and Donecker, Der Knig der Schweden, Goten und Van-
dalen, and Roland Steinacher, Rex Vandalorum The Debates on Wends and
Vandals in Swedish Humanism as an Indicator for Early Modern Patterns of Eth-
nic Perception, in Robert Nedoma (ed.), Der Norden im Ausland - das Ausland im
Norden. Formung und Transformation von Konzepten und Bildern des Anderen vom Mit-
telalter bis heute, Wiener Studien zur Skandinavistik, 15 (Vienna: Verlag der ster-
reichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 242-252.
51. This material is discussed in detail in Steinacher and Donecker, Der Knig der
Schweden, Goten und Vandalen.
Merrills 169

cession of the present king of Sweden, Carl Gustav XVI, in 1973. The origins
of this claim are uncertain, and were debated at some length by Swedish con-
stitutional scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In part no
doubt influenced by the common assumption that the Vandals originated in
Scandinavia, the title also exploited the ambiguous relationship between the
Vandals and Wends, and might thus be read as a statement of Swedish (and
Danish) claims to authority over the Hanseatic cities.
Two further studies of the Vandals emerged during the later eighteenth
century. Thomas Nugents The History of Vandalia was the first of these, and
comprised an exhaustive history of the Duchy of Mecklenburg from the
Roman Period to the later Middle Ages, with a substantial digression on the
North African kingdom. Nugents text was inspired by the royal wedding of
George III to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761 and was dedicated to
the royal couple.52 Far more impressive as a work of scholarship was Konrad
Mannerts Geschichte der Vandalen, published in 1785, which may be regarded
as the first narrative history of the Vandals worthy of the name.53 In contrast
to Krantz and Nugent, Mannert focused primarily upon the complex history
of the Vandal migration and the creation of their kingdom in Carthage. He
also argued pointedly that the Slavic occupation of the Vandals original
homeland had effectively ended their history as a Germanic people.54 Man-
nerts approach was to prove popular among the great German scholars of
the nineteenth century, but remained exceptional among the continental his-
torians of the eighteenth.
Hannoverian claims to Vandal heritage ensured that the political status of
the group crossed the English Channel and eventually (and most impres-
sively) the Atlantic. From 1769-1775 the Vandals came to be associated with
the most important of the great land speculation companies in the American
colonies.55 Formed out of the wreckage of the Indiana Company, the Grand (or
Great) Ohio Company was one of several groups which laid claim to the rich
lands of the Ohio River valley, to the west of the Alleghenies. Benjamin
Franklin was perhaps the most prominent of the companys members in Lon-
don and he eventually shepherded the proposal through the Lords of Trade
and Plantations and the Privy Council in the face of considerable political op-
position. By 1775, the land grant for the foundation of a fourteenth colony was
drafted, putatively to be named Vandalia in honour of Queen Charlottes
supposed ancestry.56 Had the land grant met less resistance in the early 1770s,

52. Thomas Nugent, The History of Vandalia (London: Printed for the author and sold
by J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, G. Hawkins, W. Johnston, and J. Dodsley, 1761).
53. Konrad Mannert, Geschichte der Vandalen (Leipzig: s.n., 1785).
54. Mannert, Geschichte der Vandalen (above, n. 53), p. 160.
55. The account here is largely drawn from Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands
and The American Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), pp. 40-54; A.M.
Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble. (New York, London: Harper and broth-
ers 1932), pp. 1-17 and Shaw Livermore, Early American Land Companies. Their In-
fluence on Corporate Development, ser. Publications of the Foundation for Research
in Legal History, Columbia University School of Law (New York: The Common-
wealth Fund, 1968), pp. 119-22.
56. Cited in Abernethy, Western Lands (above, n. 55), p. 54. Alternative names pro-
posed were Charlotta and Pittsylvania.
170 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

or had Franklin not been so closely associated with the rebellious factions
within the colonies as to generate suspicion in London, the Vandals would
very probably have found themselves commemorated in the name of one of
the new United States. As things transpired, the Revolution put an end to the
Grand Ohio Company and the Vandalia proposal went no further. By the time
the dust of the revolutionary war had settled, and the newly independent na-
tion set about the serious business of exploiting the western lands, there was
little need to flatter the British royal family in the naming of new states, and
the Abb Grgoire was busy providing the Vandals with a very different sort
of historical commemoration.

The Vandals in the Popular Imagination

The rapid adoption of the term vandalisme ensured that the Vandals would
largely be remembered for their destructive past. In truth, this probably did
not represent a huge paradigm shift for many in the eighteenth century. Un-
like the Goths, Franks, Anglo-Saxons and generic Germani, the Vandals had
never featured heavily in the revived medievalism of the early modern pe-
riod.57 They appear neither in the Niebelungenlied nor in Ariostos Orlando Fu-
rioso; Geiseric, their most important king, did not enjoy the instant brand
recognition of Clovis, Attila or Theoderic (or Hengest and Horsa). But just as
the historical Vandals played a valuable supporting role in the writings of the
Northern European antiquarians, so the same group made a number of telling
appearances in the popular entertainments of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. The Abb Grgoire was evidently unfazed by this minor celebrity, if
indeed he knew of any of these works, but the reminder that the Vandals were
not always viewed as the agents of terrible destruction remains valuable.
The best place to start this discussion is with two colossal prose epics,
written in France in the seventeenth century. Honor DUrfs LAstre was
published in six books between 1607 and 1627, the last three of which emerged
under the aegis of Balthasar Baro after DUrfs death in 1625.58 The novel is
concerned primarily with a pastoral vision of Gaul in the fifth century: a heav-
ily romanticized account, but one in which the shapes of familiar historical
narratives may dimly be made out in its tales. La Calprendes Faramond was
published between 1661 and 1670, and similarly presented a romanticized
tableau of fifth-century Gaul, in which the eponymous (and fictional) Frank-
ish king plays a central role.59 Both works were tremendously popular, and
both proved hugely influential in shaping popular views of the period, even
if they were regarded rather frostily by tastemakers at the end of the eigh-
teenth century.

57. Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages
(New York: Kings Crown Press, 1946) provides a helpful survey of this material.
58. Honor DUrf and Balthasar Baro, LAstre, ed. M. Hughes Vaganay. 5 vols (Lyon:
Olivier Masson, 1925-). Edelman, Attitudes (above, n. 57), pp. 165-8. The precise au-
thorship of the latter books of LAstre has been the matter of some dispute: Baro
certainly drew upon passages left by DUrf. For discussion, see esp. Eglal Henein,
Les Vicissitudes de la quatrime partie de LAstre, Revue dHistoire Littraire de la
France (Novembre-Decembre 1990), 881-98.
59. Edelman, Attitudes (above, n. 57), pp. 170-1.
Merrills 171

The role played by the Vandals in Faramond is largely ornamental, but the
African episode in LAstre provides a valuable illustration of the position of
the group within the seventeenth-century imagination. The Vandals appear in
the fifth book of the sequence one of those completed after DUrfs death
in an episode set shortly after the sack of Rome in AD 455.60 At the start of the
action, the Vandal King Genseric (Geiseric) has captured the Roman empress
Eudoxe (Eudoxia) and is determined to marry her. Eudoxe, however, has long
been loved by Ursace, a Roman knight who has proved devoted to her in the
best chivalric sense, despite her political marriage to the former emperor
Valentinian III. Eudoxes younger daughter, Placidie, is loved by Olimbre, an-
other Roman knight, and together Ursace and Olimbre attempt to secure their
release. Eudoxes beauty, however, has thawed Genserics heart and he falls in
love with the her, just as his son, Thrasimond, becomes smitten with the
younger Eudoxe (Eudocia), the empresss other daughter. The king and the
prince fall out over their respective obsessions, and such is Genserics passion
that the elder Eudoxe is eventually driven to faking her own death by setting
fire to her section of the palace. Genseric is convinced that the queen, her two
daughters and his own son have all died in the blaze and gives in to grief.
When he learns of the ruse, he is so relieved that he allows Olimbre, Ursace
and Thrasimond to marry their respective loves.
The net result is a predictable combination of historical narrative and ro-
mantic embellishment. Geiseric did indeed kidnap the imperial princesses
after the sack of Rome in 455, and Eudocia (historically the elder of the two)
was married to his son Huneric. Geiseric also had a son called Thrasamund,
who was younger than Huneric, and who ruled the Vandal kingdom from
496-523. The fact that the two are confused here is not surprising similar
mistakes had been made in less fanciful accounts of the Vandal past.61 Olim-
bre may also be a historical figure: probably the Roman senator Olybrius who
was married to Eudoxias other daughter Placidia and briefly attained the
western imperial purple in 474. Ursace is otherwise unknown, and can best be
regarded as a standardized chivalric character. The fire in the Carthaginian
palace is also invented and was probably a straightforward addition of the
authors own, although the image of a blazing Carthaginian palace and a
wronged queen naturally encourages parallels to be drawn with Aeneid IV.
This suspicion is supported by the strongly Virgilian flavour of one episode,
in which Ursace and Olimbre meet on a North African beach and contemplate
how best to infiltrate the royal palace.62

60. DUrf and Baro, LAstre (above, n. 58), vol 5, pp. 347-76
61. Note, for example, the confusion between almost all of the Vandal kings in Gre-
gory of Tours, Decem libri historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, I. 2 (Hannoverae: im-
pensis bibliopolii Hahniani 1885); tr. O. M. Dalton, The History of the Franks by Gre-
gory of Tours (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), II. 2.
62. On the use of historical material in LAstre, see esp. Eglal Henein, Prote romancier.
Les dguisements dans LAstre dHonor DUrf, Cultura Straniera, 67 (Fasano
Paris: Schema Editore A.G. Nizet, 1996) and Kathleen Wine, Forgotten Virgo: Hu-
manism and Absolutism in Honor dUrfs LAstre, Travaux du Grand Sicle 15
(Genve: Librairie Droz, 2000) and the references therein. (I am grateful to Pro-
fessor Wolfgang Haase for bringing these works to my attention.)
172 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

LAstres Vandal romance was revisited twice over the course of the sev-
enteenth century, in two plays which were directly influenced by LAstre. In
1641, Georges de Scudry published a tragi-comic version of Baros story
under the title Eudoxe.63 This was composed towards the beginning of a short
period of popular infatuation with the barbarian invasions in France during
the 1640s and early 1650s, a trend which culminated in De Scudrys own
(much satirised) epic poem Alaric in 1654.64 As was typical of the writer, the
greatest change that De Scudry made to his source material was to render
Baros text in verse, but he also added a scheming vizier Aspar as the true vil-
lain of his play. Three decades later, Mme Deshoulires provided a further
twist to the story in her play Genseric: a tragedy performed at the Htel de
Bourgogne in 1680.65 Deshoulires introduced two new characters into the
mix, and a far darker ending. Genserics son, Huneric is added as a somewhat
insipid individual, in contrast to his noble elder brother Trasimond. In this
version, Huneric is betrothed to an African princess named Sophronie, who
was brought up within the Vandal household, but despises her intended, in-
stead loving his elder brother with a dangerous passion. Trasimond himself is
still in love with Placidia, and the plot unfolds as normal (fire and all), until
Sophronie attempts to kill her rival in love, and succeeds only in killing Trasi-
mond himself. Distraught, Sophronie then turns the knife upon herself. The
play ends with Placidia contemplating her own suicide, and the empress Eu-
doxia and Genseric trapped in a loveless marriage with rather smaller fami-
lies.
In each of these recensions we see dramatic changes, but also some (hap-
hazard) adherence to authentic historical source material. De Scudrys addi-
tion of Aspar can only have been influenced by a knowledge of the Byzantine
courtier (and Vandal sympathiser) of the same name. Deshouliress intro-
duction of Huneric, likewise, betrays an awareness of some original source
material, if not an overt concern to work out the details of the newly expanded
Hasding family. The recurrence of the palace fire, and the addition of the fic-
tional Sophronie are a reminder of the flexibility with which these authors ap-
proached their source material, but the evolution of the Genseric tradition is
no less interesting for that. Baro, De Scudry and Deshoulires developed a
Vandal mythology that was relatively minor within the context of its time, but
one which hints at the position that Geiseric and his people might have en-
joyed within the early modern imagination. Significantly, this was flexible
enough to adapt to the changing historiographical currents of the period.
Baros bucolic comedy was transformed by the 1680s into a dark tragedy
which reflected the corruption of the empire. In this, Deshouliress revised vi-

63. Georges de Scudry, Eudoxe, tragi-comdie (Paris: A. Courb, 1641). The play is
briefly discussed by Perry Gethner, Femmes dramaturges en France (1650-1750).
Pices choisies, Vol. II, Supplment aux Papers on Seventeenth Century French Litera-
ture, 136 (Tbingen: Narr, 2002), p. 170.
64. Georges de Scudry, Alaric, ou Rome vaincue (Paris: A. Courb, 1654); ed. Cristina
Bernazzoli, Biblioteca della ricerca. Testi stranieri, 27 (Fasano: Schena, 1998).
65. Mme Deshoulires, Genseric, in Oeuvres de madame et mademoiselle Deshoulires 2
vols (Paris: Lemarchand, 1803), II, pp. 73-147. On Deshoulires play and its debts
to LAstre, see esp. Gethner, Femmes dramaturges (above, n. 63), pp. 159-70.
Merrills 173

sion of the Vandals reflected the moral perspective that historians increasingly
took on Romes fall by the end of the seventeenth century.66
The Vandals also made an appearance in Nicholas Bradys play of 1692
entitled The Rape, or the Innocent Imposters.67 Rather less successful than
Deshouliress play across the channel, Bradys work did at least win some
later critical acclaim.68 Again, the action is set in the fifth century, this time
during the reign of king Gunderic, sixteen years after a conflict between the
Vandals and the Goths of King Radagaisus. The plot of the play is
labyrinthine, and hinges on two misunderstandings at court: a young Vandal
princess passing as a man (because Gunderic is so determined to have a son),
and a Gothic prince passing as a woman (for fear of reprisals from the Vandal
king). After several clumsy (and predictably unsuccessful) attempts at seduc-
tion from several different directions, the rape that gives the play its name
and some brutal deaths, the two principals finally unite and secure a firm al-
liance between the two peoples.
The historical inspiration for The Rape is elusive. A conflict between the
Vandals (perhaps under Gunderic) and the Goths does have some historical
justification, and the namestock employed by Brady smacks of at least cur-
sory research: the Vandal villain is the convincing sounding Gesalarick, the
Gothic queen is Amalasuintha, and the principals are called Ambiomer and
Elismonda. But beyond that we are in the realm of an arbitrary olden days
setting.
Although The Rape lacked a specific historical context, Bradys contrast-
ing treatment of the Vandals and the Goths highlights the complexities and
contradictions of the period of the barbarian invasions in the seventeenth-cen-
tury imagination. Throughout, the Goths represent liberty and just rule: the
Gothic Prince Ambiomer is the rightful claimant to the joint throne, despite the
difficulties of his upbringing, and he comes into his inheritance at the close of
the play. The Vandals, by contrast, appear as symbols of tyranny: first through
the oppressive rule of Gunderic, and then through the eponymous rape at the
hands of Gesalerick. The suggestion that the Vandals were particularly op-
pressive kings was not a common theme in early modern writing, but did sur-
face on occasion: Pierre de Beaumarchaiss Le Mariage de Figaro of 1784 refers
metaphorically to harsh Vandal kings in its opening act (a reference which
sadly did not survive into da Pontes libretto for Mozarts great work).69
Equally significant, however, is the treatment of gender within Bradys
work. Understandably, much modern commentary on The Rape has focused
upon the dramatic sexualisation of violence within the play, and particularly

66. Deshoulires, Genseric (above, n. 65), II.6.

67. Nicholas Brady, The Rape, or the Innocent Imposters (London: Printed for R. Bentley,
1692).
68. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage: From the Restoration in 1660 to 1830
(London: Printed by H.E. Carrington; sold by Thomas Rodd, 1832), p. 19: it has
considerable merit.
69. Pierre de Beaumarchais, La Folle Journe ou le Mariage de Figaro (Paris: Rualt, 1785),
ed. Malcolm Cook, French texts series (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), I.10:
ah! cest la tyrannie dun Vandale, et non le droit avou dun noble Castillan.
174 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / June 2009

on the extent to which the audience is made complicit with this.70 From a
purely historiographical perspective, however, the introduction of gender-
ambiguity into a drama about the barbarians of the Dark Ages remains inter-
esting. Again, this was never a dominant theme in early modern treatments
of the Vandals, but it did have some justification in the source material.71 Mon-
tesquieu, for example, suggested that the emasculation of the Vandals once
established in Carthage effectively led to their downfall.72 Intriguingly, Bradys
King Gunderic anticipates precisely this argument in his own lament over the
character of his son Elismonda:
His outward composition shows him woman
In all things but the sex; and much I fear
His very souls a woman. Ball and Dances,
The conversation of conceited ladies
And fluttering courtiers, are his chief delight:
He loves not arms, to break the warlike steed,
Or dart the well-aimed javelin. Is he fit
To hold the reins of stubborn conquered nations.
To keep my fame up, and convey my glory
To ages yet to come ?73
Gunderics anxiety here is understandable his son is, after all, a woman,
and a comic element was doubtless intended by the author. It may be, of
course, that Bradys decision to cast the Vandals and Goths as the principals
in his barbarian drama was little more than coincidence, and there are clear
dangers in over-determination. Nevertheless, The Rape does make clear that
the popular view of the Vandals was far from straightforward in the popular
and scholarly discourses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In part
demonized barbarians, in part romantic heroes, the group could also be em-
ployed to explore a variety of political, social and gendered issues. It was only
with Grgoires appropriation of the group to describe the Revolutionary vi-
olence of the 1790s that this ambiguity was lost.
*
The immediate influences behind Grgoires choice of referent are clear
enough. The French historiography of the eighteenth century rarely consid-
ered the Vandals, but when it did it was almost always in wholly negative
terms. The barbarians who rapidly overran northern Gaul in the first decade
of the fifth century, and then established a kingdom which was all but lost to
history after little more than a century, offered an ideal counterpart to the
noble, successful and local Franks. Grgoire picked the group because their

70. See, for example, Jean I. Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English
Stage, 1660-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp.76-9.
71. On the importance of gender in the representation (and self-representation) of the
historical Vandals, see Merrills and Miles, The Vandals (above, n. 9), esp. ch. 4.
72. Montesquieu, Considrations (above, n. 26), XX.
73. Brady, Rape (above, n. 67), I:1.
Merrills 175

name fitted, and their reputation did too, at least among French historians.
But by doing so, he ended a long period in which the Vandals had represented
far more than a simple appetite for destruction.