“I Used To Love France ...”

Notebooks 2940 [11.34]: ‘Amabam Galliam (quatenus et quantum a vere Anglo amari Gallia potest) vel eo nomine quod—nobis dedisset: nunc odio eandem eo etiam ipso nomine prosequor.’ This means ‘I used to love France (insofar and to that degree any Englishman can love France)—or at least I loved the things that came to us in the name of France: but now I hate and pursue her in that very name.’ Kathleen Coburn dates this entry to December 1806.

Since nobody was sure where the Latin was from (Coburn: ‘the source is not known’), and since it so neatly encapsulates STC's shift from youthful enthusiasm for liberty to middle-aged Burkean hostility to French revolutionary upheavals, scholars have sometimes assumed it was written by Coleridge himself. It wasn't though. It's Coleridge minimally adapting something said by Renaissance French scholar Henri Estienne (1528-98).

The context of the original statement was a dispute between Estienne and the celebrated Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives over, of all things, Aulus Gellius. Estienne, editing an edition of Gellius's Noctes Atticae (Paris 1585), discovered that Vives had criticised Gellius as ‘indigestible’, and also on account of his (Gellius's) low opinion of Seneca—a Spanish-born Roman citizen. Estienne complained that Vives had allowed love of his own country, Spain, to overwhelm the truth (putting amor patriae before amor veritatis). In a supplement to his edition, titled Noctes Parisinae, Estienne took Vives to task in detail. He insisted that he had used to love Vives, prior to this attack on Gellius, at least so far as any Frenchman can love a Spaniard—but no longer: ‘Amabam Hispaniam (quatenus et quantum a vere Gallo amari Hispania potest) vel eo nomine quod Ludovicum Vivem nobis dedisset: nunc odio eandem eo etiam ipso nomine prosequor.’

This is from the third page of the dedicatory epistle right at the start of Estienne's edition. There's a nice irony in Coleridge taking a Frenchman's words to express his own growing hostility to, precisely, Frenchmen.