Guibert then turns to his reader, and provides a more extensive panegyric for his people, recalling pre-Merovingian accomplishments:
I say truly, and everyone should believe it, that God reserved this nation for such a task. For we know certainly that, from the time that they received the sign of faith that blessed Remigius brought to them, they succumbed to none of the diseases of false faith from which other nations have remained uncontaminated either with great difficulty or not at all. They are the ones who, while still laboring under the pagan error, when they triumphed on the battlefield over the Gauls, who were Christians, did not punish or kill any of them, because they believed in Christ. Instead, those whom Roman severity had punished with sword and fire, French native generosity covered with gems and amber. They strove to welcome with honor not only those who lived within their own borders, but they also affectionately cared for people who came from Spain, Italy, or anywhere else, so that love for the martyrs and confessors, whom they constantly served and honored, made them famous, finally driving them to the glorious victory at Jerusalem. Because it has carried the yoke since the days of its youth, it will sit in isolation,[34] a nation noble, wise, war-like, generous, brilliant above all kinds of nations. Every nation borrows the name as an honorific title; do we not see the Bretons, the English, the Ligurians call men "Frank" if they behave well? But now let us return to the subject.
"Let us return to the subject," like the earlier injunction, "let us continue in the direction in which we set out," indicates Guibert's awareness of his tendency to perform "sorties."[35] At times he turns from the narrative to deliver a sermon, or to offer a biography of Mahomet, and, more than once, to lecture on ecclesiastical history. The apparent looseness of structure which results, a quality Misch attributed to the Memoirs as well, may be symptom of Guibert's Shandy-like temperament, or may be evidence that the remarks he made about his style in an early aside to the reader apply equally well to his structure:
Please, my reader, knowing without a doubt that I certainly had no more time for writing than those moments during which I dictated the words themselves, forgive the stylistic infelicities; I did first write on writing-tablets to be corrected diligently later, but I wrote them directly on the parchment, exactly as it is, harshly barked out.
Such a cavalier attitude towards the finished product was not characteristic of Guibert,[36] and seems to be in keeping neither with his declared penchant for difficulty, nor with his declared intention to raise the level of his style to match the significance of his subject:
No one should be surprised that I make use of style very much different from that of the Commentaries on Genesis, or the other little treatises; for it is proper and permissible to ornament a history with the crafted elegance of words; however, the mysteries of sacred eloquence should be treated not with poetic loquacity, but with ecclesiastical plainness. Therefore I ask you to accept this graciously, and to keep it as perpetual monument to your name.
The seriousness of purpose and the apparent looseness of structure may perhaps be reconciled by considering that the literal level of events was a less urgent concern for Guibert than the significance of those events. In addition, he imagined himself not so much as a recorder of events, but as a competitor in a rhetorical agon, as the implied metaphor that he uses in describing his activity as writer, in hujus stadio operis excurrisse debueram, "racing in a stadium," implies.
In fact, in the course of composing his explicitly corrective version of the First Crusade, Guibert participates in several contests simultaneously; he "mollifies" the style and corrects the substance of previous writers on the Crusades; he argues for some miracles and against others; he utilizes and attempts to transcend both the Graeco-Roman and the Judaeo part of the Judaeo-Christian past. As a rhetorical performance, in both prose and verse, the results are impressive, since the Gesta Dei per Francos simultaneously reflects historical reality, and provides some insight into the workings of the mind of gifted, early twelfth-century French cleric and aristocrat.
Summary of the Gesta Dei per Francos
Characteristically, Guibert opens the Gesta defensively, justifying his choice of a modern topic by insisting upon the exceptional nature of the Crusade, as well as the exceptional nature of the French. The entire first book is devoted to a selective history of the Eastern Church and a denunciation of heresies, concluding with an extensive invective against Mahomet, compounding sex, excrement, and disease. [37] Guibert then moves forward in time, to the generation before the First Crusade, to describe a complaint about Muslim lust made by the Greek Emperor to the elder Count Robert of Flanders. Guibert also complains about the Greek Emperor's own excessive interest in erotic motivation for warriors.