That Malta has inherited a potpourri of cultures from different civilisations in the Mediterranean and beyond is not disputable. Even if our genetic timbre has remained 95 per cent Sicilian, including a notable North African variety, we cannot erase or change the collective memory that generations of successive settlers especially during the last millennium have constructed to produce our present identity.

Some past experiences have been perpetuated with considerable ease: we all ‘remember’ the Great Siege of 1565, the 450th anniversary of which we are commemorating this year and the recent British connection, especially World War II. The former because of the huge and impressive archival and artistic collection of reminders which have kept memory alive through abundant military edifices, numerous works of art and a pyramid of documents chronicling live events while the latter mostly through a generation of war survivors who, though rapidly diminishing in numbers, have left a strong mark through their emotional accounts.

Other communal experiences seem to have faded into sites of memory either through conscious manipulation because it suited certain generations in particular periods of time or because they were not as significant as the previous two episodes. However, that does not mean that today’s society cannot retrieve what it lost over the centuries. As Sieyès would put it, nations exist in the state of nature and are ultimately the source of power, will and law. They may slumber through centuries but continue to subsist beneath the debris of history until the moment of their rebirth.

Cultural legacy

The majority of our cultural legacy was made available through a number of powers that ruled this small strategic island for purposes not necessarily always in consonance with the wishes of the inhabitants. After the assumed arrival of Arabic-speaking Muslim settlers from Sicily in mid-11th century, one would hardly believe the new islanders, whose main stock survives, would have welcomed Count Roger with open arms. Yet the Normans and, by the 13th century, the Angevins were eventually the ones to shepherd the Maltese islands back to Latin Christian civilisation. Both of them were also ultimately responsible for raising the archipelago to higher geopolitical significance.

Both powers came into the Mediterranean and elsewhere from what is now France. Maltese scholars of this medieval period seem to agree that whatever social and administrative pressures were applied to impose Christianity on all inhabitants it must have been done, at least till 1270, in an atmosphere of relative tolerance. The presumed illiterate Maltese of the time were apparently motivated to convert to the new religion in order to safeguard their original Semitic properties, villages, language and family lineages.

Another major French connection had to wait till 1530 with the arrival of the Order of the Knights of St John that in the end was to leave its strongest mark on the islands and entice the community to aspire towards nationhood. This European noble Order hosted a community of eight langues, three of which were Provence, Auvergne and France. Between them, these produced no less than half the members of the chivalric society. Suffice it to say that during their 268 years of local rule, 12 out of 28 grandmasters were French – most of them built what could now be termed as our principal symbols of civilisation. Valletta with its palaces and St John’s – grandmasters La Valette and La Cassière were responsible for the buildings respectively – are clear signs of significant strides through which these grandmasters ascertained Malta’s prominent place on the world map. That it became the capital of Malta when French general Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 established a central government and invited the Catholic Church to assume its esteemed place in St John’s could be considered as the destiny of the birth of a nation through French connections.

Territorial collectivity

The 1789 French Revolution and the republican Rights of Man Declaration created chaos in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. They were not only to cause the fall of major medieval monarchies but also to sound the death knell of the Order mostly as an economic enterprise. In 1792 the Knights’ income from commanderies received a fatal blow that was to spell its total collapse. But it was perhaps the new ideals of liberty and democracy, as understood in those days, that fired Maltese intellectuals to facilitate the early arrival of these tenets in Malta through the French armée on its way to the Orient.

Bonaparte immediately liberated Malta of two of the three ecclesiastical authorities, namely the Inquisition – which he had already wound up in Rome – and the waning Order, leaving the Church as the only religious institution enjoying national competency in the community. For the first time in its long history Malta was to have its own secular central administration and aspire to become a territorial collectivity within the French Republic.

But to find out when the Maltese were first recognised as a distinct national community one has to rewind the clock back to 1669 and revert to France and its Sun King, Louis XIV. Through a royal edict Maltese commerçants, marins et matelots benefitted from le droit d’aubaine which meant that if they died on French soil their descendants would inherit them. In 1765 Louis XV considered ‘the inhabitants of the islands under the Order of Malta’ citizens of the Kingdom of France with rights to settle, buy and sell property in that country. No other foreign monarch seems to have awarded such rights to Maltese citizens.

Ħobż tal-Franċiż

When Malta belonged to the Knights it enjoyed close relations and ambassadorial exchanges with many countries, the closest being Spain, the Italian states, including the Holy See, and France. The 18th century brought Malta closest to France with the king having a strong say even in the choice of grandmasters. Naval connections were so strong since the founding of the Marine Royale under Richilieu that several prominent Knights of Malta not only served as admirals but left their mark on the French navy till this very day. Shipbuilding, military weaponry as well as defence architecture were decidedly French. The economy, budgeting and the cuisine were French, so much so that besides introducing confectioneries in Valletta we remain perhaps one of very few countries where local bread has to be quaintly identified with its provenance – ħobż tal-Malti – so as to differentiate it from ħobż tal-Franċiż. University students and patients alike used to proceed to Montpellier and Paris to study medicine or seek convalescence up to the time of Pasteur into the 19th century. Strolling any day in Valletta, bidding bonjour or bonsoir was so common that both salutations remain in our common parlance till this very day as ‘bonġu’ and ‘bonswa’.

We have so many anniversaries commemorating events such as the laying of the first stone of Valletta next year, the inauguration of the aqueduct by Wignacourt this year, the setting up of our precious Biblioteca, the opening of the Manoel Theatre, the founding of new towns like Senglea, Paola, gates such as Fleur de Lys – which is being rebuilt – de Rohan, Porte des Bombes or bastion girdles by various grandmasters that it is impossible to celebrate each and every occasion. Other commemorations are at times superseded by more recent landmarks: we celebrate two centuries of the Police Force as instituted in their present form but forget that police and military Maltese units have been with us since the medieval dejma.

As the future beckons we would do well to examine our highly charged calendar of events and try to balance what happened to our forebears over the past millennium when the Maltese archipelago used to attract the strongest powers of the Mediterranean and beyond. Then and only then we might be able to find our authentic identity and put into perspective each and every milestone that helped us aspire to become the independent thriving republic we are today.

Dr Charles Xuereb is the author of France in the Maltese Collective Memory, Perceptions, Perspectives, Identities After Bonaparte in British Malta, Malta University Press.

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