Crucible of the Millennium?: The Clovis Affair in Contemporary France

Abstract

I spent the 1996 Columbus Day holiday weekend in Bayonne in southwest France lecturing on the ethnographic fieldwork research I had conducted among a community of artisanal chocolatiers six years earlier.See Terrio 1998:18–31. 1996 was proclaimed the Year of Chocolate in Bayonne by municipal leaders and local chocolatiers. This event was an ambitious commemoration involving a series of public lectures organized to celebrate the southwest as the historic cradle of French chocolate production. At the gala dinner following my lecture, there was little talk of chocolate but a lively discussion ensued on the Clovis affair.An earlier version of this essay was presented in a session organized by Jill Dubisch at the 1997 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in Washington, DC. For their detailed readings of the text and insightful comments I wish to thank the editors; the excellent readers who reviewed the essay for this journal; David Kertzer, who served as the AAA session discussant; Sylvie Durmelat; and Patti Sunderland.L'affaire concerned the polemic surrounding the national ceremony organized two weeks earlier to commemorate the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the Catholic conversion and baptism of the Frankish king Clovis in 496. That polemic centered on an apparently incongruous cast of characters including the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis, the current President Jacques Chirac, Pope Jean Paul II, the Catholic Church and the French Republic.Journalist Adam Gopnik devoted his regular Paris Journal feature in the New Yorker magazine to an insightful and humorous analysis of the Clovis affair (7 October 1996).