Some Reflections on Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Idea of ‘Race’

Abstract

We are in the year 50 bc. The whole of Gaul has been occupied by the Romans … The whole of it? No: one village populated by invincible Gauls is still holding out against the invader. And the Roman legions garrisoned in the fortified camps in Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Petitbonum are having a hard time of it.

To skip 1,100 years of history:

The Norman Conquest of 1066 was remarkable for its completeness … However, the Isle of Ely became what we have come to term a ‘pocket of resistance’. It was then that the natural defences of the Isle became of prime importance, and were exploited by the Saxon leader, Hereward the Wake …!’

The first little text is taken from the frontispiece of Astérix le Gaulois, first published in 1961 and still selling very well. The second is borrowed from the website of a tourist information office in Ely. They could, you will agree, scarcely be more trivial, but that does not make them insignificant. Both are the beginnings of narratives that tell of invasion, conquest and resistance. And they speak of the racial basis of these conflicts. They touch, that is, on one of the major themes dealt with by Michel Foucault in his lectures Society Must Be Defended. They, and Foucault, are concerned with variations on the ‘Norman yoke’ thesis, which finds its classic literary expression in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and which proves to be evoked with surprising regularity even today.