No More Learning

? The Cult of the Nation in France
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
CHAPTER 3
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
Aux armes, citoyens!
--denis-ponce ecouchard (lebrun), "ode aux franc? ais" (angers, 1762)
Va, pour t'entrede? truire, armer tes bataillons
Et de ton sang impur abreuver tes sillons.
[Go, to destroy yourself, arm your battalions,
And water your furrows with your impure blood].
--claude-rigobert lefebvre de beauvray, adresse a` la nation angloise (1757)
? In the early morning of May 28, 1754, in the woods of what is now south- western Pennsylvania, a killing took place. The victims, a thirty-six-year- old French-Canadian officer named Joseph Coulon de Jumonville and nine soldiers under his command, had pitched camp for the night on the way from their base at Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) to Britain's Fort Necessity, more than 40 miles to the south. Although supposedly at peace, France and Britain were each building chains of forts to support their rival claims to the great stretches of land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, in the great game of military chess familiar from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Jumonville's mission was to instruct the British to withdraw immediately from what the French considered their territory. At Fort Necessity, however, Seneca Indian scouts had not only in- formed the inexperienced, twenty-two-year-old British commander about Jumonville's approach, but persuaded him it was the prelude to a French attack (the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson, known as the Half King, had a grudge of his own against the French). The commander therefore moved to intercept the French with a detachment of soldiers, and they crept up on Jumonville's encampment at dawn. It is unclear exactly who opened
78
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 79
? fire, but after a few confused volleys, the French were quickly overcome. Jumonville, wounded but alive, died under the Seneca leader's hatchet. The Senecas took several French scalps, and the newly seasoned British officer wrote boastfully to his brother back home in Virginia: "I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound. "
This incident has long been familiar to North American historians. It marked not only the opening skirmish in what would soon turn into the Seven Years' War, but also a key moment in the career of the cocky young British officer--a man by the name of George Washington. In fact, it nearly brought Washington's career to a premature end. Scarcely a month after Jumonville's death, a large French force--led, dramatically enough, by Jumonville's brother--captured Fort Necessity in a pitched battle with Washington's forces. They then forced Washington to sign a confession that he had "assassinated" an ambassador traveling under a flag of truce. Only Washington's slippery insistence that he had not understood the French text he had signed allowed him to avoid a damaging scandal. His detractors and admirers have argued about the incident ever since. 1
Jumonville's death, for all its importance to the outbreak of hostili- ties and to Washington's career, also won a prominent place in a very dif- ferent theater of operations. During the Seven Years' War, the French and British alike made wide use of printed propaganda, and the French side used Jumonville's death as a leitmotif, a perfect illustration of the enemy's treacherous conduct. 2 Pamphlets, songs, journals, and supposedly impar- tial collections of documents stridently condemned the English and Wash- ington (sometimes misidentified as "Wemcheston"), while enshrining the dead officer as a martyr of the patrie. 3 The incident even gave rise to a sixty-page long epic poem, Antoine-Le? onard Thomas's ferociously patri- otic Jumonville. A few lines suffice to give the general flavor:
Par un plomb homicide indignement perce? ,
Aux pieds de ses bourreaux il tombe renverse? . Trois fois il souleva [sic] sa pesante paupie`re,
Trois fois son oeil e? teint se ferme a` la lumie`re.
De la France en mourant le tendre souvenir,
Vient charmer sa grande a^me a` son dernier soupir. Il meurt: foule? s aux pieds d'une troupe inhumaine Ses membres de? chire? s palpitent sur l'are`ne. [Unworthily pierced by a murderous bullet
80 The Cult of the Nation in France
? He falls at the feet of his executioners.
Three times he lifts his heavy eyelid,
Three times his dulled eye closes to the light.
In dying, the tender memory of France
Comes to delight his great soul.
He dies: trampled under the feet of an inhuman band, His torn members throb on the ground]. 4
The poem launched Thomas on a successful literary career and was singled out in a popular Swiss book on "national pride" as the nec plus ultra of French hatred of foreigners. 5 So it is no surprise that as early as 1757, the Jesuit newspaper Me? moires de Tre? voux could comment that "all the world has learned of the treatment meted out to the Sieur de Jumonville. "6 The unfortunate officer, his undistinguished life now eclipsed by his sensational leaving of it, gained such a posthumous reputation that collective biogra- phies of "great Frenchmen," published in profusion in the waning decades of the ancien re? gime, included him right alongside such icons of French military glory as Bayard and Duguesclin. 7 Some of the poetry lamenting Jumonville's death remained well known enough in 1792 for Rouget de Lisle to crib from it in writing the Marseillaise (see, for instance, the epi- graphs to this chapter). 8
To twentieth-century eyes such atrocity literature seems quite unre- markable--indeed, by our woefully jaded standards, rather tame, and so it has been largely ignored. 9 Yet it constituted another arena in which the French seized on the concepts of the nation and the patrie and put them to new uses. In this instance, they did so in response to the changing demands of warfare, and one effect was to change perceptions and representations of warfare itself. The war literature of the 1750s and 1760s, for the first time in French history, presented an international conflict neither as a duel between royal houses nor as a clash of religions, but as a battle between ir- reconcilable nations.
As in the case of the constitutional conflicts, on one level this shift illus- trates the progressive detachment of French political culture from its for- mer religious context. In contrast to the stridently anti-Catholic propa- ganda flowing from the other side of the Channel, French war literature rarely mentioned the religious differences between France and England-- despite the survival of anti-Protestant bigotry in France, and despite suspi- cions that some French Protestants may have had illicit contacts with the
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 81
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 5. Another version of the killing of French officer Jumonville by Virginia militia and their Indian auxiliaries in the Ohio Valley in 1754. Once again, the scene is illustrated allegorically by comparison to combats between Saracens and Crusaders. Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, Paris, 1759.
82 The Cult of the Nation in France
? English enemy. 10 The French war literature also formed part and parcel of the campaign of royal patriotism, which itself marked so striking a depar- ture from orthodox Catholic justifications of absolute monarchy. Yet just as the pamphleteers of the pre-Revolution found themselves reaching back to the quasi-religious concept of "regeneration" as part of their quest to re- build the nation, so the propagandists of the Seven Years' War broke with recent predecessors to adopt various ideas and practices from the literature of the Wars of Religion. Paradoxically, this return to the past helped lay the groundwork for the development of modern, racially based forms of nationalism.
There were two great xenophobic moments in eighteenth-century French history: the Seven Years' War that started with Jumonville's death, and the revolutionary wars that started in 1792. The second certainly dwarfed the first in intensity. At the height of the Revolution, Jacobin clubs across France were spitting forth hatred of that "enemy of the human race" William Pitt, and denouncing the English as a "race of cannibals. " Bertrand Bare`re not only called the English "a people foreign to humanity, [who] must disappear," but convinced the Convention to pass a (thankfully little obeyed) motion instructing French commanders in the field to take no English prisoners alive. 11 Yet the two moments have striking similarities. In both cases, the cosmopolitanism so often associated with eighteenth-cen- tury French culture abruptly disappeared from books and periodicals, to be replaced by snarling hostility to France's enemies. In both cases, this change occurred thanks above all to the concerted efforts of the French government, which sought to mobilize resources and public opinion be- hind the war effort. And the revolutionary literature in fact followed mod- els developed in the earlier period, sometimes quite literally, as in the case of the Marseillaise. It is impossible to say, given the available evidence, whether the Seven Years' War literature had anything like the popular reso- nance of its revolutionary counterpart, which helped shape a wave of patriotic mobilization unparalleled in European history. But at the very least--as the revolutionary borrowings themselves demonstrate--this ear- lier body of work put important ideas and motifs into broad circulation. For this reason, and to continue my exploration of the transformation of patriotism and national sentiment in the last decades of the old regime, I will concentrate here particularly on the Seven Years' War, although I will also look ahead to the Revolution.
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 83 Englishmen and Barbarians
In modern accounts, the Seven Years' War is considered important not only for the decisive realignment of European power that it brought about (especially the triumph of Britain and Prussia and the decline of France and Austria), but also because it was a new sort of war. It could almost be called the first world war, for the combatants battled each other in North America, Africa, India, and on every ocean, as well as in Europe. They spent unprecedented sums in the process, and the war hastened the devel- opment of several Western European states into vast fiscal-military ma- chines, capable of keeping hundreds of thousands of men in the field and scores of ships of the line on the high seas. 12 It has generally escaped notice, however, that the propaganda efforts (at least on the French side) also rep- resented a considerable novelty. The vilification of national enemies itself was hardly new, of course; the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of Reli- gion offered ample precedent. 13 But the Seven Years' War saw not simply the expression of national antipathies, but their employment in a sus- tained, intensive print campaign aimed at mobilizing the French nation against an enemy nation. The only precedent for this sort of campaign lay in the history of religious warfare, in such episodes as the Catholic League's frenetic efforts to mobilize its supporters against the Protestant Henri of Navarre, and before that, in the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Luther's Germany. 14
Consider, first, the sheer volume: at least 80 items per year appeared in France during the Seven Years' War, more than double the amount pro- duced during the recent wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions (the second of which ended just six years before Jumonville's death). 15 The Jour- nal encyclope? dique signaled its awareness of this change with a wry quip: "The future will scarcely believe it, but the war between the English and the French has been as lively on paper as on the high seas. "16 Not since the Wars of Religion had French printing presses churned out such quanti- ties of xenophobic polemic. Tracking its distribution is difficult, but we know that at least one item, the issue of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau's newspaper L'Observateur hollandois that recounted Jumonville's death, sold 8,000 cop- ies, an impressive figure for the period. The paper was pirated by Dutch, Italian, and German publishers and translated into several languages. 17 The burgeoning European periodical press gave considerable attention to the
? 84 The Cult of the Nation in France
? polemical works, as did the British themselves, who responded in kind. 18 As a result, not only Jumonville's death, but also other major themes of French propaganda had wide diffusion, such as the triumphant early sei- zure of Port-Mahon in Minorca from the unfortunate Admiral Byng, and the heroic death of the Chevalier d'Assas in the battle of Clostercamp. 19
The material also represented a new departure in its violence. Although unimpressive by twentieth-century standards, the language reached a level of invective not seen in French war literature since the sixteenth century-- certainly not in the thin, almost decorous productions of the recent War of the Austrian Succession. 20 The propaganda portrayed the English as "vul- tures," a "perjurious race" driven by "blind wrath" and "undying hatred," people who had removed themselves from "that universal Republic, which embraces all nations in its heart. "21 It consistently compared them to the grasping, mercantile Carthaginians, and suggested that England would soon, quite deservedly, share Carthage's hideous fate. 22
Simply taking note of the numbers and the violence, however, does not advance our understanding very far. The crucial questions are what form the material took, and what strategies the authors employed. Most impor- tantly, rather than tar the English as "heretics," the propaganda tended to stigmatize them as lawbreaking "barbarians" and to contrast them, insis- tently and unfavorably, to American Indians. Moreau was the first to use this theme. In his 1755 description of Jumonville's death in L'Observateur hollandois, he accused the English of "infamies which have distinguished peoples whom Europeans consider Barbarians," and of "this wild license which previously distinguished the northern Barbarians. "23 He also linked English "barbarism" to the long history of English civil discord and the is- landers' proven inability to refrain even from killing one another. 24
Following Moreau, Antoine-Le? onard Thomas virtually structured his epic poem Jumonville around the theme. He began it with a pointed Vir- gilian epigraph--"What race of men is this? What fatherland is so barba- rous as to allow this custom? "--and continued relentlessly in this vein. 25 The Englishman was a "new barbarian" (p. 23) who committed "a barbar- ian homicide" (p. 4) and showed "a barbarian joy" in it (p. 24). Thomas also asserted no fewer than four times that the Indians themselves, for all their qualities of "ferocity," "cruelty," and "roughness" (p. 44), were shocked and angered by Jumonville's killing (pp. ix, 22, 30, 44). Immedi- ately after the description of Jumonville's death, the poet addressed himself directly to the Indians:
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 85
? Du moins votre grossie`re et farouche droiture Suit les premie`res Loix de la simple nature. L'Anglais, nouveau barbare, a traverse? les mers Pour apporter ce crime au fonds de vos de? serts. Allez, du fer tranchant, d'une ha^che sanglante Gravez sur vos rochers cette image effrayante. [At least your crude and ferocious uprightness Follows simple nature's first laws.
The Englishman, a new barbarian, has crossed the seas To bring this crime to the heart of your wilderness. Go, and engrave on your rocks this horrifying image Of cutting steel and bloody axe] (pp. 22-23).
For Thomas, both Indians and English behave at a vast remove from Eu- ropean norms of politeness and morality, but the latter even more so. The Me? moires de Tre? voux grasped the point perfectly in its review of Jumonville: "These Englishmen on the Oyo [Ohio River] . . . were more barbarian than the Iroquois and the Hurons. They, at least, shuddered when they heard of the attack on Jumonville. "26
Other chroniclers of Jumonville's death joined in as well. The poet Lebrun echoed Moreau's words in his indignation at the "barbaric" con- queror who gave lessons in crime to Indians much less deserving of the epithet:
De la Terre et des Mers De? predateur avare,
Au Huron qu'il de? daigne, et qu'il nomme barbare
Il apprend des Forfaits.
[Greedy despoiler of land and seas,
He teaches infamies to the Huron whom he disdains
and calls barbarian]. 27
A historically minded abbe? named Se? ran de la Tour, expatiating at book length on the comparison of England to Carthage, devoted two pages to this particular instance of "English barbarism"--and three more to the Indians' horrified reaction. 28 He and others likewise stressed the "discord" that lay at the heart of the English soul. 29
The incident in the Pennsylvania woods provided the ideal illustration of the theme, but its use permeated nearly all the polemical anti-English literature of the Seven Years' War (most of which did not deal with events
86 The Cult of the Nation in France
? in North America). Again and again, French publicists decried turbulent English "barbarians" and compared them unfavorably with non-European peoples. The author of a poem on a wide range of English atrocities asked, for instance, "Dans les antres profonds de la vaste Lybie / Vit-on jamais re? gner autant de barbarie? [In the deep lairs of vast Libya, did one ever see so much barbarism reign? ]"30 Satirical verses carrying a mock approbation from a fictive Royal Academy of Barbary of Tunis put a particularly sharp speech in the mouth of Montcalm, the French general who would soon find defeat and death on the Plains of Abraham:
. . . amis, vous e^tes ne? s Franc? ais.
N'imite? z point par cet affreux ravage
La Barbarie et le ton des Anglais,
Laisse? z agir la nation sauvage . . .
Qu'un Iroquois a bien plus de cle? mence
Que ces Milords qu'on fait pour de l'argent.
. . . friends, you were born French.
Don't imitate the Barbarism and the tone of the English In this horrid depredation.
Let the savage nation act . . .
An Iroquois has far more mercy in him
Than these Milords who buy their titles]. 31
The ministerial publicist Lefebvre de Beauvray told the subjects of his 1757 poetic Adresse a` la nation angloise: "Oui c'est vous qu'on a vu^s, portant dans Votre sein / Toute la cruaute? du fe? roce Africain" [Yes it is you that we have seen, carrying in your breast / All the cruelty of the fierce African]. 32 Most insistently, Robert-Martin Lesuire devoted an entire comic novel to the theme: his Les sauvages de l'Europe. 33 "The English lie at mid-point between men and beasts," says Lesuire's hero. "All the difference I can see between the English and the Savages of Africa, is that the latter spare the fair sex. "34
One further point about the theme is worth making. Polemical writing of this sort hardly lent itself to lexical precision, but nonetheless, from the 1750s through the 1790s, the texts mostly distinguished English "barbari- ans" from non-European "savages" (Lesuire was the principal exception). The latter term, in keeping with its origins in "selvaggi," or forest-dwellers, in the early modern period generally implied creatures without fixed abode, law, or polite customs, possibly even without language--but also
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 87
? without guile or hypocrisy. It most often connoted a greater closeness to nature and man's original state. The more pejorative "barbarian," by con- trast, implied a degree of social corruption and willful rejection of polite behavior (particularly respect for the law), and was most often applied to non-European peoples possessed of a high degree of social organization (such as the inhabitants of the Barbary coast). 35 As a concise example of the difference, consider that eighteenth-century authors spoke of "noble savages" but never of "noble barbarians. "36
Overall, this juxtaposition of the English to non-Europeans served an obvious polemical purpose. Not that it was an entirely new theme for French publicists. During the Wars of Religion, when the Spanish had filled the role of national enemy, Huguenots and politiques occasionally de- nounced them as barbarians and gleefully copied into their broadsides Las Casas's accounts of Spanish New World atrocities. 37 Still, the renewed pre- dilection for the theme in the 1750s, like the dimensions of the wartime lit- erature itself, was novel and deserves explanation.
Mobilizing the Nation
To find this explanation, the first questions to ask are: who wrote the litera- ture, and what readership did they hope to reach? Many of the texts ap- peared anonymously, but it is still possible to make one broad generaliza- tion: the literature did not simply well up spontaneously from the breasts of inspired patriotic authors. To a very large extent (although just how large remains uncertain), it was directed from above, by the royal ministry. As the hostile satirist Mouffle d'Angerville later wrote, "these writings [were] produced under the auspices of the Ministry, whose secret sponsor- ship remained hidden, [so that they] seemed nothing but the effusion of a patriotic heart. "38 The literature certainly cannot be read as evidence of widespread and spontaneous outbreaks of patriotic devotion and xeno- phobia, although some of this doubtless occurred. 39
The key figure was none other than Moreau, whom the foreign affairs department provided with plentiful funds, the services of a translator and clerk, and confidential papers. Thus supplied, he wrote pamphlets and produced the lion's share of two newspapers: the highly successful L'Ob- servateur hollandois, and, later in the war, Le Moniteur franc? ois. He also published in book form, in both English and French, papers seized from Washington at Fort Necessity. 40 Considerable textual evidence suggests that
88 The Cult of the Nation in France
?
the other authors took their source material and their themes directly from Moreau's writings. Some openly admitted as much, while others cribbed lines and quotations from him (Thomas took the preface to Jumonville al- most verbatim from L'Observateur hollandois, and even his Virgilian epi- graph had previously appeared in its pages--to paraphrase Dr. Swift, "Get scraps of Virgil from your friends, And have them at your fingers' ends"). 41 The ministry employed other official propagandists as well, probably in- cluding the prolifical Anglophobic lawyer Lefebvre de Beauvray (who also cooperated with it against the parlements). A year after writing Jumonville, Thomas became private secretary to Foreign Minister Choiseul. 42 War po- etry flooded the pages of official periodicals such as the Mercure de France, and it seems likely that many of the more than 150 separate poems, songs, and "fe^tes" collected in one 1757 volume had official sponsorship. 43
At least at the beginning, the ministry's intended audience was not so much French as international. When it hired Moreau in 1755, it did so first and foremost with the goal of keeping the Netherlands neutral in the looming Franco-British conflict, which is why the Parisian lawyer took on the unconvincing persona of a sturdy Dutch burgher (Monsieur Van ***) in his Observateur hollandois. His publication of Washington's papers formed something of an unofficial codicil to France's formal declaration of war, a testimony to the justice of France's cause. Yet the newspaper was published in French, and when Moreau boasted of the sensation it caused, he meant the sensation in France itself, not the Netherlands. 44 Reading the paper, it is hard to believe that Moreau did not principally have a French audience in mind. In the issue centered on Jumonville's death, he wrote of the French: "When will this amiable and generous Nation learn to amuse its imagination with objects worthy of occupying its reason? When will the love of the patrie which lives in the heart of all Frenchmen convey its heat to those many minds who occupy themselves wholly with arid and frivo- lous questions? "45 It was not the sort of passage to stir the blood of Dutch readers.
As the war proceeded, the early French victories turned to ashes and France faced the prospect of massive defeat, including the loss of most of its overseas empire. The principal purpose of the propaganda then became all the more clear: to mobilize French readers behind the crown's war ef- fort. Moreau's Le Moniteur franc? ois openly aimed at a domestic audience, and Moreau recounted in his memoirs that a major pamphlet he wrote comparing France and England (whose publication the ministry hastily
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 89
? scotched when negotiators agreed on terms for peace) had as its goal "to bring back the confidence that we needed more than ever, and to raise up our courage. " Similarly, in a work entitled Lettre sur la paix, "I exhorted the nation to recapture the customs, courage and virtues of its ancestors. "46 At the same time, the ministry attempted to stifle expressions of Anglophilia, which had flourished in print without much constraint during the War of the Austrian Succession, and held up "cosmopolitanism" as a particularly grievous sin. 47 As Edmond Dziembowski has convincingly argued, the French war literature found a model of patriotic fervor in England itself (although this fervor was linked to the turbulent nature of the English and their politics, which supposedly showed through in everything from elec- tion riots to the execution of Charles I). 48
Not surprisingly, the literary propagandists seized on any and all evi- dence that the French were making unprecedented sacrifices for victory-- for instance, in voluntary contributions to the war effort. A contributor to the anti-philosophe Elie Fre? ron's newspaper L'Anne? e litte? raire had called as early as 1756 for such donations: "We have to engage the nation, or at least the well-off people, to make an effort worthy of true French patriots, in giving voluntarily what they can give without harming their fortune, which is much less than the effort one makes for one's patrie in giving up one's life. "49 In 1759 and 1760, with the disastrous state of French finances almost matching the disastrous state of French arms, the crown started encouraging this sort of "voluntary" activity, including the donation of a 74-gun warship by the Estates of Languedoc, and of at least eight other smaller ships (including one baptized the Citoyen) by a variety of benefac- tors. 50 In November of 1759, Controller General of Finances Silhouette is- sued letters patent calling on the French to bring their silver plate to the mint, either as donations or to be exchanged for promissory notes, and the king set an example with some of his own silver. These contributions had a negligible impact on the overall budgetary situation; their purpose was more symbolic than financial. 51 The letters patent actually generated a great deal of resentment and fear ("this sort of expedient is ordinarily the state's last resort in the face of calamities," noted the caustic Parisian lawyer Edmond Barbier in his diary), but few dared disobey, for fear of belying the image of national unity. 52 A letter from an adviser to a Parisian convent is particularly telling: "I informed [the nuns] that they are in circum- stances in which it is essential that they appear patriotic, and ready to obey His Majesty's wishes. "53
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? In the shift from a propaganda effort aimed at least partly at an interna- tional audience to one designed to stimulate domestic "confidence" and "courage" and to present the image of a united nation, the literature of the Seven Years' War in some respects followed a model first elaborated earlier in the century, during the War of the Spanish Succession. Then, too, al- though on a noticeably smaller scale, the ministry underwrote pamphlets to persuade neutral foreign observers of the justice of the French cause; es- pecially notable was Jean de la Chapelle's vituperative Lettres d'un Suisse. 54 As that war turned more desperate for the French, the crown issued several public letters, supposedly written by the king himself, in which Louis XIV stressed his love for his people and his desire to secure a lasting and honor- able peace. One letter addressed to royal governors was read out from church pulpits across the kingdom. 55 Moreau consulted de la Chapelle in writing his Observateur hollandois, and several patriotic publications from the mid-century recalled Louis's letter in making their own exhortations to the French. 56
Yet in fact the difference between the two sets of war literature is enor- mous. The first presented the war as a war of kings, of royal houses. De la Chapelle consistently attacked the perfidies and infamies of the "House of Austria" and the "Emperor," not of Austrians. Although he used the word "barbarian," it was to describe the "House of Austria's barbarous max- ims. "57 When the ministry appealed to the French nation, it did so in the guise of the king speaking to noble governors about his "faithful sub- jects. "58 In contrast, the literature of the Seven Years' War, including a manifesto written by Foreign Minister Choiseul himself, presented the conflict between France and Britain in quite a different manner, as a war of nations. 59 The anonymous contributor to Fre? ron's newspaper (possibly Fre? ron himself) expressed this difference most strikingly: "There are wars in which the nation only takes an interest because of its submission to the Prince; this war is of a different nature; it is the English nation which, by unanimous agreement, has attacked our nation to deprive us of something which belongs to each of us. "60
In this light, the emphasis Moreau and his fellow authors placed on Jumonville's death takes on added significance. It was not an emissary of the House of Hanover who had cut Jumonville down in the Ohio Valley. Indeed, Britain's King George II barely figured in the war literature at all. No, the villain was an "English barbarian," and, more generally, all "English barbarians. " The victim, meanwhile, was no illustrious noble or prince of the blood. He was, wrote Thomas in Jumonville, "nothing but a simple
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 91
? French officer"--but for that very reason the prototype of his nation: "Of the virtuous Frenchman, such is the character. "61
The difference between the two bodies of propaganda shows just how much had changed in France in the forty years between Louis XIV's death and 1755. The French had grown increasingly accustomed to seeing them- selves as a "nation," and more so, a nation which could mobilize itself, in- stead of simply flocking behind a king. In this respect, the experience of the Seven Years' War contributed to the concept of the nation as a political artifact, something consciously constructed through an act of collective political will. Furthermore, France's ruling elites had become accustomed, in certain important respects, to treating France as a collectivity possessed of its own internal unity and of certain legitimate "rights. " In this respect, both the expansion of the public sphere in France and the political earth- quake of the early 1750s had an absolutely fundamental importance. By the 1750s the ministry was learning to defend its actions in print, to justify them before the "nation" or "public opinion," through the ever-expanding circuits for the distribution of printed material. It was natural, therefore, to seek to mobilize the nation (in fact, the small percentage of relatively well- off pamphlet readers), presenting the war as one in which every individual citizen had a stake.
National Identity and European Unity
If the war was a war of nations, then it was not only a war of all the French, but a war against all of the English. The publicists needed to demonize not simply an enemy king or his advisors, but an entire enemy nation. This shift from earlier modes of propaganda raised some formidable problems, however, as illustrated particularly by Moreau's contortions on the issue. In October 1755, in the Observateur hollandois, he wrote unctuously that he "didn't want to accuse a Friendly Nation"--but he immediately proceeded to ask how one could possibly "separate from the rest of the nation an officer [Washington] whose crime . . . seems to have been the signal for hostilities of all sorts. " And he added a few pages later: "Yes, Monsieur, whatever wish you may have to justify the English nation, the facts speak too loudly against it. "62 A month later, he again retreated from this posi- tion, in a fascinating disquisition on the English national character.
I do not attribute to all the English the excesses to which the bulk of the Nation seems pushed today. I do more. I distinguish two Nations, one of
92
The Cult of the Nation in France
? which is presently the small minority, the nation of the wise . . . But there is in England another nation, if you can even give this name to that ill- considered multitude who let themselves be carried away by opinion and subjugated by hatred. A tumultuous assemblage of all sorts of different parties, they are not a Nation who consult, who reflect, who deliberate; they are a people who cry, who agitate, and who demand war. 63
If elsewhere in his work Moreau (like other authors) drew a deft contrast between true French patriotism and national feeling and the English "fa- naticism" that masqueraded under those names, here he drew the bound- ary line within England itself. 64
Other writers followed Moreau's example. The Me? moires de Tre? voux ex- coriated the "English common people [petit peuple]" for "a ferocity which no longer belongs to the mores [moeurs] of Europe. "65 A semi-official French publicist, the abbe? Le Blanc, denounced "the imbecility of these [English] Fanatics, who take for the voice of the People, the cries of an mindless populace which they themselves have excited. "66 The Journal en- cyclope? dique denounced the "wild [English] populace, which, thinking it is embracing the phantom of liberty, can give itself over to horrid insults of other Nations. "67 These passages incidentally illustrate the suppleness of the publicists' vocabulary. While Moreau contrasted a presumably well- constituted and rational "nation" to a disorganized and fickle "people," us- ing the latter in the sense of the (scorned) "common people," Le Blanc dis- tinguished between a divinely wise "People" (as in vox populi, vox dei), and a (scorned) "populace. "68
It was obvious why Moreau and the others distinguished so carefully be- tween the tiny minority of benign English and the crushing majority of malignant ones. As they knew quite well, making collective accusations against the English nation might not have much credibility for the French reading public, because that public had, for more than twenty years, con- sumed a steady diet of Anglophilic literature, which taught reverence, not hatred, toward the nation across the Channel. From Voltaire's paeans to England in the Philosophical Lettters, to Montesquieu's exaltation of the English constitution, to Diderot's prostration before Samuel Richardson ("O Richardson, Richardson . . . I will keep you on the same shelf with Mo- ses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles"), to the general adulation of Locke and Newton, the major philosophes did their part. 69 Anglomania raged in many other domains as well, notably fashion and sport, while the eigh-
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 93
? teenth-century adoption of words such as "le club" and "le jockey" marked the birth of Franglais. 70 A sizeable literature grew up in the eighteenth cen- tury solely to inoculate the French against the disease of Anglomania, and it still could not prevent Mlle. de l'Espinasse from notoriously remarking that "only Voltaire's glory consoles me for not having been born English. "71 The popular novelist and poet Baculard Arnaud acknowledged the prob- lem when he wrote, in a 1762 poem, "Your Lockes and your Newtons / Were not the ones to teach you these barbaric lessons. "72
Although no other foreign nation elicited anything like the visceral emotional response from the French that England did, this Anglomania it- self fit within a broader eighteenth-century phenomenon: French readers' growing awareness of their identity as Europeans. The idea of Europe as a political unit had a long and august pedigree, and the shadow of European empire had not yet vanished from the Continent, but in the eighteenth century, writers began to perceive what we would now call a close Euro- pean cultural unity as well. 73 Voltaire wrote in his Le poe? me sur la Bataille de Fontenoy (a war poem, but from the relatively polite War of the Austrian Succession): "The peoples of Europe have common principles of humanity which cannot be found in other parts of the world . . . A Frenchman, an Englishman and a German who meet seem to have been born in the same town. "74 A 1760 review from the Journal encyclope? dique also put the point in a global context: "There is a perceptible and striking difference between the inhabitants of Asia and those of Europe . . . But it is much harder, and takes much more discernment, to grasp the slight differences that separate the inhabitants of Europe from one another. "75 The young Rousseau, in a plan for universal peace, commented that "Europe [is] not only a collec- tivity of nations . . . but also a real society, which has its own religion, its own morality, its own way of life, and even its own laws. "76 He returned to the theme more critically in Emile and the Considerations on the Govern- ment of Poland: "Today, whatever one may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen, whatever one may say on the subject there are only Europeans. They all have the same tastes, the same passions, and the same customs, because none of them has ac- quired a national form through a particular education. "77
Many factors spurred this new awareness. Among them were improved communications, the burgeoning periodical press, the enormous cultural influence of France itself, and the decline of international religious ani- mosities. The deeply Catholic commitment to a universal human commu-
94 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nity that pervaded French culture in the eighteenth century could only have reinforced all of these developments. In addition, Europe stood as the embodiment of several of the foundational concepts discussed in Chapter 1: socie? te? , police, civilisation, and moeurs. Nowhere, except perhaps in China, French authors agreed, had progress brought these things to such a high level of development--a verdict that Voltaire celebrated and Rous- seau deplored (as we will see in Chapter 5, the status of women was crucial to these arguments, although the issue did not feature prominently in the war literature). 78
Voltaire's poem and the Journal encyclope? dique review suggest a final and crucial factor: the vertiginous expansion of interest in and informa- tion about non-European cultures during the eighteenth century. Miche`le Duchet has remarked that one need read no further than Candide and the Spirit of the Laws to see how large a place the non-European world occu- pied in the French Enlightenment's imagination--and Duchet herself, fol- lowing on several earlier works, has in any case provided ample further ev- idence. 79 Travel writing, Jesuit Relations (accounts of missionary activity), newspapers, atlases, orientalist novels, and synthetic works of philosophy all made the French familiar with a much larger range of human diversity than ever before. 80
In the context of this new perception of a European identity, the Me? moires de Tre? voux's comments that the English common people dis- played a "ferocity which no longer belongs to the mores of Europe" takes on particular significance and suggests why the image of the "English bar- barian" had such powerful resonance in French propaganda. The casting of the Seven Years' War as a war of nations rather than a war of royal houses conflicted directly with the idea that Europeans were growing steadily closer together, with France and England in particular establishing sym- bolic bridges across the Channel. How could Moreau, Thomas, and the other publicists make national differences within Europe appear unbridge- ably vast, when so much of the printed matter consumed by their reader- ship implied the exact reverse?
The power of the image of the "English barbarian" lay precisely in its symbolic removal of the English from Europe--to the shores of Tripoli, or even further, to an outer darkness beyond even the "savagery" of Africans and American Indians. It revealed that the English, or at least most of them, only appeared European, but in fact lacked the requisite qualities of politeness, sociability, and respect for the law, and stood at the opposite
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 95
? end of a linear scale of historical developments. The label "barbarian" sug- gested that the English, unlike the more pliable American "savages," had actually rejected joining the company of advanced nations. In sum, if rep- resentations of savage Americans and Africans figured centrally in the in- vention of the idea of the civilized European, they also provided a radical standard of alien and primitive behavior (of otherness) that could be used, as political necessity dictated, to measure other European peoples against, thereby contributing to the construction of a new, and more specifically national, self-image.
The School of Arts and Humanity
If the image of the English barbarian functioned in this way to de- Europeanize the English, it also helped to place France itself at the sym- bolic center of Europe. The national self-image it helped to construct had little in common with the one often proposed for England by English pub- licists in this period: namely, the image of a new Israel of the elect--a cho- sen people fundamentally set apart from others. 81 The French image was rather that of a new Rome, the open and welcoming center of a universal civilization. And here too the war literature fit in well with the evolution of French nationalism and patriotism over the course of the eighteenth century.
As we have already seen, the way the French defined themselves in the eighteenth century did not rest primarily on a drastic drawing of borders between themselves and foreign "others. " They tended to minimize the connotations of exclusivity and fatality that had been associated with the concept of patrie from antiquity, and strove to make patriotism compatible with a universal human community in which all nations followed the same linear path of development. This universalism did not, however, imply any modesty about France's own place in the family of nations. Throughout the early modern period, dating back at least to Jean Bodin's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, French writers had generally sought to identify the highest stage of human development not merely with Eu- rope, but with France itself. Most often, they grounded their arguments in theories of climate, arguing that France's temperate weather and fertility made it welcoming soil for spiritual achievement and gave the naturally moderate French--nature's true cosmopolitans--the best qualities of all nations. 82 In the eighteenth century, the most subtle contributors to cli-
96 The Cult of the Nation in France
? mate theory (particularly Montesquieu and Buffon) eschewed these chau- vinistic claims, but many others embraced them. Antoine de Rivarol, for instance, wrote that "nature, in giving [the Frenchman] a gentle climate, could not make him rough: it has made him the man of all the nations. "83 D'Espiard de la Borde similarly argued, in his The Spirit of Nations, that "France, among all the nations, can take pride in the fortunate Tempera- ture of its Climate and Minds alike, which produces no bizarre effects, ei- ther in Nature or Morals. "84 French mores were perfectly compatible with those of all other nations, and so France, d'Espiard concluded, "is the prin- cipal Pole of Europe. "85 The cleric Thomas-Jean Pichon wrote in a work similar to d'Espiard's, The Physics of History, that "[French] souls, capable of all modifications, are, in a sense, like their territory, which can produce all sorts of fruits. "86 During the French Revolution the messianic cosmo- politan Anacharsis Cloots asked: "Why, indeed, has nature placed Paris at an equal distance from the pole and the equator, but for it to be a cradle and the metropolis for the general confederation of mankind? "87
From these arguments it followed that the French had the duty to act not only as the world's seat of learning (thus fulfilling the venerable prom- ise of a translatio studii from Athens to Rome to Paris), but also as the world's schoolmasters. 88 Fellow Europeans might recognize France's supe- riority and of their own free will copy its fashions and learn its language. Beyond Europe, however, fulfilling the Frenchman's destiny as "the man of all the nations" demanded an early version of what the nineteenth century would call the nation's "civilizing mission. "89 This mission was in fact a tenet of early modern French imperialist theory. The French authorities in Canada, for instance, declared early on that all "savages" who accepted Ca- tholicism would "be considered and reputed native French," while Con- troller General Colbert even encouraged intermarriage between Indians and French, "in order that, in the course of time, having but one law and one master, they may likewise constitute one people and one race. "90 These ideas permeated travel literature and the missionary Relations, which Jesuit colle`ges pressed on their students. 91
Not surprisingly, the ideas also appeared prominently in the polemical literature of the Seven Years' War--and most strongly in those texts which most insistently deployed the image of the English barbarian. Thomas's Jumonville, for instance, describes the American Indians in terms that Colbert himself would certainly have approved:
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 97
? Les grossiers habitants de ces lointains rivages Forme? s par nos lec? ons, instruits par nos usages, Dans l'e? cole des Arts et de l'humanite?
De leurs sauvages moeurs corrigent l'apre^te? . . . Leur coeur simple et nai? f dans sa fe? rocite? Respecte du Franc? ois la sage authorite? .
[The crude inhabitants of those distant shores, Shaped by our lessons, and instructed by our customs, Reform the harshness of their savage mores
In the school of Arts and humanity . . .
Their hearts, simple and nai? ve in their ferocity, Respect the wise authority of the Frenchman]. 92
In the poem, Jumonville's death itself provides the Indians with a salutary lesson. Until they witnessed it, nothing could overcome their "inflexible roughness," and they remained deaf to pity, taking it for weakness. But on seeing Washington's crime, "Pour la premie`re fois [ils] se sentent e? branler, / De leurs yeux attendris on voit des pleurs couler [For the first time they feel themselves weaken / And one sees tears flow from their eyes]. 93 The novelist Lesuire also cast the French as educators--but in this case unsuc- cessful--of the savage English. As he had one of his few sympathetic Eng- lish characters remark in a crucial scene: "Our [French] neighbors could, more than any other People, soften our mores, and teach us the bonds of society, which make life precious by making it pleasant; but here we make it a duty to hate them. As long as we hate the French, we will be barbarians" (emphasis mine). 94
It would be wrong to say that these representations of England, France, and the relation between them held unanimous sway in France. The heavy legacy of Anglomania and cosmopolitanism did not dissipate so easily. Be- sides, these representations were at least in part official ones, elements of a conscious strategy on the part of the ministry to mobilize the population for the war effort. It is impossible to gauge with any degree of accuracy how widely the general population shared them. What can be said, how- ever, is that these representations permanently expanded the field of French political discussion, suggesting ways of seeing nations, foreign and French alike, that would continue to reappear in French political culture (particularly during the Revolution).
98 The Cult of the Nation in France
? What was most original and significant about them, ultimately, was the idea of an essential, unalterable difference between two nations. In the eighteenth century (as we will see in more detail in Chapter 5), the most common criteria for adducing differences in national character were cli- mate, political system, and position on a linear scale of historical evolution, according to which American Indians, for instance, stood roughly equiva- lent to the early Greeks. For this reason, historians have generally opposed eighteenth-century notions of human difference to nineteenth-century ra- cially based ones, since, according to the earlier criteria, a people's char- acteristics could easily change (as in Buffon's claim that Africans trans- planted to Scandinavia would eventually become white). 95 Certainly the polemical writers of the mid-eighteenth century did not fail to link English faults to all these factors, particularly the turbulence of English politics and weather alike ("a perpetually bloody climate," as Buirette de Belloy con- cisely put it). 96 But the tactic of stigmatizing the English as barbarians, al- though rooted in notions of historical evolution, established new criteria of difference.