The Rabelaisian Border

Abstract

In 1930 the French historian Lucien Febvre and geographer Albert Demangeon were commissioned to coauthor a book on the Rhine. In preparation for this volume, and with war clouds gathering on the horizon, they took an upriver Rhineland journey into Europe's heart of darkness. Around this time, Febvre began taking notes for what would later become his magisterial study of François Rabelais. From the intellectual cross-fertilization of these apparently unrelated events this paper suggests Febvre inaugurates a political moment for European border studies, with important resonances for our day. This moment, derived from Febvre's analysis of the Rhine as a vast, integrating force in the modern period and his reading of Rabelais's own stubbornly persistent religiosity, suggests a method for border studies that takes into account the temporal specificity of borders in European history and trains attention on the everyday ‘mentalities’ of those inhabiting lived borders while foregrounding the problem of the Other as central to any proper understanding of the spatiality of borders. In thus posing the border as a geohistorical histoire-problème, Febvre reinjects the notion of possibility into border studies and makes of border space a properly political object of re-worlding. The paper then reviews a selection of canonical texts in border studies dating from the mid to late 1990s and invites a dialogue with the smiling figure of Rabelais.