No More Learning

. . looking exclusively to the rules of prudence and good sense to regulate the details of his life. "68 In other words, the shift in language reflects not so much secularization as what might be called the interiorization of religious belief--its relegation to the private consciences of individual believers. 69 Rousseau evoked precisely this idea in The Social Contract, in his contrast of the "religion of man" to the "religion of the citi- zen. " He noted that the "religion of man," which he identified with the "holy, sublime and true religion" of the Gospel, had "no particular connec- tion with the body politic, leaves the laws only the force they themselves possess, adding nothing to them; and hence one of the chief bonds holding any particular society together is lacking. " Rousseau concluded, "I know nothing more contrary to the social spirit. " The passage, while purporting to describe an ancient, pristine Christianity, perfectly captured the changes in the religious sphere taking place in Rousseau's own day, and pointed to the direction in which Christianity would henceforth evolve. 70
38 The Cult of the Nation in France
? If the new and redefined concepts represented purely terrestrial ways of ordering the world, they nonetheless retained crucial similarities to their religious counterparts. The very sense of harmony they evoked inescapably recalled earlier visions of the heavenly city. Furthermore, each not only de- scribed something which supposedly existed prior to politics and to orga- nized religion, and which could be taken for a fundamental ground of human existence, but also something beyond all possible criticism and therefore, in an important sense, something sacred. It has been shown that eighteenth-century discussions of how individuals came together in socie? te? rarely failed to invoke religion, even if the theorists increasingly demoted religion to a mere adjunct and aid to supposedly natural human sociabil- ity. 71 Indeed, these writers, in praising socie? te? , frequently adopted the sort of metaphorical religious language long employed for describing France's divinely ordained kings. To give just one example, the Encyclope? die article entitled "Philosophe" declared that "socie? te? civile is, so to speak, a divinity on earth. "72
This same sense of sacrality was invested with even greater strength in the concept of patrie. The Latin noun patria had strong religious connota- tions from the start, and after the fall of Rome, it survived mostly in reli- gious usage: the Christian's true patria lay in the Kingdom of Heaven. In the high Middle Ages, secular rulers began to adopt the word for their own purposes, but "the main contents of the veneration of patria were derived from a world of thought which was religious in a broad sense. " The secu- lar kingdom was imagined on the model of the corpus mysticum of the Church, headed by Jesus. 73 French writers continued to employ the analogy in the era of Henri IV, when both the politique Lord Chancellor De Thou and the ultra-Catholic Guillaume Des Autelz could call the patrie "a sec- ond divinity" or "a second deity. "74 As for the eighteenth century, descrip- tions of the patrie as a "God," "divinity," or something "sacred," and of pa- triotism as "a vast chain linked to Divinity" or a "sacred love," were utterly commonplace. 75 During the Revolution, the 1792 Petition of Agitators to the Legislative Assembly declared that "the image of the patrie is the sole divinity it is permissible to worship. "76
It was the Calvinist, Geneva-born Rousseau who, even while exploring the consequences of the world's "disenchantment," speculated most pro- foundly upon the continuing place of the sacred in the foundation of hu- man communities. (It is tempting to conclude that Calvinism, and the sense of distance between the heavenly and terrestrial cities it instilled, may
The National and the Sacred 39
? have helped Rousseau, and later Rabaut, to imagine secular counterparts to the bonds religion instills between believers. ) Thus in The Social Contract Rousseau insisted that a properly constituted polity requires not merely the consent and participation of the people, but a Lawgiver who invokes divine authority for his laws and a "civil religion" which inspires people to love their duties. 77 He returned to the theme even more powerfully in his 1772 Considerations on the Government of Poland, in a section which turned both Jewish and Roman histories on their heads. First, he took the historical sense of national purpose and unity that the Jews themselves at- tributed to their covenant with God, and removed it from the religious context entirely. Moses "formed and executed," he wrote,
the astonishing enterprise of shaping into a national Body a swarm of unhappy fugitives, bereft of arts, weapons, talents, virtues and courage, and who, not having a single square inch of land for their own, passed for a foreign band on all the face of the earth. Moses dared turn this wander- ing and servile band into a political Body, a free people; and while it wan- dered in the wilderness without even a stone to rest on, he gave it this durable form, resistant to time, fate and conquerors, which five thou- sand years have not been able to destroy or even alter, and which even today retains all its strength, although the national Body itself no longer exists. 78
As for Rome, Rousseau argued that its real founder was not Romulus, who had merely "assembled brigands," but his successor Numa, the codifier of Roman paganism. Numa made the Romans into an "indissoluble body by transforming them into Citizens, less by laws, which their rustic poverty hardly needed yet, than by gentle institutions which attached them to each other, and to their land, by making their city sacred to them through these apparently frivolous and superstitious rites. "79
These remarkable passages, which for perhaps the first time in history clearly articulated the idea of the nation as a political construction, illus- trate better than any other text the way that nationalism arose both out of and against a religious system of belief. In his treatment of the Jews Rous- seau jarringly rewrote sacred history as a secular story of nation-building, something only conceivable in an at least partially "disenchanted" world. He replaced a transcendent vision in which human existence derived its structure and purpose from external, supernatural forces with a political vision in which this structure and purpose arose out of humanity itself. In
40 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the Roman case he injected the sacred back into a story conventionally seen as secular, emphasizing the dependence of nation-building on reli- gion--but a civil religion that oriented citizens toward the terrestrial city, not a transcendent one that turned them away from it. Rousseau therefore showed that nationalism borrows from religious practices but also funda- mentally transforms them; it is not, so to speak, communion wine poured into a new bottle.
Boundaries and Time
The emergence of these new ways of discerning and ordering the world represents only the starting point for understanding the cultural and reli- gious framework of French nationalism. Foundational concepts like patrie, nation, and socie? te? had crucial roles to play in the great constitutional and intellectual movements and conflicts of eighteenth-century France, and were themselves significantly transformed in the process. The following chapters will explore these transformations and their consequences for the emergence of nationalism itself at the time of the Revolution. First, how- ever, it is important to sketch out some of the differences and contradic- tions that existed within the new semantic field throughout the eighteenth century.
The most important distinction is that between the concepts of patrie and civilisation. To be sure, neither had a fixed and uniform meaning. 80 Voltaire himself called patrie a variable and contradictory term. Yet Vol- taire was a self-professed enemy of patriotism ("the philosophe belongs to no country") who ridiculed Joan of Arc and called his own country a "land of monkeys and tigers. "81 He had every reason to deny any fixed, intrinsic meaning to patrie. Yet for most eighteenth-century French writers, even before Rousseau seized on the word and made it central to the great debate he provoked over human progress, patrie did have one very clear set of as- sociations: with the ancient Greek and Roman republics. French writers throughout the century may have argued bitterly over the place the patrie should hold in the modern world. Many expended vast mental effort and even more ink to prove love of patrie compatible with monarchy, and from the 1750s it is possible to talk of a concerted program of "royal patrio- tism. " Yet their almost pathetic eagerness on this score itself underlined the patrie's fundamental association with a different form of government. It was Montesquieu who expressed the traditional point of view when he
The National and the Sacred 41
? identified love of the patrie with republican virtue and stated that in mon- archies the state could exist without it. 82
Insofar as it retained this association with the classical republics, patrie had two particularly distinctive characteristics within the semantic field that emerged in the early eighteenth century. First, it denoted a community that was essentially closed. Citizens belonged to the patrie, literally the land of their fathers, by birth, and owed their exclusive allegiance to it. Those outside the magic circle were excluded, deserving indifference at best and perhaps suspicion or outright hostility. Secondly, the term implied a par- ticular vision of the passage of time: a patrie did not progress but declined. It possessed a pristine past but faced a perilous future, filled with the dan- gers of corruption, of decay, of the insidious poison of self-interest leech- ing away the precious fluid of republican virtue and leaving the commu- nity vulnerable to conquest and destruction. 83 If the future of the patrie held any promise at all, it lay in the possibility of a return to its original state (at least in this sense, the patrie was considered a political construc- tion from the very beginning).
The neologism civilisation, by contrast, had almost precisely the oppo- site characteristics, which is why Rousseau's opponents embraced it so readily. 84 Civilization was, by definition, open and inclusive, ready to wel- come any "civilized" person. It stretched across many different countries, but did not necessarily include everyone within those countries. Further- more, it implied a vision of historical progress in which mankind evolved (unequally, it is true) toward civilization from earlier stages, labeled "sav- age" or "barbarian. " If the future of the patrie held innumerable perils, the future of civilization held great promise, as expressed most memorably in Condorcet's vision of steady, rational historical progress. "We have seen human reason slowly shape itself," he wrote, "through the natural progress of civilization. "85 The radical republicanism which arose at the end of the old regime and enjoyed its apotheosis in 1793-94 expressed an adoration of the patrie and an abhorrence of civilisation.
The other new and redefined concepts did not fall so easily at one end or another of the axis defined by these two, but French writers deployed them in the same debates. Thus for Voltaire and d'Holbach, the term socie? te? im- plied something that, like civilisation, stretched across political boundaries and carried with it a sense of historical progress. Other writers, however, used socie? te? as a virtual synonym for patrie, complete with its resonances of decline. 86 Similarly, for Voltaire, especially in his great historical essays,
42 The Cult of the Nation in France
? moeurs developed slowly over the centuries, turning increasingly "gentle" and refined (at least in the proper conditions). For Rousseau, however, moeurs sprang fully developed from the hands of the all-powerful Legisla- tors who founded properly constituted states, and thereafter could rot and decay as easily as the most delicate blossom.
The concept of "nation" presents the most complicated case. Like patrie, it referred to an essentially closed community, one defined by common origins (even if the occasional foreigner might join it, thereby "naturaliz- ing"--literally changing his or her nature--in the process). 87 In the eigh- teenth century, however, the word lacked the resonances of intense belong- ing and fatality associated with patrie, not to mention the exaltation of place and ethnicity and "the mystique of the language, people and com- mon origin" characteristic of nineteenth-century nationalism. 88 Nor did nation have a particular association with classical republics (dictionary and encyclopedia articles on patrie almost always invoked Greece and Rome, articles on nation hardly ever did). 89 Yet if writers did not assume that na- tions necessarily fell into decay, nonetheless, as we will see in the next chap- ter, three important groups of French writers--parlementaire, physiocratic, and republican--agreed that the French nation in particular had fallen into decay, and urgently required "regeneration. "
It was the Marquis de Mirabeau, one of the strangest and least remem- bered of major eighteenth-century French thinkers, who best expressed the tension that ran between the concepts of patrie and civilisation. 90 Mirabeau's unconventional, ungainly prose earned him derision from the gatekeepers of French prose "clarity," but also allowed him unusual free- dom to experiment with language. He adored neologisms, and among the words to which he gave currency in his masterpiece, L'ami des hommes, were both "civilization" and "regeneration," that future centerpiece of re- publican patriotic rhetoric. 91 In fact, Mirabeau's entire, large, lumbering work can be read as an attempt to reconcile classical republicanism with the ideas of civilization and historical progress, particularly in the realm of political economy. Thus he devoted a long section to love of patrie and ex- alted it in republican language worthy of Rousseau (although he argued for the compatibility of patriotism and monarchy). Yet he also defended the progress of the arts and sciences. 92 Mirabeau ultimately attempted to bring decline and progress together by devising a cyclical interpretation of history, in which "regeneration" provided a bridge between one cycle of growth and decay and the next. 93 His work's great vogue in the 1750s and
The National and the Sacred 43
? 1760s indicates that readers found his attempts at conciliation intriguing, although ultimately less convincing than Rousseau's argument that patrio- tism brooked no compromise with other loyalties.
Overall, then, not only did the use of "nation" and "patrie" develop as part of a larger shift in the language that the French used to describe forms of human coexistence; it also occupied a distinctive place within this lan- guage, pointing to a more sharply bounded type of community and a more pessimistic view of the passage of time. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that this shift in language took place against a very significant backdrop. Whatever the continuing, overwhelming presence of classical antiquity in early modern Europe, which led a young Rousseau to gorge himself on Plutarch and a generation of Revolutionaries to read Polybius and Tacitus as user's manuals for democratic politics, France of course re- mained a deeply Catholic country. Formal education remained largely in the hands of the clergy, and the Church preserved the power to censor and condemn irreligious writings. Furthermore, whatever the changes within the religious sphere that took place in France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practices and opinions of the Church hardly be- came irrelevant but continued to exert an enormous influence on the man- ner in which discussions of the nation developed. The sense of sacrality in- vested in the concept of the patrie only enhanced the Church's influence, for the French approached this terrestrial object of adoration in what can only be called a deeply Catholic manner. The extent to which this was the case can be shown most easily in a brief comparison between Catholic France and Protestant England.
Catholics and Protestants, French and English
In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years' War, Robert-Martin Lesuire pub- lished a ferocious novel about the English with the expressive title of Les sauvages de l'Europe. It is the story of a nai? ve young couple who travel to England thinking it the land of advanced philosophy, only to receive a se- ries of rude shocks worthy of Candide at the hands of the frightful inhabit- ants, including first-hand experiences of English riots, highways, hangings, kidnappings, prisons, and insane asylums, not to mention the dreadful cuisine ("English fierceness comes from the still-bloody flesh they de- vour"). 94 What seemed to bother Lesuire most about these savages, how- ever, was their lack of respect for France. Wherever his heroes turn, they
44 The Cult of the Nation in France
? stumble upon the crudest xenophobia. Passers-by exclaim "Goddamn! " on hearing French spoken, while dramatists and theatrical audiences seem to do little other than mock things Gallic. The couple see a man executed for "having shown humanity to two Frenchmen," and indeed meet only one Englishman who "heard the word French pronounced without going into convulsions. "95
Such amazed horror at the Francophobia and excessive patriotism of the English was a leitmotif in French writing about that country in the eigh- teenth century. Few portraits of the English failed to mention their "ex- cessive principles of patriotic honor," "inveterate hatred of the French," "silly idea of their own excellence," and "puerile relentlessness in mocking our fashions," not to mention their alleged tendency to label all foreigners "French dog," regardless of nationality. "They hate us and will always hate us," the Parisian lawyer Edmond Barbier wrote in his diary. 96
It would be easy to write these opinions off as mere hypocrisy, as if the French had never stooped to vilify perfidious Albion in their turn. Yet they actually point to a significant difference between French and English vari- eties of patriotic and national sentiment. In fact, vilification of national enemies and assertions of France's superiority had very narrow applica- tions under the old regime--far narrower than in the Revolution or the nineteenth century. The French did not define themselves primarily by "othering" foreigners. Attempting any precise measurement of xenophobia of course makes little sense, given the state of the evidence: except in a very few cases, we do not know how widely any particular text circulated, let alone how readers responded to it. But several studies of French attitudes towards England have concluded that hostility and admiration balanced each other, indeed that the two existed in a sort of symbiotic relationship. 97 Nor did xenophobic writings necessarily reflect widespread opinions. The mass of Anglophobic works printed during the wars of 1756-1763 and 1778-1783 owed their existence to concerted propaganda campaigns on the part of France's foreign ministry. 98
Even overtly patriotic writing was usually quite compatible with the sort of cosmopolitan (indeed Anglophilic) literature most famously repre- sented by Voltaire's Philosophical Letters and Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. 99 Writers who exalted patriotism in one sentence frequently used the next to denounce "national hatreds and odious rivalries," "fatal preju- dices," "atrocious insults," and other examples of xenophobia that only an "overexcited populace" or "true fools" could believe. 100 The abbe? Mably in
The National and the Sacred 45
? the Entretiens sur Phocion, the Chevalier de Jaucourt in the article "Patrie" for the Encyclope? die, and Montesquieu in his Cahiers, all stressed that love of country and love of humanity were not mutually exclusive. 101 In fact, the great mass of overtly patriotic writing did not mention foreign countries at all but equated love of the patrie simply with concern for the common good. To quote a typical definition, written by Jean-Franc? ois Sobry in 1786, "he who loves his patrie takes pleasure in being a good father, good son, good husband, good master, good servant, good friend, good coun- selor, in a word, a good citizen. " Sobry called love of patrie the "first social principle. "102 Others called it "the continuous practice of political virtues," the "secret spring which maintains constant order in the State," and the "bond without which every Society decomposes," while claiming that it "shapes the heart" and filled a "void in the soul. "103
Even the works of literature that historians most often held up as ex- amples of eighteenth-century French nationalism and Anglophobia can prove, on close examination, surprisingly sympathetic toward foreigners. Pierre Buirette de Belloy's phenomenally popular Le sie`ge de Calais, a 1765 melodrama about the Hundred Years' War, contained favorable English characters, called the English "rivals more than enemies," and praised "the fraternal bond between all humans. "104 The play's villain, England's Edward III, himself acknowledged the error of his ways at the end of the play, as did the truculent protagonist of Charles-Simon Favart's successful 1765 com- edy, L'Anglois a` Bordeaux, usually described as an exemplary piece of An- glophobia. 105 Even Lesuire's Les sauvages de l'Europe included favorable English characters (not to mention an admirable Chinese sage), and it con- cluded that the savage islanders might yet redeem themselves. 106 Most sig- nificant of all, Anglophobic works in the eighteenth century almost never invoked the religious differences between the two countries, despite the hostility toward Protestantism that still permeated French society, particu- larly in the south. If pamphleteers of the sixteenth century had excoriated the English as heretics ruled by a modern Jezebel, their eighteenth-century successors resolutely refrained from such inflammatory tactics. 107
National and patriotic sentiment in England did have some similarities to the French variety, reflecting the countries' common classical heritage and their close intellectual ties. In England, too, a current of writing flour- ished that equated patriotism with love of the common good. Its single most important example, Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King, came close enough in spirit to its French counterparts to become something of a best-
46 The Cult of the Nation in France
? seller in French translation. 108 England boasted its own small tribe of self- proclaimed cosmopolitans, and they were just as susceptible as the rest of Western Europe to a French cultural influence then reaching its zenith. 109
Nonetheless, recent work has made clear that this cosmopolitanism and Francophilia paled before what Linda Colley calls "a vast superstructure of prejudice throughout eighteenth-century Britain" directed particularly at the French and at Catholics, with origins that can be traced back at least to the Reformation. 110 These studies confirm not only the (admittedly partial) complaints of the French themselves, but also the more even-handed judg- ments of third parties, as to the astonishing strength of xenophobia in eighteenth-century English culture (in the words of a Swiss writer, for example, "no people on earth hates another as much as the English hate the French"). 111 Printmakers from William Hogarth on down mocked the French as lecherous, cowardly, filthy, ruthless, and untrustworthy, in an iconographic tradition which had no French counterpart at all until the Revolution. Novelists, dramatists, and moralists railed against insidious, effeminate French influences, and organizations such as the Laudable As- sociation of Anti-Gallicans, founded in 1745, even urged consumers to boycott French goods. British victories in the field over France touched off spontaneous, nationwide celebrations. 112 A recent comparison of British and French colonial policies in North America, which shows that an ex- clusionary Britain set up much stricter boundaries than France did be- tween white settlers and Indians and made it far more difficult for Indians to integrate into colonial society, adds further substance to the picture. 113 Religious prejudice formed an integral element of the British national id- iom in a way that had no French equivalent. Almanacs, holidays like Guy Fawkes Day, and pious works like John Foxe's gruesome martyrology kept the memory of Catholic atrocities vivid. Preachers railed against "papists," and poets celebrated England as a second Israel, a chosen people. 114
This view of the outside world both spurred, and drew strength from, a virtual cultural revolution aimed at "rediscovering" a native English tradi- tion and cleansing it of impure foreign accretions. A mere thirty-year pe- riod, 1750-1780, saw the chartering of the Society of Antiquaries, the preparation of Johnson's Dictionary, the Biographia Britannica and the En- cyclopedia Britannica, the opening of the British Museum, and the publica- tion of the first histories of English painting, music, and poetry. The for- mation of an English literary canon took place in the same period, as did the rise of a nationalist historiography. Furthermore, this quest to uncover
The National and the Sacred 47
? a national essence proceeded under the aegis of what Gerald Newman calls "rampant racialism," based on the exaltation of the native "Teutonic" stock. 115 While France also experienced something of a "medievalist" re- vival in this period, it lacked both the institutional strength and the racial emphasis of its English equivalent. 116
These French and English examples show just how differently the con- cept of patrie could function in practice. 117 In France, an important current of writing tended to minimize the connotations of exclusivity and fatality that had been associated with the concept of patrie from antiquity, and to make it more compatible with the new concept of civilisation. Hence the lesser importance in French culture of fears of foreign corruption, and the writers' tendency to describe even the worst enemies as "savages" who might yet eventually improve themselves enough to join a civilized world community. Not all writers subscribed to these beliefs, and enormous de- bate took place among those who did. Still, the comparison with England is instructive. In England, the eighteenth century saw the logic of exclusiv- ity and fatality associated with the concept of "love of country" taken to an extreme. 118 The calls to recover native traditions and cleanse the country of foreign influence, and the strong emphasis on England's racial distinctive- ness, all bespoke an anxious desire to keep the national community as ex- clusive as possible. The ubiquitous warnings against corruption, associated with the adoption of foreign ways, echoed the classical lament that all poli- ties eventually fall prey to the weak flesh and spirit of their citizens. Again, these concepts did not prevail to the exclusion of all others, and remained subject to lively debate. Yet the contours of the debate in the two countries remained strikingly different.
Needless to say, no single factor can explain this contrast. Any really thorough explanation would have to consider everything from the heritage of Roman imperialism in England and France to the persistence of serious threats to internal security (far worse in Britain, which Bonnie Prince Charlie came so close to conquering in 1745). Still, the different religious backgrounds have particular importance. I would argue that despite the tendency of many eighteenth-century French writers to contrast patriotic and religious devotion, their efforts to minimize the classical connotations of patrie--to make patriotism compatible not merely with monarchy but with love of humanity and human progress--nonetheless reflected the Catholic commitment to a universal human community, and the Catholic belief in the freedom of all sinners to achieve salvation. Even if these writ-
48 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ers believed patriotism and the nation should inherit the role religious dogma had once held in maintaining terrestrial order, their vision of this order retained a strongly Catholic sensibility.
In Protestant England, by contrast, the choice between God and father- land presented itself much less starkly, and religious universalism had far less resonance. The Church was a state church headed by the English king, not a foreign pope. Furthermore, preachers in England, like those in New England, the Netherlands, South Africa, and many other Protestant com- munities, tended to identify the cause of their people with the cause of God, through the Old Testament metaphor of England or Britain as a "sec- ond Israel. "119 This metaphor needs to be read with care, for the preachers did not equate the population of England with God's elect (even Israel had its share of sinners), and the more Calvinistic among them in particular had a strong commitment to Protestantism as an international movement. Foxe's martyrs were not all English, and his book actually says little about England itself. 120 Yet Protestantism and the classical republican concept of patria nonetheless reinforced each other in powerful ways. Both the Protestant promise of a return to a primitive and pristine form of Chris- tianity and the ubiquitous Protestant image of an erring Israel succumbing to temptation paralleled the classical theme of the inevitable erosion of re- publican virtue. The Protestant (and particularly the Calvinist) sense of a terrible and impassable boundary between the elect and the damned paral- leled the classical republican theme of the radical difference between citi- zens and foreigners. This all made it easy for the Protestants to borrow from the language of classical patriotism in describing God's elect, and to borrow from the language of divine election in describing their fatherland. The consequence, from the sixteenth century onward, was the facilitation of a powerful, exclusionary, and xenophobic patriotic tradition that had no real parallel in France. 121 Montesquieu recognized something of this dynamic when he wrote "that the Catholic religion better suits a monarchy and that the Protestant religion is better adapted to a republic. "122
The influence of Catholicism in France was not so great as to flatten out all distinctions and to produce a single, uniform, static view of the nation. In reality, it left room for enormous disagreement and debate. While a line can certainly be traced from the philosophes and pamphleteers of the mid- century to Rabaut Saint-Etienne and his injunction to follow the example of the priesthood, it was an exceptionally tortuous one. In fact, as the next chapter will begin to explore, nothing divided the French so much as their membership in a common nation and patrie.
The National and the Sacred 49
? The comparison of Britain with France also shows that for all the differ- ences and debates, these developments can be shown to form part of a broad European movement. It was not just in France that, by the early eighteenth century, the concepts of "nation" and patrie acquired such a fundamental sense of authority that participants in the great political and cultural movements and conflicts of the day instinctively reached for them to support their points of view. The processes of "disenchantment" and material change sketched out above went far beyond France's borders, and so did the cult of nation and country. Dour French magistrates and radical British pamphleteers, Francophilic British ministers and Catholic French priests decrying blasphemy, propagandists in the service of Europe's for- eign ministries and philosophes of all nationalities, the virtuous and the scoundrels: all were patriots now, in the first and last resort.
All would soon be nationalists as well.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
The Politics of Patriotism
CHAPTER 2
The Politics of Patriotism and National Sentiment
L'e? tat et le monarque, a` nos yeux confondus N'ont jamais divise? nos voeux et nos tribus. De la` cet amour et cette ido^latrie
Qui dans le souverain adore la patrie.
[The state and the monarch, mixed together in our eyes, have never divided our wishes and our tribes.
Thence this love and this idolatry,
Which, in the sovereign, worships the patrie. ]
--pierre buirette de belloy, le sie`ge de calais (1765)
There is no patrie where there are courtiers and eaters of pensions, no patrie where there are Bastilles, no patrie where there are prelates and parlements.
--pierre-nicolas chantreau, dictionnaire national et anecdotique (1790)
? The ceremony that took place on November 15, 1715, in the Palace of Jus- tice in Paris, was anything but revolutionary. The noble magistrates of the highest court in the kingdom, the Parlement of Paris, marched in proces- sion, accompanied by solemn music and swathed in heavy robes whose bright scarlet symbolized the undying royal majesty of which they partook, into a courtroom chamber sparkling with gold fleur-de-lis. Here, seated so that each man's position in the ensemble spelled out his location within the greater hierarchy of the kingdom, the Society of Orders incarnate, they listened to a series of invocations and orations reminding them of their duties and preparing them for the coming term of dispensing the king's justice. Everything about the ceremony expressed veneration for tradition, for authority both divine and terrestrial, for order and hierarchy, and for the institutions of the French state.
50
The Politics of Patriotism 51
? Yet one of the orations delivered on this occasion, by Lord Chancellor Henri-Franc? ois d'Aguesseau, on the theme of "love of country" ("amour de la patrie"), appears with hindsight to have clashed mightily with the set- ting. D'Aguesseau spoke not of subjects and parlements but of "citizens" and "senates. " He obliquely criticized the newly-deceased Louis XIV and even praised the republican form of government. In republics, he declared, "every Citizen, from the earliest age, practically from birth, grows used to seeing the fate of the State as his own. This perfect equality, and this sort of civil fraternity, which makes all Citizens like a single family, interests them all equally in the fortunes and misfortunes of the Patrie. " In monarchical soil, by contrast, love of country was "like a strange plant. "1 Alphonse Aulard, late nineteenth-century official historian of the French Revolution, found d'Aguesseau's language to be "not just of 1789, but of a patriot of the Year II [i. e. the height of the Terror]. "2
In some ways, Aulard's enthusiasm got the better of him: D'Aguesseau was no forerunner of Robespierre. 3 Throughout his long career, the chan- cellor maintained a deep and abiding loyalty to France's absolute monar- chy, and acted firmly to squelch dissenting murmurs within the world of the law. 4 In the oration itself, the criticism of Louis XIV was muted and discreet. 5 As for the words "citizen" and "senate," and the admiration for the moral life of the ancient republics, these things were utterly common- place among early modern French judges and lawyers, who considered themselves latter-day colleagues of Demosthenes and Cicero--and not so unusual in the broader culture, either, drenched as it was in the Greek and Roman classics. The oration expressed a resolutely moralistic, but nonetheless thoroughly depoliticized republicanism: a call for men to act as if they were Roman citizens while living under a Christian absolute monarchy.
All the same, d'Aguesseau's oration did represent something new in French political life. Unlike earlier authors, who had simply invoked the patrie in a sentence or two, he turned it into a subject of systematic re- flection. Furthermore, he presented it both as a fundamental category of political life and as an object of allegiance and affection distinct from the king. 6 The patrie, for d'Aguesseau, was the body of "citizens" who ideally enjoyed "perfect equality" and "civil fraternity. "7 Love of the patrie meant love of the common good, not love of the monarch, and the strength of that love constituted the ultimate measure of a political community's worth. "What a strange spectacle for the zeal of the public man," d'Agues-
52 The Cult of the Nation in France
? seau mused, in an obvious, pointed criticism of France in 1715. "A great kingdom, but no patrie; a numerous people, but hardly any more citi- zens. "8 Such language had some precedents in Renaissance Italy and seven- teenth-century England, where classical republican ideas had flourished, but not in monarchical France. 9
The fact that a prominent French political figure departed from tradi- tion in this manner in 1715 is significant. By this date, the processes of "disenchantment" and material change discussed above had gone far. On the one hand, the sense that God had withdrawn from the world, leaving it to function according to its own knowable laws, and on the other, the growing cohesion of the French state, coupled with dramatic advance- ments in forms of communication and association, were leading the French to develop a new conceptual framework with which to discern and maintain terrestrial order. More immediately, the death of Louis XIV ear- lier in the year, after a reign of more than seven decades, had produced a startling sense of disorientation. Precisely because of the strengthening of the state in previous decades, the yawning chaos and violence that had characterized every other royal succession since 1560 did not take place. But the brief regency of Duke Philippe d'Orle? ans (1715-1722) during Louis XV's childhood quickly turned into a period of unprecedented ex- perimentation in peaceful, contestatory public politics. Within three years, the duke had briefly put much of France's formidable government ma- chinery under the control of the high aristocracy, restored the parlements to their traditional, obstructionist political role (Louis XIV had succeeded in muzzling them), and presided over drastic reforms in the state finances. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie justly calls the regency "a quite stunning politi- cal phase. "10 In short, conditions were ripe for the French to experiment with new visions of the polity in which the figures of the patrie and the na- tion occupied central positions, inspiring forms of adoration akin to reli- gious devotion.
D'Aguesseau himself, not coincidentally, stood in the forefront of all these changes: religious, material, and political. His religious sympathies lay with Jansenism, which had gone to unprecedented lengths in its stress on the radical separation of God from a corrupt, concupiscent humanity, and whose adherents had undergone severe persecution as a result. 11 In this sense d'Aguesseau was close to the more openly Jansenist Jean Soanen, one of the few other figures of the period to take the patrie as his central theme. Meanwhile, as the son of an intendant (the chief official of a prov-
The Politics of Patriotism 53
? ince) and a high servant of the monarchy himself, d'Aguesseau had partici- pated in the construction of a more powerful, cohesive state, and was also keenly aware of the power of printed words and the power of the public which read them. 12 He would later write in a private note, provoked by the publication and wide distribution of an inflammatory legal brief: "The king does not rule over the opinions of men: he judges individuals, and the public judges him . . . There is no power whose principal instrument is not some sort of persuasion. "13 Finally, d'Aguesseau belonged to the milieu of the parlements, which traditionally considered themselves an indispens- able restraint on royal authority. In his 1715 oration, he defined the parlementaire magistrate as nothing less than the "voice of the patrie," and "akin to the depository of public interests. " Referring obliquely to the re- gent's restoration of the parlements' full "right of remonstrance" (the de- vice which allowed them to obstruct, although not to veto, royal legisla- tion) he said it had created "something akin to a new patrie, which seems to bear on its forehead the certain foreshadowing of public happiness. "14
For these reasons, d'Aguesseau's oration signaled the beginning of a new era in French political culture and cultural politics: an era of increasingly open, public debate, taking place in a relatively stable, peaceful, and cohe- sive national framework, aided by a rapidly expanding market for the printed word, in which the basic organizing concepts were the "founda- tional" ones discussed above. That is to say, the French increasingly defined themselves not as Catholics, or subjects, but as members of a socie? te? , public, nation, or patrie (and soon, civilisation)--forms of association that were not structured from without, by God or a king, but arose from supposedly natural human qualities such as "sociability" or "patriotism. " Moreover, nation and patrie in particular came to be seen as holding unquestioned sway over people's emotions and even their lives, in return giving even the humblest of the French the dignity and pride of calling themselves citizens. Fervent royalists partook of these changes equally with opponents of the crown, and indeed, the period saw the emergence of a powerful program of what could be called "royal patriotism. " Over the course of the seventy- four years that separated d'Aguesseau's oration from the start of the Revo- lution, the concepts of nation and patrie came to occupy a central position in French political culture.
This centrality is obvious to anyone who has ever taken even a small taste of the great, bubbling stew of political writing the French produced at the end of the 1780s. Yet the manner in which the concepts became cen-
54 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tral remains obscure. Several historians have examined uses of the words themselves during the eighteenth century, but few have given serious con- sideration to the larger contexts which shaped the evolution of meanings. 15 Edmond Dziembowski's recent study of French patriotism between 1750 and 1770 makes for a noteworthy exception. Yet it attributes the rise of a new patriotic language in France almost entirely to the single factor of Franco-British rivalry, and mostly disregards the effects of two other, si- multaneous, and equally weighty internal developments: an extended con- stitutional crisis, and the rise of new sensibilities associated with the En- lightenment. 16 This chapter will consider the politics, while the next two will reexamine the issues of warfare and cultural change.
The Old Regime Style of Politics
Politics in the old regime differed so radically from what we understand by the word today that it almost makes sense to use a different word to de- scribe it. Men and women competed, as always, for power, position, status, and jurisdiction, and argued incessantly over these things, but they gener- ally did so under the pretense of wishing only to restore or maintain a state of affairs that dated from time immemorial, in a complex and delicate hi- erarchy presided over by God's anointed king. They also did so in the knowledge that at any time, in the name of that same king, they might find themselves summarily stripped of power, position, status, jurisdiction, and indeed all freedom. France was not a totalitarian state, and a great deal of what might be called semi-free debate did take place, particularly among persons who enjoyed one form or another of institutional protection. But neither was the Bastille a myth, and the threat it represented made France a place where the most radical and destabilizing arguments tended to come cloaked in thick layers of flattery and deceptive orthodoxy.
The details of eighteenth-century political conflict do not need retelling here. The parlements, which presented themselves as the repositories and defenders of traditional liberties, engaged in almost continuous squab- bling with the crown over issues which ranged from religion to taxation to judicial reform to the structure of the state itself. The story mostly took the form of a hugely complex and exquisitely choreographed ballet of "respectful remonstrance" and considered response that could go on for months or years before breaking down into well-calculated acts of defiance and authority: judicial strikes on the one side, and on the other, forcible
The Politics of Patriotism 55
? "registration" of laws, the exiling of the recalcitrant magistrates, and short- lived attempts to restructure the court system. Alongside the official state- ments, each camp and its supporters generated a steady flow of illegal and intemperate pamphlets and periodicals. 17 Meanwhile, from the 1750s onwards, other, less well-defined currents of opposition arose that were broadly associated with the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Finding their principal forms of expression in periodicals, pamphlets, and legal briefs filed by sympathetic lawyers and then printed and sold to the general public, these critics tended to mobilize above all on issues of perceived misconduct of justice, such as the Calas Affair (the case of a Protestant exe- cuted on trumped-up charges in 1762, which Voltaire transformed into a cause ce? le`bre). 18 Throughout the century, the number of books, pamphlets, and newspapers engaged in and reporting on all these issues expanded ver- tiginously, as did the number of places, from coffee houses to literary soci- eties to lending libraries, where people could gather to discuss them. 19
Despite the outpouring of so much ink, it is easy to downplay the sig- nificance of the debates. In the case of the parlements, nearly every crisis was also accompanied by long negotiation and an intense search for hon- orable compromise (marked by wrangling over the wording and even the punctuation of official statements). In nearly every case both sides eventu- ally found it best to return to something approaching the status quo ante, and as a result, in 1789, the parlements still occupied much the same insti- tutional and legal position they had done in 1715. 20 As for the philosophes, until the collapse of the French state in the 1780s, the impact of their writ- ings on political issues other than judicial reform and religious toleration remained distinctly limited. Rousseau's Social Contract, by nearly every ac- count the most "revolutionary" work of the Enlightenment, had relatively little success for years after its publication in 1762. 21
Yet the appearance of continuity is, in the end, deceptive. At three deci- sive moments the nature of political debate changed and intensified, with massive consequences for the future of French patriotic and national senti- ment. The first moment was the regency of Philippe d'Orle? ans (1715- 1722). Then, between 1748 and 1756, a parlementaire crisis that began with quarrels over taxation and Jansenism soon came to include the question of the courts' right to impede royal legislation, and culminated in a year-long exile for the Parlement of Paris. As these tensions escalated, the high courts and their supporters not only made bolder claims than ever before, but self-consciously chose to put their arguments before the "tribunal of pub-
56 The Cult of the Nation in France
? lic opinion. " To this end they produced an unprecedentedly large volume of pamphlets, newspapers, legal briefs, and broadsides, which they counted on to reach readers both directly, and in coffeehouses, reading societies, and other new arteries for the circulation of printed matter. Crucially, in response to this offensive, the crown decided it had to compete in kind. Royal ministers had always sponsored their own pamphlet literature, but in the 1750s they systematized their previously erratic operations by en- gaging Jacob-Nicolas Moreau to serve, in effect, as their chief propagandist in matters both foreign and domestic. Moreau, an ambitious Parisian law- yer with a knack for ingratiating himself with the powerful, insisted that every parlementaire declaration meet with a royal response. "If bad citizens speak so loudly, it is because good citizens don't speak enough," he wrote in a newspaper he founded precisely to respond to critics of the govern- ment. 22 In changing tack in this manner, the crown went a long way toward legitimizing political debate itself. 23 It also attempted to appropriate the concept of the patrie for its own benefit, in a concerted campaign of royal patriotism.
Third, in 1771, King Louis XV and his Lord Chancellor Maupeou, at the end of a particularly convoluted and drawn-out battle with the parlements, abruptly ended the long-running dance of remonstrance and reply with a brutal show of force. They arrested and exiled the magistrates, stripped them of their offices, and replaced them with the crown's own, pliant nom- inees. In doing what even the authoritarian Louis XIV had never done, they provoked the greatest institutional crisis in France since the Fronde of the mid-seventeenth century, and prompted the formation of a broad- based opposition movement which included devotees of the philosophes as well as supporters of the parlements. This movement called itself, sig- nificantly, the parti patriote. During the crisis, the amount of printed mat- ter again rose sharply and its polemical content grew notably sharper. 24
At each of these moments, the uses of patrie and nation shifted notice- ably. Before 1750, a few authors did seize on them as central concepts, but they still had a limited place in overall political debate. Opponents of the theoretically absolute monarchy mostly still restricted themselves to vener- able strategies of French opposition and rebellion: invoking the king's duty to God, or his need to respect the laws laid down by his predecessors, or his subordination to certain "fundamental laws" of the kingdom. Between 1750 and 1771, the concepts gained a much larger place in debate, along with public and opinion publique (societe? , civilisation, and peuple remained
The Politics of Patriotism 57
? more tangential, although in the last case only until 1789). 25 Yet even oppo- nents of the crown did not invoke them to propose drastic changes in the form of French government. Only after 1771, when large numbers of the French started to take seriously the possibility of such a change, did the po- litical debate generate the ideological elements out of which the French revolutionaries could create new and stunningly powerful national and patriotic doctrines. Only then did the construction of the nation, and the defense of a patrie distinct from the king, come to appear at once the most pressing and the most sacred of political tasks.
Law and the Uses of the Nation (1715-1771)
Start with the concept of nation. Even as Louis XIV lay dying, the reaction- ary nobleman Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers, was putting the final touches on his unwieldy compilation L'e? tat de la France, which included a provocative essay on the "state of the French nation" at its earliest mo- ments, after the Germanic tribe of the Franks took over the crumbling Ro- man Empire's province of Gaul. 26 Boulainvilliers, like d'Aguesseau, both analyzed and stood at the forefront of the religious, material, and political changes discussed in the previous chapter. 27 He was no conventional Cath- olic but a free-thinking skeptic, who wrote extensively and sympathetically on Spinoza in works which circulated in manuscript because they never would have passed the French censor. He participated in the administrative survey of France sponsored by his patron the Duke of Burgundy, and in- deed intended the Etat as a summary of this enterprise. He was also one of the sharpest critics of Louis XIV's monarchy, going far beyond the modest aristocratic reform aspirations of other members of the Burgundy circle. In the Etat, he claimed with more passion than historical accuracy that the Franks had come to decisions collectively and chosen their first kings by election. The French nobility of the eighteenth century, he further postu- lated, could trace its direct descent to this original Frankish nation, and so by right retained all its original privileges. A biographer has commented that "one finds Boulainvilliers constituting as his object of study a French 'nation' independent of the crown, indeed, 'antagonistic' to the crown. "28 And just as d'Aguesseau identified the patrie with the noble parlements, Boulainvilliers identified the nation with another particular group: the no- bility as a whole.
Boulainvilliers's importance to the pre-history of French nationalism
58 The Cult of the Nation in France
? should not be exaggerated. As already pointed out, he belonged to a long- standing tradition of French constitutionalism, and did not treat the na- tion as a political construction. Yet his arguments, which he continued to develop in the years before his death in 1722, still have significance. Simply by using the word nation, rather than asserting the rights of an ancient corporate institution like the Estates General (France's principal repre- sentative body, which did not meet between 1615 and 1789), he gave it po- litical salience it had previously lacked. He also associated traditional con- stitutionalist claims with it, even as he was revivifying these claims. He therefore touched off decades of clotted but passionate controversies over the French nation's nature and history, in which half-forgotten (and some- times mythical) figures like Clothaire, Childebert, and Pharamond loomed up out of the Dark Ages and for a time seemed to have as much impor- tance in French political discussion as recent kings and ministers. Anti- quarians searched through dusty archives for lost capitularies with the in- tensity of knights chasing the grail, in the hope of finding the missing links of a chain connecting the Frankish assemblies with contemporary institu- tions. The philosophes Mably and Montesquieu were only the most promi- nent writers to contribute to the controversies. And from all these discus- sions a sort of political competition arose. Who had originally constituted the nation? Who were their modern descendants? Who had the right to speak for them? 29
The questions were inflammatory, but before 1770 the answers re- mained largely framed within traditional constitutionalist terms. Even the most radical critics of the monarchy proceeded by arguing that the nation was endowed with certain particular "rights" from its earliest existence, and that just like other particular, positive "rights" and "privileges" (the two terms were practically synonymous under the old regime), these passed from one generation to the next like forms of property. Hence in the eighteenth century the nation still possessed the same rights it had first acquired at its foundation in the fifth, allowing it by law to check or even overrule the actions of the monarchy. Historical and legal research was of course required to prove the point, with the result that most political dis- cussions of the nation from this period took the form of legal history. 30 From Boulainvilliers this sort of critical legalism passed into the writings of the more extreme Jansenist constitutionalists, who as early as 1730 were calling the parlements "the Senate of the nation" and labeling the king somewhat dismissively as "the nation's chief. "31 Spurred by the crisis of the
The Politics of Patriotism 59
? 1750s, members of the parlements themselves, guided by the Parisian law- yer Adrien-Louis Le Paige, began to insert claims about "the right of the nation," "the rights and privileges of the nation," "the rights, liberties and franchises of the nation," and even "the sacred right of the nation" into their published remonstrances. The texts circulated widely, and indepen- dent newspapers like the Gazette de Leyde reprinted the most important ones along with the king's responses. 32 Le Paige further buttressed the claims in massively erudite, clandestinely published, best-selling works of legal history. 33
In response, supporters of the monarchy did not deny the existence of a French "nation," but they insisted that it could only express itself through the person of the monarch. Bossuet had already made the point in his late- seventeenth-century defense of absolute royal authority: "Thus the sover- eign magistrate has in his hands all the strength of the nation, which sub- mits to, and obeys him. "34 Boulainvilliers's critic, the abbe? Dubos, added the historical argument that it was the monarchy which had founded the nation, rather than the reverse. 35 Eighteenth-century royalists did little more than repeat these points and scold the parlements for disputing their self-evident truth. Thus Lord Chancellor Lamoignon, in a 1759 reply to re- monstrances of the Parlement of Paris: "The right of the Nation is spoken of, as if was distinct from the laws, of which the King is the source and the principle. "36 Thus the angry words of the king himself to the Parlement of Paris in 1766, in what became known as the "session of the flagellation": "the rights and interests of the nation, which some dare to regard as a sepa- rate body from the monarch, are necessarily united with my rights and in- terests, and repose only in my hands. "37 Toward the end of the old regime, apologists for the crown echoed Louis's words in virtually everything they wrote. 38
These debates succeeded, by the 1760s, in making the concept of the na- tion central to French political culture. Yet simple assertions about the na- tion's rights left open the key questions of how those rights could be ex- pressed and represented. The monarchists--including Louis XV during the "flagellation" session--painted their opponents in broad strokes as dangerous "republicans" who not only put the nation above the king, but would give the nation free choice to decide the form of its government. But in the 1750s and 1760s, this amounted to a scare tactic. For Le Paige and the parlementaires, the rights of the nation remained positive rights, de- fined by French law, and they belonged not to the nation as a whole, what-
60 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ever form it might take, but to the institutional descendants of the ancient assemblies. Le Paige did not grant "the nation" any clear right of resistance against the king, and to him its "rights" did not signify anything terribly different from the traditional "fundamental laws" of the kingdom. Fur- thermore, while the parlements claimed powers of "representation," they did not thereby mean that the nation had freely chosen them to act in its place. As Keith Baker and Paul Friedland have pointed out, this quintes- sentially modern concept of representation only triumphed with the Revo- lution. In most pre-revolutionary works, "representation" meant some- thing quite different and much closer to what we would call incarnation. For Le Paige, the parlements did not simply speak for the nation; they ac- tually were the nation. They embodied it, in a quasi-miraculous manner that bore a resemblance to transubstantiation. 39 The nation could only take shape in them. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, had similarly writ- ten that in the early Middle Ages "one often assembled the nation, that is, the lords and bishops. "40 When the king replied to the parlements in 1766, he claimed that he himself was the nation, again in the sense of incarnating or embodying it, as opposed to being its chosen deputy.
Morality and the Uses of the Patrie (1715-1771)
Arguments about the patrie proceeded in a very different manner. Unlike the nation, the patrie was not thought to possess an active will. It also lacked the specific "rights" and the detailed history which the nation had in such abundance (although the history of "patriotic actions" could be cata- logued ad infinitum). While the nation was seen as a fact of nature, the patrie was presented as endlessly fragile, subject to deterioration, corrup- tion, and destruction, and therefore in need of stout guardians--all in keeping with the classical tradition discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, the noun patrie was rarely followed by an active verb, unless it was something on the order of "lose," "receive," or "suffer. " All in all, the patrie was consid- ered less a physical space than a state of mind: the product of amour de la patrie, or patriotisme, that quasi-sacred, pre-political impulse that allowed humans to avoid killing each other and to act for the common good. Talking about the patrie was a way of making moral judgments about the attitudes of the French toward the common good and the way that politi- cal actions affected these attitudes. 41 A few authors dared to present the patrie as something separate from the king, and a very few--notably the
The Politics of Patriotism 61
? Chevalier de Jaucourt in the Encyclope? die's article "Patrie"--even placed it above him. "[The patrie] is a power superior to all the powers it establishes within it: archons, sufetes, ephors, consuls or kings" (the flannel of classical erudition carefully muffled the sentence's true radicalism). 42 Yet the inabil- ity of the patrie to express itself in any specific, constitutional manner or to claim specific "rights" limited the utility and the popularity of this argument. 43
Between 1715 and 1750, despite the precedent of d'Aguesseau's oration, the patrie still appeared infrequently in the remonstrances and polemical literature generated by the quarrels between the crown and the parlements. A few orations and treatises on the theme of "amour de la patrie" did appear, but they tended to present it solely as a general civic ethic and avoided even the muted political comment that d'Aguesseau had permit- ted himself. 44 As the examples of Soanen and d'Aguesseau would suggest, it was mostly Jansenists who invoked the patrie as a source of political au- thority. Seized with a burning sense of God's withdrawal from the world, doubting the Church's claim to temporal powers, and harshly persecuted by both Church and state, they employed language which would not ap- pear in mainstream political debate for decades. Thus, for example, the Jansenist lawyer Louis Chevalier, in a printed and widely distributed legal argument from 1716 that defended the state's right to overrule decisions of clerical courts: "Is there a French heart which would dare argue the con- trary? We defy him to appear. He would have to renounce the patrie, relin- quish the inner sentiments which arise in the soul at birth, tear out his French heart and degenerate wholly from his ancestors. "45 Jansenist pam- phlets praised allies of their desperate cause as "voices of the patrie. "46
After 1750, with the intensification of political conflict and the crown's implicit legitimization of debate, the situation changed. While the patrie continued to feature prominently in many contexts far removed from po- litical dispute (and could refer to regions or towns, as well as to all of France), polemical writers now attempted to appropriate both it and "pa- triotism" for political uses. Loud clashes took place over the terms, particu- larly in regard to the fraught relationship between the patrie and the king.