The Gauls in Ancient Rome and Colonial Vietnam: Race, Empire and Classical Inheritance

summary: This paper examines the racialization of "the Gauls" in French colonial Vietnam and in the ancient Roman world. I explore two contesting uses of the Gauls from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, one which universalizes the Gauls as a paradigm of assimilation, and the other which racializes them to limit integration and to maintain the colonial hierarchy. Alongside the modern source materials, I analyze representations of the Gauls in Cicero's speeches ( Pro Fonteio and De provinciis consularibus ) and Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico as case studies of Roman racializing rhetoric. This paper demonstrates that parallel readings of racialization in modern and ancient contexts help us better understand not only how race is made and remade, but also how we can work towards countering this sinister process.