John Edelvik
Provisional paper title: "L'Outremer ou L'Orient Latin? Paul Riant and French Crusade
Studies in the 19th Century"
Jules Michelet remarked in his 1870 Histoire de France that "the Crusades were
epitomized by two Frenchmen: Godfrey of Boullion at the beginning and Louis IX at the
end." "It fell to France," he continued, "to contribute more than any other to the grand
event that made one nation out of Europe." Like that other great Frenchman,
Charlemagne, Godfrey and Louis were part of a grand mission civilisatrice that held
Christian Europe together through the perils of the Middle Ages. The nexus of French
nationalism, colonialism, and the study of the Crusades is well known, of course, and
the idea of "L'Outremer" rests in a delicate tension between the 19th century colonial
imagination and medieval politics. One key individual who navigated these waters with a
bit of a different compass was the French scholar Paul Comte de Riant (1836-1888).
Riant made significant contributions to the study of the Crusades and the Latin Kingdom
over the course of his career, including the foundation of the Société de l'Orient Latin in
1875, which published two short-lived series of studies and textual editions relating to
the history of the Latin East. Yet while many of his scholarly colleagues focused on
situating the Crusades and the history of the Latin Kingdom firmly in a nationalist
French narrative, Riant remained committed to the idea of a Latin Christendom as the
unifying force in European history. For Riant, the Crusades were a grand idealistic
project precisely because all European nations -- from Scandinavia to Portugal to
Hungary -- participated and lent their particular energies and talents to the undertaking.
Riant's devout Catholicism clearly informed this outlook and his work attracted the
attention of Pope Pius IX, who bestowed on him the title of Roman count. But at a time
when few French academics would have thought of collaborating with their German
counterparts, Riant was reaching out to fellow historians like Reinhard Röhricht, with
whom he shared a multi-year collaborative relationship. Riant's first substantive
scholarly work was a study not of French, but of Scandinavian, crusaders. His last major
scholarly article was devoted to the Passio Thiemonis, a hagiographic text about a
Bavarian bishop killed during the Crusade of 1101. My paper will suggest that although
Riant never carried out his scholarship in a polemical fashion, his editorial policies,
collaborative relationships, and insistence on a broad, multinational vision of Crusades
history made a bold critical statement about the highly nationalistic historical projects of
his day. Riant thus deserves credit not only for his astounding productivity and
organizational efforts, but also his remarkable intellectual independence and historical
vision.