The speech was
reprinted
as Jean-Paul Rabaut, Projet d'e?
Cult of the Nation in France
coles normales were trained to see themselves not merely as instruc- tors, but as the "black hussars of the Republic" sent out to convert the young and to form them into good republican French citizens.
Further- more, French republican nationalism was genuinely universalistic, for what gave it its purpose was, in addition to building the nation, expanding it indefinitely so as to embrace as large a portion of humanity as possible.
The first large effort to fulfill this mission, under the First Republic and then under the Napoleonic Empire (which inherited some, though hardly all, of the Republic's ideas and principles), was a brief blazing triumph that quickly collapsed into an abject failure. This effort was, of course, a mili- tary one, which expanded the frontiers of France across Europe, in the pro- cess integrating areas without a shred of French tradition seamlessly into the system of French de? partements. By 1812, in theory, Schleswig-Holstein and the Adriatic coast of Croatia belonged to France every bit as much as the Arde`che or the Morbihan. The effort was a failure in part because the French soldiers and administrators proceeded with brazen hypocrisy, de- claring their new subjects the equals of French citizens while ruthlessly ex- ploiting them for the war effort. The hypocrisy was not all-pervasive; in the last years of the Empire, more than a third of Napoleon's (admittedly pow- erless) Senate came from territories well outside France's 1789 bound- aries. 23 Nonetheless, the French attitudes spurred widespread resentment and rebellion, which in turn led to the birth of new nationalist move- ments throughout Europe, all of which tended to define themselves against France and the French.
Yet after the defeat of the Empire, and particularly from 1870 to 1940, efforts to fulfill the early republican national mission met with consider-
208 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ably more success, despite France's reduced military capacities and inter- national prestige. These efforts aimed at three separate and very different population groups: French peasants, inhabitants of France's colonial terri- tories, and foreign immigrants. In each case, the republican state set itself a "civilizing mission" whereby assimilation into civilization meant--as had often been the case in the eighteenth century--assimilation into the patrie.
Peasants, of course, were the original targets of the First Republic's ef- forts at national integration, from its grandiose plans for public education and the deployment of newspapers like La Feuille villageoise, to the "public sessions" of the Jacobin clubs and the language policies discussed in the last chapter. These peasants were the French citizens routinely described by their educated, urban compatriots in the nineteenth century as belonging to an alien, animalistic world. Adolphe Blanqui in 1851 could speak of "two different peoples living on the same land a life so different that they seem foreign to each other. "24 True, after the Terror, and particularly after Napoleon's rise to power, the campaign to make Frenchmen out of these country-dwellers fell into abeyance. Universal primary education, the most important means of conversion for the Jacobins, remained a distant dream until well into the nineteenth century. 25 After 1830, however, the July Mon- archy began to set up a nationwide system of public schools. The Second Republic of 1848 revived the ideals of the First, and in the 1860s Louis-Na- poleon's Ministry of Education began to formulate the problem of peasant integration in a systematic manner, notably carrying out the first truly large-scale survey of the spoken languages of France. In 1867, the reform- ing minister Victor Duruy again put forward an ambitious plan for univer- sal elementary schooling. 26
The Third Republic, which arose out of the disasters of the Franco-Prus- sian War and the Commune, built on these foundations with such energy and zeal that its black-clad schoolmasters became its most famous and vis- ible servants. The high temple of French education, the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure, in theory a school for training lyce? e teachers, served as the nursery for France's leading politicians and intellectuals and had no equiv- alent in most other European countries. Eminent educators proclaimed that apprentice teachers "must above be told that their first duty is to make [their charges] love and understand the patrie"; the school is "an instru- ment of unity" and an "answer to dangerous centrifugal tendencies. "27 School texts like Ernest Lavisse's enormously successful French history primer, and Bruno's Tour de France par deux enfants took up the task once
Conclusion 209
? shouldered by La Feuille villageoise, educating the rural population not only in the language, history, and constitution of France, but in patriotic duty. 28 While usually not committed to the eradication of local languages, teachers in patois-speaking regions nonetheless saw the teaching of stan- dard French as their main mission. Patois had, at best, a minor, auxiliary role in the classroom. 29
Even as republican efforts to civilize the peasantry reached their peak to- wards the end of the nineteenth century, the Third Republic reached out to embrace a far larger field in which to sow its language, ideals, symbols, and ultimately, perhaps, its nationality: the colonial empire, which by 1900 in- cluded vast areas of north and west Africa. 30 Just as seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century Catholic missionaries had employed much the same meth- ods of conversion in France as in the Americas or Asia--and indeed had drawn explicit parallels between the different fields of operation--so the republicans of the age of imperialism easily translated their approach to- wards the peasants into an approach towards their colonial subjects. 31 In the service of an explicit civilizing mission, not only did they expose these subjects to the usual panoply of "integrationist" policies, above all school- ing and linguistic instruction; they went further than any other European colonial power in breaking down the distinction between the colonies and the metropole. Certain areas of the empire became legally part of France, theoretically indistinguishable in this regard from Paris or Marseilles. Fur- thermore, legislation opened the door for at least an elite of colonial sub- jects to become full French citizens. School texts like Louis Sonolet's Moussa et Gi-gla: Histoire de deux petits noirs, modeled on Bruno's Tour de France, taught that French and blacks belonged to the same patrie. 32
The extent to which the empire offered its colonial subjects true equal membership in the French nation was, of course, strictly limited. The en- terprise proceeded with a predictably large share of racism, hypocrisy, hesi- tation, and doubt--particularly after World War I, and particularly where Muslims were concerned. 33 Yet the "civilizing mission" was not simply a mask for exploitation. And regardless of the realities on the ground, it mat- tered deeply to republican nationalists in France that the nation was ex- panding in this way, and that it might someday welcome millions of fully civilized Africans and Asians into the great circle of the patrie.
The final, and most contested field of expansion and integration was im- migration. Unlike the missions to civilize the peasantry and the colonies, the assimilation of immigrants was not an enterprise that the republic glo-
210 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ried in. France has repeatedly opened its doors to large numbers of immi- grants: Belgians and Italians in the nineteenth century, Poles in the early twentieth, and more recently Spanish, Portuguese, North Africans, black Africans, and Southeast Asians. But it has almost always done so initially as a temporary measure, to provide badly needed labor. Citizenship came later, after the communities had already established themselves. Nor was immigration ever anything less than controversial. The Belgians and Ital- ians met as much hostility and prejudice in their time as Algerians and black Africans have done in contemporary France, and sometimes more. In part as a result, the French government and the French academy for many years practically ignored the long history of immigration into France. No less a prestigious scholar than Pierre Nora could write, as re- cently as 1986, that immigration was "a novelty of the country's present- day situation. "34
Unremarked as it may have been, the immigration did take place. In- deed, after the United States drastically curtailed immigration in the wake of World War I, France became the leading immigrant nation in the West- ern world, with policies far more welcoming than those of any other Euro- pean country. 35 It is a powerful but relatively little-known fact that today nearly a quarter of all French citizens have at least one grandparent born elsewhere. 36 Furthermore, in large part thanks to the same republican insti- tutions that strove to civilize the peasants and the colonies--above all, the schools--the immigrants did indeed assimilate, and to a greater extent than their American counterparts. As has sometimes been remarked, there is no such thing as a "hyphenated French person," in contrast to the mil- lions of hyphenated Americans taking pride in an (often mostly invented) ethnic identity, and expressing a residual if largely nostalgic loyalty to an ancestral homeland. The phrase "Italian-American" suggests an individual; the phrase "Italian-French," a treaty. Few French people know that one of their most celebrated film stars of the twentieth century, Yves Montand, was born Ivo Livi, or that the nineteenth-century novelist Emile Zola also came from an Italian background. When President Franc? ois Mitterrand named a son of Ukrainian immigrants, Pierre Be? re? govoy, as his prime minister, his background generated far less interest and comment than it would have done in the United States.
In all these ways, then, the French republican nationalism born in the eighteenth century remained powerful and active through the middle of the twentieth, shaping the policies of the French state both at home and abroad and providing to its elites, educated in large proportion at the Ecole
Conclusion 211
? Normale Supe? rieure, a unique sense of mission. In this somber building on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, within sight of the Pantheon, so reminiscent of a monastery in its architecture, with its cloister and cells and high, echoing corridors, the Republic trained its own secular Jesuits to go forth and forge, not the church, but the nation.
Today, the Ecole Normale still stands on the rue d'Ulm, and some of the smartest and best-prepared of France's university-age students still pass through its doors each year, under an inscription beginning "By Decree of the Convention, 9 Brumaire, Year III. " But it is diminished. The most am- bitious and successful students have largely abandoned it for the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, which trains high civil servants and virtually the whole top layer of what the French call the "political class" (including the present president, prime minister, and a majority of the Cabinet). While some of its pupils still take the republican mission seriously and teach in the countryside (or, more often, the suburban slums), most are simply academics using it as a stepping stone to eventual professorships. The scientists who make up half the student body compete strenuously for postdoctoral fellowships abroad, above all in the United States. And they publish almost exclusively in English.
As such the Ecole Normale can stand as a symbol, among many such symbols, for what is often today called a "crisis of French national identity. " This crisis has been endlessly discussed, both in France and abroad, over the past twenty years. 37 It is significant that perhaps the single most impor- tant work of scholarship published in the Mitterrand years, the massive collection Les lieux de me? moire, edited by Pierre Nora (himself a descen- dant of North African Jews), began with the assumption that long-stand- ing French forms of self-identification were disappearing, and that the re- publican tradition in particular was unraveling. Indeed, despite Nora's presentation of the work as a dispassionate analysis of the workings of na- tional memory, much of it adopted a frankly elegiac, rueful tone, particu- larly when discussing the great institutions of the French state and French culture. 38 Meanwhile, the great livre de scandale of 1993 was a book gloom- ily entitled Voyage au centre du malaise franc? ais ("Voyage to the Center of the French Malaise"), which discerned a virtual disintegration of French national identity, thanks to multiculturalism and the flood of revelations about French conduct towards the Jews under Vichy (the author found them pathological, whence the scandal). 39
The usual suspect in these discussions of the crisis is France's dimin-
212 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ished position in an increasingly interconnected, Americanized world. The fingers point to France's decline as a military and diplomatic power, the in- creasing integration of the European Union (as of this writing, the French currency has recently given way to the euro and the dictates of the Euro- pean central bank, and plans are afoot for a pan-European military force), and of course the invasion of France by everything from McDonald's and Pizza Hut to American pop music, movies, The Gap, Starbucks, and the Internet (the long-suffering French language must now accommodate phrases like "le netsurfing des sites cools du web"). In the spring of 2000, a farmer who vandalized a new McDonald's in the Languedoc town of Millau, Jose? Bove? , became something of a French folk hero. Prime Minister Jospin's recent statement on French identity, quoted at the start of this chapter, was made above all in reference to Europeanization and the euro. Commentators were not slow to notice its defensive tone. Immigration also comes up frequently, of course, and is generally discussed in blissful ignorance of the subject's long and complex history.
All these factors indeed have enormous relevance for the way the French now view their nation. What is much less well understood is why these fac- tors, common to all nations, seem to have had such a particularly strong negative effect in France. There has been less talk of crises of Dutch, Irish, or Italian national identity, although the developments that go by the name of globalization have arguably had a stronger impact in any of these coun- tries than in France. Of course, as Michelet liked to quip, the world thinks; France speaks. But I would argue that the sharpness with which the French have experienced these global changes should in fact be attributed to par- ticular changes that the nation underwent before most of the trends associ- ated with globalization made much of an impact on France. It was in the period of strong economic growth between World War II and the early 1970s, often called the "Glorious Thirty [years]," that the sense of mission attached for so long to French republican nationalism, along with the drive to assimilate new populations and to put France at the center of a universal civilization, virtually evaporated. The areas in which these changes took place are, again, the peasantry, the empire, and immigration. The changes were reinforced by significant transformations in the French educational system and in the sphere of religion.
Few French schoolmasters today can take on the role of republican mis- sionaries sent out into the depths of the countryside to civilize the peas- antry, and for a simple reason: there is no more peasantry. As recently as
Conclusion 213
? World War II, with France lagging behind many other industrialized West- ern states, fully 45 percent of the population lived in rural districts, and a quarter of the labor force worked directly on the land. The peasantry re- mained, in the words of the sociologist Henri Mendras, "the central social class. "40 But then came the thirty years of rapid economic growth and transformation. Today, only five percent of the labor force is employed in agriculture, and in villages across France homes stand empty and decaying. In the 1960s, 100,000 workers a year left the land. 41 They have flocked to cities and suburbs where patois is a distant memory, and send their chil- dren to lyce? es and universities. They have indeed been "melted into the na- tional mass," and are melting into the global mass as well. I still remember vividly my own first encounter with a French farming family, in Brittany, in 1978. Invited by their suburb-dwelling cousins, my summer hosts, for an afternoon, I was expecting rural tradition and quaintness, and found it in the lovely old stone farmhouse, the farm animals, the weather-beaten face of the farmer, and the galettes and cider on the table. But the effect was rather spoiled by the fact that we spent dinner watching "Happy Days" on television.
Just as France retains only tiny remnants of its once vast peasantry, so it has only kept shreds of its once vast empire: Guadeloupe, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Martinique, New Caledonia and so forth--a small, thin, and widely scattered archipelago where one can still use French currency, speak the French language, and walk into post offices identical to the ones on Pa- risian street corners. The rest disappeared in the great wave of decoloniza- tion in the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond this tiny formal empire, there is also a much larger informal one, for France still maintains legions of civil ser- vants, businessmen, and aid workers in its former African colonies, not to mention soldiers. But if French influence remains strong in these na- tions, its civilizing mission has almost entirely vanished. Far from granting French citizenship to "meritorious" Africans, the French state devotes con- siderable efforts to keeping them out of France, lest they swell an already large immigrant population.
The issue of immigration itself is, as it has always been, fraught and complex. Nearly every party to the ongoing debate in France over immi- grants has an interest in presenting the problems of the current wave of immigrants (especially the millions of Arabs and Berbers who have made Islam France's second largest religion, after Catholicism) as more serious than any similar problems in the past. The National Front and other
214 The Cult of the Nation in France
? rightists do so to garner support for an absolute halt to immigration and intensified efforts of repatriation. Opposing political forces do so in order to justify large-scale public efforts to relieve the misery in which many im- migrants live. Even though, in a recent poll, no less than 38 percent of the French population confessed to some racist feelings about immigrants, and even though the National Front routinely has won up to 15 percent of the vote, the prejudice and even violence dealt to previous waves of im- migrants ironically offer some hope that eventually the North Africans, too, may find themselves integrated more fully into French society and cul- ture. 42 Southeast Asians, and to a lesser extent black African immigrants, are becoming so already. On the other hand, at least two phenomena do suggest a need for caution. One is the growing popularity of anti-Western fundamentalism in some sectors of France's Muslim communities, leading to a radical rejection of assimilation. The other is the ghettoization of im- migrant communities, characterized by high levels of unemployment and crime, and physical isolation in the miserable suburban confines of vast, sterile housing projects.
Even if the North African Muslims do eventually follow the example of their Belgian, Italian, Polish, and Iberian predecessors, a different fact is now becoming clear: they will most likely have no successors. In the pres- ent French political climate, and thanks above all to the National Front, even the Socialist Party has strongly committed itself to ending immigra- tion, cracking down on clandestine immigration, and shipping illegal im- migrants back to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, the president of the Republic has openly remarked that he sympathizes with his compatriots who must put up with the "noise" and the "smells" generated by an "over- dose" of immigrants. 43 In the 1980s and 1990s the United States has again become the leading immigrant nation in the West, and is being trans- formed by immigration to an extent not seen for a century. By contrast, the French are making it clear that once they have digested the current immi- grant populations, they have no appetite for more. In this sense, the field of immigration, too, is closed to republican nationalism.
Supposing that France did still have peasants, an empire, and ongoing waves of immigration, would there still be a vigorous republican national impulse to instill republican values in these outsiders and to integrate them seamlessly into the national community? The answer is far from ob- vious. As Pierre Nora and others have noted, French republicanism in many ways reached its peak a century ago, thanks above all to its conflict
Conclusion 215
? with a frankly anti-republican Catholic right. This opponent remained a serious threat throughout the interwar years, and of course took power in 1940 thanks to the Nazi conquerors. But the experience of Vichy wholly discredited it, and it has never regained its electoral base. The National Front is itself a largely republican party; it flies the republican tricolor even as its supporters celebrate Joan of Arc. After the war, not only did French republicanism find itself without a powerful opponent to justify its contin- ued vigilance and activity; it was also sapped by the competing forces of Gaullism and Marxism. They have declined in their turn in the past twenty years, but it has not been to either the ideological or electoral advantage of Third Republic-style republicanism and the political parties that embod- ied it. 44 Whether or not the French Revolution is finally over, as Franc? ois Furet famously claimed, it has ceased to matter in mainstream French poli- tics, where middle-of-the-road parties with often identical policies com- pete to dominate a Republic of the Center largely similar to other Western European democracies. 45
Just as important, republicanism has in a sense lost its principal in- strument of spreading the creed, the public education system. Obviously, French public education itself is larger than ever (French civil servants once liked to boast that "l'e? ducation nationale" was the single largest orga- nization in Europe, after the Red Army--now, presumably, it is the larg- est). But since the war it has undergone some fundamental transforma- tions. First, its center of gravity has shifted upwards. Whereas once the lyce? es were elite institutions and the universities and grandes e? coles were re- served for a tiny minority, now virtually all French children receive second- ary education. Franc? ois Mitterrand set a goal of bringing 80 percent of the population at least through the baccalaureat, and the intolerable crowding in many universities testifies to the system's progress towards this goal. As the system increasingly came to center on adolescents rather than young children, it would inevitably have moved away from the sort of heavy- handed patriotic indoctrination characteristic of the Third Republic. But that indoctrination has in any case faded away for very different reasons, and instituteurs now rarely treat patriotic and moral education as more important tasks than the imparting of basic skills. 46
In this context, one cannot overestimate the importance of the events of May 1968. Whatever else this extraordinary episode accomplished, it came close to destroying the magisterial authority previously enjoyed by French educators, and their overweening confidence in their ability to shape their
216 The Cult of the Nation in France
? charges to fit a pattern of their own devising. While students had helped lead previous French rebellions, they had not done so directly against their own teachers and educational institutions. In the wake of 1968, teachers could no longer occupy the same moral position they had held before--es- pecially after the students of 1968 became teachers in their turn. 47
Beyond all these social, political, and cultural reasons why the republi- can vision of the nation has dissolved, leaving a perceived crisis in its wake, there is another, perhaps more fundamental reason. Nationalism, while de- veloping in large part against religion, also developed out of it, and did so at a time of general, profound religious faith. Above all, the order and har- mony that nationalists hoped to establish in this world, while seen as part of this world and not a reflection or extension of celestial order, was none- theless envisioned as a terrestrial counterpart to the order and harmony discerned by Christians in heaven. Hence it is doubtful that nationalism can remain the same in an era characterized not merely by the interioriza- tion of religion, but by the thorough evaporation of religious faith, to the extent that the original, religious conception of order and harmony no longer resonates in most people's minds with anything like the strength it did in the eighteenth century. What are the successors of Rabaut Saint- Etienne to do when they no longer need to fight against the priests--when, moreover, what the priests themselves were trying to accomplish no longer has any meaning to most of the population?
In our own profoundly disenchanted world, it is perhaps not surprising that in fact, most of the foundational concepts discussed in Chapter 1 are losing their centrality, in France and beyond. The word "civilization" is spoken with irony more often than not. The same is true for "patrie"--in- deed, this word seems to be fast disappearing from the French lexicon, to the extent that if the abbe? Coyer returned to France today, he would undoubtedly see the need to reprint his little dissertation lamenting the word's absence. "Society," as is often remarked, is steadily giving way to "culture" in everything from the most abstruse academic discourse to the most popular media. We may not be at the "end of history," but we do seem to be at the end of a period in which reshaping human society into some sort of ideally harmonious order was seen as the central task for hu- man beings to accomplish. Assuring a reasonable degree of comfort and security is now often seen as all that is possible. As in the decades around 1700, inhabitants of the West are again living in a time of "anti-enthusi- asm," though now they are reacting against ideological, as opposed to reli- gious enthusiasms.
Conclusion 217
? And what of the nation? In this not-so-brave new world, which admit- tedly extends over only the small portion of the globe that can take a rea- sonable degree of comfort and security for granted, will it simply become irrelevant? Will France steadily dissolve into Europe, cyberspace, and the global marketplace, whatever stubborn words the prime minister may summon against this fate? I do not think so. But if the nation does remain a central organizing principle of human life, it will do so in a very different manner from the past two centuries. It will do so not as a field of homoge- neity, but as a site of exchange, where different cultures meet and mix, in constant movement. National identity and national character will survive, but they will refer as much to the particular style of the meeting and mix- ing as to the things that are meeting and mixing.
Parts of France itself have already become this sort of kaleidoscope na- tion, as a stroll through central Paris, with its overwhelming selection of foods, music, and clothing from around the world, easily demonstrates. Many prominent French commentators and politicians, attached by a blend of conviction, nostalgia, and self-interest to the old national creed and the institutions that embodied it, may decry the change, but they have so far proved incapable of doing anything to reverse it (legislation on pro- tecting the French language, for instance, has been an often ludicrous fail- ure). They are unlikely to become more effective in the near future. Today, with France more prosperous, peaceful, and secure than at any time in its history, the nationalism that flourished between the late eighteenth cen- tury and the mid-twentieth is distant from the experiences and concerns of most of the French. This change may be partly regrettable, for French re- publican nationalism, if party to much that was terrible, particularly at its origins, had something noble and grand to it as well. Nonetheless, the French will be fortunate if they are able, in the years to come, to look back on their nationalist past with sympathy and admiration, but also with a degree of puzzled incomprehension.
? ? Notes
Introduction: Constructing the Nation
1. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours et rapports a` la Convention, ed. Marc Bouloiseau (Paris, 1965), 79.
2. On Rabaut, see Andre? Dupont, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 1743-1793: Un prot- estant de? fenseur de la liberte? religieuse (Strasbourg, 1946, repr. Geneva, 1989).
3. Re? impression de l'ancien Moniteur, 32 vols. (Paris, 1840), Dec. 22, 1792, 803.
The speech was reprinted as Jean-Paul Rabaut, Projet d'e? ducation nationale
(Paris, 1792).
4. Cited in Mona Ozouf, "La Re? volution franc? aise et la formation de l'homme
nouveau," in L'homme re? ge? ne? re? : Essais sur la Re? volution franc? aise (Paris, 1989),
116-157, at 125.
5. Moniteur, 802-3.
6. Ibid. , 802-3.
7. Ibid. , 803.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 804.
10. Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Projet.
11. It has principally been noticed for its influence on the subsequent educa-
tional projects. See Jean-Louis Labarrie`re, "De la vertu du citoyen e? claire? ," in Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, ed. , Former un nouveau peuple? Pouvoir, e? ducation, re? volution (Quebec, 1996), 57-69, esp. 66-67; Robert J. Vignery, The French Revolution and the Schools: Educational Policies of the Mountain 1792-1794 (Madison, 1965), 45, 77; Dominque Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir: La Re? volution (Paris, 1981), 46, 89-96; and Bronislaw Baczko, Une e? ducation pour la de? mocratie: Textes et projets de l'e? poque re? volutionnaire (Paris, 1982), which reproduces the later, printed version of the speech on 295-301.
12. On this subject, see notably Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), and Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559-1598) (Louvain, 1971).
219
220
Notes to Pages 3-5
? 13.
Here I am taking issue with influential scholars who see the rise of nations and the rise of nationalism as the same essential phenomenon. See for in- stance Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Benedict An- derson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na- tionalism (London, 1983); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York, 1982); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Pro- gramme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1989). These scholars all take a "modern- ist" approach, locating the origins of nations and nationalism alike around 1800, but the same conflation is also typical of scholars who project the phe- nomenon further back in time, for instance Adrian Hastings, The Construc- tion of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), or Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, 1991).
For an excellent synthesis of this aspect of nationalism, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, La cre? ation des identite? s nationales: Europe XVIIIe-XXe sie`cle (Paris, 1999). For a discussion of the language of restoration and reconstruction, even in the most radical moments of the French Revolution, see Chapter 5 below.
This point is valid for the "civic" (as opposed to "ethnic") form of national- ism, to borrow the distinction formulated most notably by John Plamenatz in "Two Types of Nationalism," in Eugene Kamenka, ed. , Nationalism: The Na- ture and Evolution of an Idea (New York, 1976). The distinction has recently been challenged, notably by Anne-Marie Thiesse.
Geoff Eley, "State Formation, Nationalism, and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany," in From Unification to Nazism: Re- interpreting the German Past (London, 1986), 66. See also Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), and Thiesse, passim.
In making an argument about how new ways of looking at the world become "thinkable," I am drawing on numerous works in cultural theory, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Among the most important are Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory VIII/1 (1969), 3-53; J. G. A. Pocock, "Political Languages and Their Implications," in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971), 3-41; Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 193-233; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1973). I am also indebted to the example of Keith Mi- chael Baker in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Cul- ture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).
The argument that for centuries "nation" meant primarily communities of foreign university students, developed particularly by Guido Zernatto in "Na-
14.
Notes to Pages 3-5
15.
16.
17.
18.
tion: The History of a Word," Review of Politics, 6 (1944), 351-66, has been too easily accepted by many scholars. See the persuasive evidence presented by Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 14-17 (although the author proceeds to draw unwarranted conclusions about the antiquity of national- ism itself); Jean-Yves Guiomar, La nation entre l'histoire et la raison (Paris, 1990), 13; and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, ed. , L'imaginaire de la nation 1792- 1992 (Bordeaux, 1992), 20.
19. Cited in Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 17; Dictionnaire de l'Acade? mie Franc? oise (Paris, 1694), s. v. "nation. "
20. For Richelieu's project, which never came to fruition, see Nicolas Legras, Acade? mie royale de Richelieu (n. p. , 1642). For Mazarin's, which quickly lost its "integrative" purpose and became simply a prestigious Parisian colle`ge, see Alfred Franklin, Recherches historiques sur le colle`ge des quatre nations (Paris, 1862).
21. I here take issue with recent attempts to push the origins of nationalism fur- ther back in time, such as Anthony D. Smith's National Identity and The Eth- nic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986), and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992). A compelling recent synthesis making the same case, and arguing for the centrality of the early modern Netherlands and England, is Philip S. Gorski, "The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism," American Jour- nal of Sociology, CV/5 (2000), 1428-68. Even Gorski, however, still tends to conflate nationalism and national identity (e. g. p. 1430, where he takes the antiquity of the word "nation" as evidence for "nationalism qua ideology"
antedating the modern era).
Notes to Pages 6-8
22. On the origins of the word, see Beatrice Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789 According to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934), 22; Jacques Godechot, "Nation, patrie, nationalisme et patriotisme en France au XVIIIe sie`cle," in Annales de l'histoire de la Re? volution franc? aise, 206 (1971), 481-501.
23. This formulation is based on a reading of Anderson, Imagined Communities, esp. 17-23.
24. The limits of Louis XIV's ambitions comes through quite clearly in the recent revisionist work of scholars such as William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), and Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV's France (Oxford, 1988). The perils of reading modern "language poli- tics" back into the early modern period have been amply demonstrated by Henri Peyre, La royaute? et les langues provinciales (Paris, 1933), 58-91; Danielle Trudeau, "L'ordonnance de Villers-Cottere^ts et la langue franc? aise: Histoire ou interpre? tation," Bibliothe`que d'humanisme et Renaissance, XLV (1983), 461-472; and Paul Cohen, "Courtly French, Learned Latin, and Peas-
Notes to Pages 6-8 221
? 222
Notes to Pages 8-9
? 25.
ant Patois: The Making of a National Language in Early Modern France," 2 vols. , Ph. D. diss. , Princeton University, 2000.
A good starting point in the immense literature on this subject is still John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present, 47 (1970), 51-70. More recently, see Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1989), and R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (Cambridge, 1998). On the case of Brittany, see the superb study by Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux 16e et 17e sie`cles: La vie, la mort, la foi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981). On the Catholic clergy see also Timothy Tackett, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Cure? s in the Diocese of Dauphine? , 1750-1791 (Princeton, 1977), and Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500- 1789 (New Haven, 1984). Keith P. Luria provides an interesting revisionist view on the Catholic Reformation in Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley, 1991).
On Britain, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Ha- ven, 1992). For the "peripheral" states, see especially Franco Venturi, Sette- cento Riformatore, III and IV (Turin, 1979 and 1984). Colley (p. 86) has re- cently noted that "it remains unclear why this resurgence of interest in matters patriotic occurred in so many different countries at the same time. " See, for instance, the copious publications of Robert Lafont on "Occitania. " Maryon McDonald, "We Are Not French! ": Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany (London, 1989), offers a valuable corrective to this point of view. On the supposed crisis of French identity, see David A. Bell, "Paris Blues," The New Republic, Sept. 1, 1997, and the Conclusion, below.
26.
27.
Notes to Pages 8-9
28. Colley, Britons; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, 1976), are the most prominent general works on their subjects. On Britain, see also Gerald Newman, The Rise of English National- ism: A Cultural History (London, 1987); Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1688 (Cambridge, 1996); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds. , British Consciousness and British Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533- 1707 (Cambridge, 1998); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999). On nineteenth-century France, see also Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Prince- ton, 1993), and James Lehning, Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Ru- ral France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1995). Nearly all the general works on nationalism listed in the bibliography (available at www. davidbell. net) accord considerable attention to French history.
Notes to Pages 9-10 223
? 29. See particularly Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen.
30. Cited in Ferdinand Brunot et al. , Histoire de la langue franc? aise, des origines a` 1900, 13 vols. (Paris, 1905-53), IX, pt. I, 4.
31. See notably Anderson, Imagined Communities; Greenfeld, Nationalism; Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations and National Identity; Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994); John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982); Carla Hesse and Thomas Laqueur, "Introduction: National Cultures before Nationalism," Representations 47 (1994), 1-12; Hagen Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europai? schen Geschichte (Munich, 1994).
32. The fundamental introductory works on the political culture of the old re- gime are: Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, 1991); Keith Michael Baker, ed. , The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987). See also Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1990) and Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Old Regime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, 1984). Notes to Pages 9-10
33. See especially Pierre Nora, ed. , Les lieux de me? moire, 7 vols. (Paris, 1984-93); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989); Sahlins, "Fictions of a Catholic France: The Natural- ization of Foreigners, 1685-1787," Representations, 47 (1994), 85-110; Sahlins, with Jean-Franc? ois Dubost, Et si on faisait payer les e? trangers? Louis XIV, les immigre? s et quelques autres (Paris, 1999). Also important are two stimulating, if more narrowly focused new works on patriotism: Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme franc? ais, 1750-1770: La France face a` la puissance anglaise a` l'e? poque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Ox- ford, 1998), and He? le`ne Dupuy, "Gene`se de la Patrie Moderne: La naissance de l'ide? e moderne de patrie en France avant et pendant la Re? volution," Ph. D. diss. , Universite? de Paris-I (1995). Other recent works on early mod- ern French national sentiment include Greenfeld, 89-188; Sophie Wahnich, L'impossible citoyen: L'e? tranger dans le discours de la Re? volution franc? aise (Paris, 1997); and the books discussed in David A. Bell, "French Na- tional Identity in the Early Modern Period," Journal of Modern History, LXVIII/1 (1996), 84-113. Steven Englund is currently writing an ambi- tious history of modern French nationalism. Michael Rapport's Nation- ality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of For- eigners, 1789-99 (Oxford, 2000) appeared too late to be consulted for this book.
34. See on this point especially Yardeni, La conscience nationale, and Alphonse Dupront, "Du sentiment national," in M. Franc? ois, ed. , La France et les franc?
The first large effort to fulfill this mission, under the First Republic and then under the Napoleonic Empire (which inherited some, though hardly all, of the Republic's ideas and principles), was a brief blazing triumph that quickly collapsed into an abject failure. This effort was, of course, a mili- tary one, which expanded the frontiers of France across Europe, in the pro- cess integrating areas without a shred of French tradition seamlessly into the system of French de? partements. By 1812, in theory, Schleswig-Holstein and the Adriatic coast of Croatia belonged to France every bit as much as the Arde`che or the Morbihan. The effort was a failure in part because the French soldiers and administrators proceeded with brazen hypocrisy, de- claring their new subjects the equals of French citizens while ruthlessly ex- ploiting them for the war effort. The hypocrisy was not all-pervasive; in the last years of the Empire, more than a third of Napoleon's (admittedly pow- erless) Senate came from territories well outside France's 1789 bound- aries. 23 Nonetheless, the French attitudes spurred widespread resentment and rebellion, which in turn led to the birth of new nationalist move- ments throughout Europe, all of which tended to define themselves against France and the French.
Yet after the defeat of the Empire, and particularly from 1870 to 1940, efforts to fulfill the early republican national mission met with consider-
208 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ably more success, despite France's reduced military capacities and inter- national prestige. These efforts aimed at three separate and very different population groups: French peasants, inhabitants of France's colonial terri- tories, and foreign immigrants. In each case, the republican state set itself a "civilizing mission" whereby assimilation into civilization meant--as had often been the case in the eighteenth century--assimilation into the patrie.
Peasants, of course, were the original targets of the First Republic's ef- forts at national integration, from its grandiose plans for public education and the deployment of newspapers like La Feuille villageoise, to the "public sessions" of the Jacobin clubs and the language policies discussed in the last chapter. These peasants were the French citizens routinely described by their educated, urban compatriots in the nineteenth century as belonging to an alien, animalistic world. Adolphe Blanqui in 1851 could speak of "two different peoples living on the same land a life so different that they seem foreign to each other. "24 True, after the Terror, and particularly after Napoleon's rise to power, the campaign to make Frenchmen out of these country-dwellers fell into abeyance. Universal primary education, the most important means of conversion for the Jacobins, remained a distant dream until well into the nineteenth century. 25 After 1830, however, the July Mon- archy began to set up a nationwide system of public schools. The Second Republic of 1848 revived the ideals of the First, and in the 1860s Louis-Na- poleon's Ministry of Education began to formulate the problem of peasant integration in a systematic manner, notably carrying out the first truly large-scale survey of the spoken languages of France. In 1867, the reform- ing minister Victor Duruy again put forward an ambitious plan for univer- sal elementary schooling. 26
The Third Republic, which arose out of the disasters of the Franco-Prus- sian War and the Commune, built on these foundations with such energy and zeal that its black-clad schoolmasters became its most famous and vis- ible servants. The high temple of French education, the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure, in theory a school for training lyce? e teachers, served as the nursery for France's leading politicians and intellectuals and had no equiv- alent in most other European countries. Eminent educators proclaimed that apprentice teachers "must above be told that their first duty is to make [their charges] love and understand the patrie"; the school is "an instru- ment of unity" and an "answer to dangerous centrifugal tendencies. "27 School texts like Ernest Lavisse's enormously successful French history primer, and Bruno's Tour de France par deux enfants took up the task once
Conclusion 209
? shouldered by La Feuille villageoise, educating the rural population not only in the language, history, and constitution of France, but in patriotic duty. 28 While usually not committed to the eradication of local languages, teachers in patois-speaking regions nonetheless saw the teaching of stan- dard French as their main mission. Patois had, at best, a minor, auxiliary role in the classroom. 29
Even as republican efforts to civilize the peasantry reached their peak to- wards the end of the nineteenth century, the Third Republic reached out to embrace a far larger field in which to sow its language, ideals, symbols, and ultimately, perhaps, its nationality: the colonial empire, which by 1900 in- cluded vast areas of north and west Africa. 30 Just as seventeenth- and eigh- teenth-century Catholic missionaries had employed much the same meth- ods of conversion in France as in the Americas or Asia--and indeed had drawn explicit parallels between the different fields of operation--so the republicans of the age of imperialism easily translated their approach to- wards the peasants into an approach towards their colonial subjects. 31 In the service of an explicit civilizing mission, not only did they expose these subjects to the usual panoply of "integrationist" policies, above all school- ing and linguistic instruction; they went further than any other European colonial power in breaking down the distinction between the colonies and the metropole. Certain areas of the empire became legally part of France, theoretically indistinguishable in this regard from Paris or Marseilles. Fur- thermore, legislation opened the door for at least an elite of colonial sub- jects to become full French citizens. School texts like Louis Sonolet's Moussa et Gi-gla: Histoire de deux petits noirs, modeled on Bruno's Tour de France, taught that French and blacks belonged to the same patrie. 32
The extent to which the empire offered its colonial subjects true equal membership in the French nation was, of course, strictly limited. The en- terprise proceeded with a predictably large share of racism, hypocrisy, hesi- tation, and doubt--particularly after World War I, and particularly where Muslims were concerned. 33 Yet the "civilizing mission" was not simply a mask for exploitation. And regardless of the realities on the ground, it mat- tered deeply to republican nationalists in France that the nation was ex- panding in this way, and that it might someday welcome millions of fully civilized Africans and Asians into the great circle of the patrie.
The final, and most contested field of expansion and integration was im- migration. Unlike the missions to civilize the peasantry and the colonies, the assimilation of immigrants was not an enterprise that the republic glo-
210 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ried in. France has repeatedly opened its doors to large numbers of immi- grants: Belgians and Italians in the nineteenth century, Poles in the early twentieth, and more recently Spanish, Portuguese, North Africans, black Africans, and Southeast Asians. But it has almost always done so initially as a temporary measure, to provide badly needed labor. Citizenship came later, after the communities had already established themselves. Nor was immigration ever anything less than controversial. The Belgians and Ital- ians met as much hostility and prejudice in their time as Algerians and black Africans have done in contemporary France, and sometimes more. In part as a result, the French government and the French academy for many years practically ignored the long history of immigration into France. No less a prestigious scholar than Pierre Nora could write, as re- cently as 1986, that immigration was "a novelty of the country's present- day situation. "34
Unremarked as it may have been, the immigration did take place. In- deed, after the United States drastically curtailed immigration in the wake of World War I, France became the leading immigrant nation in the West- ern world, with policies far more welcoming than those of any other Euro- pean country. 35 It is a powerful but relatively little-known fact that today nearly a quarter of all French citizens have at least one grandparent born elsewhere. 36 Furthermore, in large part thanks to the same republican insti- tutions that strove to civilize the peasants and the colonies--above all, the schools--the immigrants did indeed assimilate, and to a greater extent than their American counterparts. As has sometimes been remarked, there is no such thing as a "hyphenated French person," in contrast to the mil- lions of hyphenated Americans taking pride in an (often mostly invented) ethnic identity, and expressing a residual if largely nostalgic loyalty to an ancestral homeland. The phrase "Italian-American" suggests an individual; the phrase "Italian-French," a treaty. Few French people know that one of their most celebrated film stars of the twentieth century, Yves Montand, was born Ivo Livi, or that the nineteenth-century novelist Emile Zola also came from an Italian background. When President Franc? ois Mitterrand named a son of Ukrainian immigrants, Pierre Be? re? govoy, as his prime minister, his background generated far less interest and comment than it would have done in the United States.
In all these ways, then, the French republican nationalism born in the eighteenth century remained powerful and active through the middle of the twentieth, shaping the policies of the French state both at home and abroad and providing to its elites, educated in large proportion at the Ecole
Conclusion 211
? Normale Supe? rieure, a unique sense of mission. In this somber building on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, within sight of the Pantheon, so reminiscent of a monastery in its architecture, with its cloister and cells and high, echoing corridors, the Republic trained its own secular Jesuits to go forth and forge, not the church, but the nation.
Today, the Ecole Normale still stands on the rue d'Ulm, and some of the smartest and best-prepared of France's university-age students still pass through its doors each year, under an inscription beginning "By Decree of the Convention, 9 Brumaire, Year III. " But it is diminished. The most am- bitious and successful students have largely abandoned it for the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, which trains high civil servants and virtually the whole top layer of what the French call the "political class" (including the present president, prime minister, and a majority of the Cabinet). While some of its pupils still take the republican mission seriously and teach in the countryside (or, more often, the suburban slums), most are simply academics using it as a stepping stone to eventual professorships. The scientists who make up half the student body compete strenuously for postdoctoral fellowships abroad, above all in the United States. And they publish almost exclusively in English.
As such the Ecole Normale can stand as a symbol, among many such symbols, for what is often today called a "crisis of French national identity. " This crisis has been endlessly discussed, both in France and abroad, over the past twenty years. 37 It is significant that perhaps the single most impor- tant work of scholarship published in the Mitterrand years, the massive collection Les lieux de me? moire, edited by Pierre Nora (himself a descen- dant of North African Jews), began with the assumption that long-stand- ing French forms of self-identification were disappearing, and that the re- publican tradition in particular was unraveling. Indeed, despite Nora's presentation of the work as a dispassionate analysis of the workings of na- tional memory, much of it adopted a frankly elegiac, rueful tone, particu- larly when discussing the great institutions of the French state and French culture. 38 Meanwhile, the great livre de scandale of 1993 was a book gloom- ily entitled Voyage au centre du malaise franc? ais ("Voyage to the Center of the French Malaise"), which discerned a virtual disintegration of French national identity, thanks to multiculturalism and the flood of revelations about French conduct towards the Jews under Vichy (the author found them pathological, whence the scandal). 39
The usual suspect in these discussions of the crisis is France's dimin-
212 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ished position in an increasingly interconnected, Americanized world. The fingers point to France's decline as a military and diplomatic power, the in- creasing integration of the European Union (as of this writing, the French currency has recently given way to the euro and the dictates of the Euro- pean central bank, and plans are afoot for a pan-European military force), and of course the invasion of France by everything from McDonald's and Pizza Hut to American pop music, movies, The Gap, Starbucks, and the Internet (the long-suffering French language must now accommodate phrases like "le netsurfing des sites cools du web"). In the spring of 2000, a farmer who vandalized a new McDonald's in the Languedoc town of Millau, Jose? Bove? , became something of a French folk hero. Prime Minister Jospin's recent statement on French identity, quoted at the start of this chapter, was made above all in reference to Europeanization and the euro. Commentators were not slow to notice its defensive tone. Immigration also comes up frequently, of course, and is generally discussed in blissful ignorance of the subject's long and complex history.
All these factors indeed have enormous relevance for the way the French now view their nation. What is much less well understood is why these fac- tors, common to all nations, seem to have had such a particularly strong negative effect in France. There has been less talk of crises of Dutch, Irish, or Italian national identity, although the developments that go by the name of globalization have arguably had a stronger impact in any of these coun- tries than in France. Of course, as Michelet liked to quip, the world thinks; France speaks. But I would argue that the sharpness with which the French have experienced these global changes should in fact be attributed to par- ticular changes that the nation underwent before most of the trends associ- ated with globalization made much of an impact on France. It was in the period of strong economic growth between World War II and the early 1970s, often called the "Glorious Thirty [years]," that the sense of mission attached for so long to French republican nationalism, along with the drive to assimilate new populations and to put France at the center of a universal civilization, virtually evaporated. The areas in which these changes took place are, again, the peasantry, the empire, and immigration. The changes were reinforced by significant transformations in the French educational system and in the sphere of religion.
Few French schoolmasters today can take on the role of republican mis- sionaries sent out into the depths of the countryside to civilize the peas- antry, and for a simple reason: there is no more peasantry. As recently as
Conclusion 213
? World War II, with France lagging behind many other industrialized West- ern states, fully 45 percent of the population lived in rural districts, and a quarter of the labor force worked directly on the land. The peasantry re- mained, in the words of the sociologist Henri Mendras, "the central social class. "40 But then came the thirty years of rapid economic growth and transformation. Today, only five percent of the labor force is employed in agriculture, and in villages across France homes stand empty and decaying. In the 1960s, 100,000 workers a year left the land. 41 They have flocked to cities and suburbs where patois is a distant memory, and send their chil- dren to lyce? es and universities. They have indeed been "melted into the na- tional mass," and are melting into the global mass as well. I still remember vividly my own first encounter with a French farming family, in Brittany, in 1978. Invited by their suburb-dwelling cousins, my summer hosts, for an afternoon, I was expecting rural tradition and quaintness, and found it in the lovely old stone farmhouse, the farm animals, the weather-beaten face of the farmer, and the galettes and cider on the table. But the effect was rather spoiled by the fact that we spent dinner watching "Happy Days" on television.
Just as France retains only tiny remnants of its once vast peasantry, so it has only kept shreds of its once vast empire: Guadeloupe, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Martinique, New Caledonia and so forth--a small, thin, and widely scattered archipelago where one can still use French currency, speak the French language, and walk into post offices identical to the ones on Pa- risian street corners. The rest disappeared in the great wave of decoloniza- tion in the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond this tiny formal empire, there is also a much larger informal one, for France still maintains legions of civil ser- vants, businessmen, and aid workers in its former African colonies, not to mention soldiers. But if French influence remains strong in these na- tions, its civilizing mission has almost entirely vanished. Far from granting French citizenship to "meritorious" Africans, the French state devotes con- siderable efforts to keeping them out of France, lest they swell an already large immigrant population.
The issue of immigration itself is, as it has always been, fraught and complex. Nearly every party to the ongoing debate in France over immi- grants has an interest in presenting the problems of the current wave of immigrants (especially the millions of Arabs and Berbers who have made Islam France's second largest religion, after Catholicism) as more serious than any similar problems in the past. The National Front and other
214 The Cult of the Nation in France
? rightists do so to garner support for an absolute halt to immigration and intensified efforts of repatriation. Opposing political forces do so in order to justify large-scale public efforts to relieve the misery in which many im- migrants live. Even though, in a recent poll, no less than 38 percent of the French population confessed to some racist feelings about immigrants, and even though the National Front routinely has won up to 15 percent of the vote, the prejudice and even violence dealt to previous waves of im- migrants ironically offer some hope that eventually the North Africans, too, may find themselves integrated more fully into French society and cul- ture. 42 Southeast Asians, and to a lesser extent black African immigrants, are becoming so already. On the other hand, at least two phenomena do suggest a need for caution. One is the growing popularity of anti-Western fundamentalism in some sectors of France's Muslim communities, leading to a radical rejection of assimilation. The other is the ghettoization of im- migrant communities, characterized by high levels of unemployment and crime, and physical isolation in the miserable suburban confines of vast, sterile housing projects.
Even if the North African Muslims do eventually follow the example of their Belgian, Italian, Polish, and Iberian predecessors, a different fact is now becoming clear: they will most likely have no successors. In the pres- ent French political climate, and thanks above all to the National Front, even the Socialist Party has strongly committed itself to ending immigra- tion, cracking down on clandestine immigration, and shipping illegal im- migrants back to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, the president of the Republic has openly remarked that he sympathizes with his compatriots who must put up with the "noise" and the "smells" generated by an "over- dose" of immigrants. 43 In the 1980s and 1990s the United States has again become the leading immigrant nation in the West, and is being trans- formed by immigration to an extent not seen for a century. By contrast, the French are making it clear that once they have digested the current immi- grant populations, they have no appetite for more. In this sense, the field of immigration, too, is closed to republican nationalism.
Supposing that France did still have peasants, an empire, and ongoing waves of immigration, would there still be a vigorous republican national impulse to instill republican values in these outsiders and to integrate them seamlessly into the national community? The answer is far from ob- vious. As Pierre Nora and others have noted, French republicanism in many ways reached its peak a century ago, thanks above all to its conflict
Conclusion 215
? with a frankly anti-republican Catholic right. This opponent remained a serious threat throughout the interwar years, and of course took power in 1940 thanks to the Nazi conquerors. But the experience of Vichy wholly discredited it, and it has never regained its electoral base. The National Front is itself a largely republican party; it flies the republican tricolor even as its supporters celebrate Joan of Arc. After the war, not only did French republicanism find itself without a powerful opponent to justify its contin- ued vigilance and activity; it was also sapped by the competing forces of Gaullism and Marxism. They have declined in their turn in the past twenty years, but it has not been to either the ideological or electoral advantage of Third Republic-style republicanism and the political parties that embod- ied it. 44 Whether or not the French Revolution is finally over, as Franc? ois Furet famously claimed, it has ceased to matter in mainstream French poli- tics, where middle-of-the-road parties with often identical policies com- pete to dominate a Republic of the Center largely similar to other Western European democracies. 45
Just as important, republicanism has in a sense lost its principal in- strument of spreading the creed, the public education system. Obviously, French public education itself is larger than ever (French civil servants once liked to boast that "l'e? ducation nationale" was the single largest orga- nization in Europe, after the Red Army--now, presumably, it is the larg- est). But since the war it has undergone some fundamental transforma- tions. First, its center of gravity has shifted upwards. Whereas once the lyce? es were elite institutions and the universities and grandes e? coles were re- served for a tiny minority, now virtually all French children receive second- ary education. Franc? ois Mitterrand set a goal of bringing 80 percent of the population at least through the baccalaureat, and the intolerable crowding in many universities testifies to the system's progress towards this goal. As the system increasingly came to center on adolescents rather than young children, it would inevitably have moved away from the sort of heavy- handed patriotic indoctrination characteristic of the Third Republic. But that indoctrination has in any case faded away for very different reasons, and instituteurs now rarely treat patriotic and moral education as more important tasks than the imparting of basic skills. 46
In this context, one cannot overestimate the importance of the events of May 1968. Whatever else this extraordinary episode accomplished, it came close to destroying the magisterial authority previously enjoyed by French educators, and their overweening confidence in their ability to shape their
216 The Cult of the Nation in France
? charges to fit a pattern of their own devising. While students had helped lead previous French rebellions, they had not done so directly against their own teachers and educational institutions. In the wake of 1968, teachers could no longer occupy the same moral position they had held before--es- pecially after the students of 1968 became teachers in their turn. 47
Beyond all these social, political, and cultural reasons why the republi- can vision of the nation has dissolved, leaving a perceived crisis in its wake, there is another, perhaps more fundamental reason. Nationalism, while de- veloping in large part against religion, also developed out of it, and did so at a time of general, profound religious faith. Above all, the order and har- mony that nationalists hoped to establish in this world, while seen as part of this world and not a reflection or extension of celestial order, was none- theless envisioned as a terrestrial counterpart to the order and harmony discerned by Christians in heaven. Hence it is doubtful that nationalism can remain the same in an era characterized not merely by the interioriza- tion of religion, but by the thorough evaporation of religious faith, to the extent that the original, religious conception of order and harmony no longer resonates in most people's minds with anything like the strength it did in the eighteenth century. What are the successors of Rabaut Saint- Etienne to do when they no longer need to fight against the priests--when, moreover, what the priests themselves were trying to accomplish no longer has any meaning to most of the population?
In our own profoundly disenchanted world, it is perhaps not surprising that in fact, most of the foundational concepts discussed in Chapter 1 are losing their centrality, in France and beyond. The word "civilization" is spoken with irony more often than not. The same is true for "patrie"--in- deed, this word seems to be fast disappearing from the French lexicon, to the extent that if the abbe? Coyer returned to France today, he would undoubtedly see the need to reprint his little dissertation lamenting the word's absence. "Society," as is often remarked, is steadily giving way to "culture" in everything from the most abstruse academic discourse to the most popular media. We may not be at the "end of history," but we do seem to be at the end of a period in which reshaping human society into some sort of ideally harmonious order was seen as the central task for hu- man beings to accomplish. Assuring a reasonable degree of comfort and security is now often seen as all that is possible. As in the decades around 1700, inhabitants of the West are again living in a time of "anti-enthusi- asm," though now they are reacting against ideological, as opposed to reli- gious enthusiasms.
Conclusion 217
? And what of the nation? In this not-so-brave new world, which admit- tedly extends over only the small portion of the globe that can take a rea- sonable degree of comfort and security for granted, will it simply become irrelevant? Will France steadily dissolve into Europe, cyberspace, and the global marketplace, whatever stubborn words the prime minister may summon against this fate? I do not think so. But if the nation does remain a central organizing principle of human life, it will do so in a very different manner from the past two centuries. It will do so not as a field of homoge- neity, but as a site of exchange, where different cultures meet and mix, in constant movement. National identity and national character will survive, but they will refer as much to the particular style of the meeting and mix- ing as to the things that are meeting and mixing.
Parts of France itself have already become this sort of kaleidoscope na- tion, as a stroll through central Paris, with its overwhelming selection of foods, music, and clothing from around the world, easily demonstrates. Many prominent French commentators and politicians, attached by a blend of conviction, nostalgia, and self-interest to the old national creed and the institutions that embodied it, may decry the change, but they have so far proved incapable of doing anything to reverse it (legislation on pro- tecting the French language, for instance, has been an often ludicrous fail- ure). They are unlikely to become more effective in the near future. Today, with France more prosperous, peaceful, and secure than at any time in its history, the nationalism that flourished between the late eighteenth cen- tury and the mid-twentieth is distant from the experiences and concerns of most of the French. This change may be partly regrettable, for French re- publican nationalism, if party to much that was terrible, particularly at its origins, had something noble and grand to it as well. Nonetheless, the French will be fortunate if they are able, in the years to come, to look back on their nationalist past with sympathy and admiration, but also with a degree of puzzled incomprehension.
? ? Notes
Introduction: Constructing the Nation
1. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours et rapports a` la Convention, ed. Marc Bouloiseau (Paris, 1965), 79.
2. On Rabaut, see Andre? Dupont, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 1743-1793: Un prot- estant de? fenseur de la liberte? religieuse (Strasbourg, 1946, repr. Geneva, 1989).
3. Re? impression de l'ancien Moniteur, 32 vols. (Paris, 1840), Dec. 22, 1792, 803.
The speech was reprinted as Jean-Paul Rabaut, Projet d'e? ducation nationale
(Paris, 1792).
4. Cited in Mona Ozouf, "La Re? volution franc? aise et la formation de l'homme
nouveau," in L'homme re? ge? ne? re? : Essais sur la Re? volution franc? aise (Paris, 1989),
116-157, at 125.
5. Moniteur, 802-3.
6. Ibid. , 802-3.
7. Ibid. , 803.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. , 804.
10. Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Projet.
11. It has principally been noticed for its influence on the subsequent educa-
tional projects. See Jean-Louis Labarrie`re, "De la vertu du citoyen e? claire? ," in Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, ed. , Former un nouveau peuple? Pouvoir, e? ducation, re? volution (Quebec, 1996), 57-69, esp. 66-67; Robert J. Vignery, The French Revolution and the Schools: Educational Policies of the Mountain 1792-1794 (Madison, 1965), 45, 77; Dominque Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir: La Re? volution (Paris, 1981), 46, 89-96; and Bronislaw Baczko, Une e? ducation pour la de? mocratie: Textes et projets de l'e? poque re? volutionnaire (Paris, 1982), which reproduces the later, printed version of the speech on 295-301.
12. On this subject, see notably Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), and Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559-1598) (Louvain, 1971).
219
220
Notes to Pages 3-5
? 13.
Here I am taking issue with influential scholars who see the rise of nations and the rise of nationalism as the same essential phenomenon. See for in- stance Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); Benedict An- derson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na- tionalism (London, 1983); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York, 1982); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Pro- gramme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1989). These scholars all take a "modern- ist" approach, locating the origins of nations and nationalism alike around 1800, but the same conflation is also typical of scholars who project the phe- nomenon further back in time, for instance Adrian Hastings, The Construc- tion of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), or Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, 1991).
For an excellent synthesis of this aspect of nationalism, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, La cre? ation des identite? s nationales: Europe XVIIIe-XXe sie`cle (Paris, 1999). For a discussion of the language of restoration and reconstruction, even in the most radical moments of the French Revolution, see Chapter 5 below.
This point is valid for the "civic" (as opposed to "ethnic") form of national- ism, to borrow the distinction formulated most notably by John Plamenatz in "Two Types of Nationalism," in Eugene Kamenka, ed. , Nationalism: The Na- ture and Evolution of an Idea (New York, 1976). The distinction has recently been challenged, notably by Anne-Marie Thiesse.
Geoff Eley, "State Formation, Nationalism, and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany," in From Unification to Nazism: Re- interpreting the German Past (London, 1986), 66. See also Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), and Thiesse, passim.
In making an argument about how new ways of looking at the world become "thinkable," I am drawing on numerous works in cultural theory, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Among the most important are Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory VIII/1 (1969), 3-53; J. G. A. Pocock, "Political Languages and Their Implications," in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971), 3-41; Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 193-233; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1973). I am also indebted to the example of Keith Mi- chael Baker in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Cul- ture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990).
The argument that for centuries "nation" meant primarily communities of foreign university students, developed particularly by Guido Zernatto in "Na-
14.
Notes to Pages 3-5
15.
16.
17.
18.
tion: The History of a Word," Review of Politics, 6 (1944), 351-66, has been too easily accepted by many scholars. See the persuasive evidence presented by Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 14-17 (although the author proceeds to draw unwarranted conclusions about the antiquity of national- ism itself); Jean-Yves Guiomar, La nation entre l'histoire et la raison (Paris, 1990), 13; and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, ed. , L'imaginaire de la nation 1792- 1992 (Bordeaux, 1992), 20.
19. Cited in Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 17; Dictionnaire de l'Acade? mie Franc? oise (Paris, 1694), s. v. "nation. "
20. For Richelieu's project, which never came to fruition, see Nicolas Legras, Acade? mie royale de Richelieu (n. p. , 1642). For Mazarin's, which quickly lost its "integrative" purpose and became simply a prestigious Parisian colle`ge, see Alfred Franklin, Recherches historiques sur le colle`ge des quatre nations (Paris, 1862).
21. I here take issue with recent attempts to push the origins of nationalism fur- ther back in time, such as Anthony D. Smith's National Identity and The Eth- nic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986), and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass. , 1992). A compelling recent synthesis making the same case, and arguing for the centrality of the early modern Netherlands and England, is Philip S. Gorski, "The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism," American Jour- nal of Sociology, CV/5 (2000), 1428-68. Even Gorski, however, still tends to conflate nationalism and national identity (e. g. p. 1430, where he takes the antiquity of the word "nation" as evidence for "nationalism qua ideology"
antedating the modern era).
Notes to Pages 6-8
22. On the origins of the word, see Beatrice Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789 According to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934), 22; Jacques Godechot, "Nation, patrie, nationalisme et patriotisme en France au XVIIIe sie`cle," in Annales de l'histoire de la Re? volution franc? aise, 206 (1971), 481-501.
23. This formulation is based on a reading of Anderson, Imagined Communities, esp. 17-23.
24. The limits of Louis XIV's ambitions comes through quite clearly in the recent revisionist work of scholars such as William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), and Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV's France (Oxford, 1988). The perils of reading modern "language poli- tics" back into the early modern period have been amply demonstrated by Henri Peyre, La royaute? et les langues provinciales (Paris, 1933), 58-91; Danielle Trudeau, "L'ordonnance de Villers-Cottere^ts et la langue franc? aise: Histoire ou interpre? tation," Bibliothe`que d'humanisme et Renaissance, XLV (1983), 461-472; and Paul Cohen, "Courtly French, Learned Latin, and Peas-
Notes to Pages 6-8 221
? 222
Notes to Pages 8-9
? 25.
ant Patois: The Making of a National Language in Early Modern France," 2 vols. , Ph. D. diss. , Princeton University, 2000.
A good starting point in the immense literature on this subject is still John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present, 47 (1970), 51-70. More recently, see Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1989), and R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (Cambridge, 1998). On the case of Brittany, see the superb study by Alain Croix, La Bretagne aux 16e et 17e sie`cles: La vie, la mort, la foi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981). On the Catholic clergy see also Timothy Tackett, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Cure? s in the Diocese of Dauphine? , 1750-1791 (Princeton, 1977), and Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500- 1789 (New Haven, 1984). Keith P. Luria provides an interesting revisionist view on the Catholic Reformation in Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley, 1991).
On Britain, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Ha- ven, 1992). For the "peripheral" states, see especially Franco Venturi, Sette- cento Riformatore, III and IV (Turin, 1979 and 1984). Colley (p. 86) has re- cently noted that "it remains unclear why this resurgence of interest in matters patriotic occurred in so many different countries at the same time. " See, for instance, the copious publications of Robert Lafont on "Occitania. " Maryon McDonald, "We Are Not French! ": Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany (London, 1989), offers a valuable corrective to this point of view. On the supposed crisis of French identity, see David A. Bell, "Paris Blues," The New Republic, Sept. 1, 1997, and the Conclusion, below.
26.
27.
Notes to Pages 8-9
28. Colley, Britons; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, 1976), are the most prominent general works on their subjects. On Britain, see also Gerald Newman, The Rise of English National- ism: A Cultural History (London, 1987); Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1688 (Cambridge, 1996); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds. , British Consciousness and British Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533- 1707 (Cambridge, 1998); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999). On nineteenth-century France, see also Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Prince- ton, 1993), and James Lehning, Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Ru- ral France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1995). Nearly all the general works on nationalism listed in the bibliography (available at www. davidbell. net) accord considerable attention to French history.
Notes to Pages 9-10 223
? 29. See particularly Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen.
30. Cited in Ferdinand Brunot et al. , Histoire de la langue franc? aise, des origines a` 1900, 13 vols. (Paris, 1905-53), IX, pt. I, 4.
31. See notably Anderson, Imagined Communities; Greenfeld, Nationalism; Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations and National Identity; Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994); John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982); Carla Hesse and Thomas Laqueur, "Introduction: National Cultures before Nationalism," Representations 47 (1994), 1-12; Hagen Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europai? schen Geschichte (Munich, 1994).
32. The fundamental introductory works on the political culture of the old re- gime are: Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, 1991); Keith Michael Baker, ed. , The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1987). See also Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1990) and Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Old Regime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, 1984). Notes to Pages 9-10
33. See especially Pierre Nora, ed. , Les lieux de me? moire, 7 vols. (Paris, 1984-93); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989); Sahlins, "Fictions of a Catholic France: The Natural- ization of Foreigners, 1685-1787," Representations, 47 (1994), 85-110; Sahlins, with Jean-Franc? ois Dubost, Et si on faisait payer les e? trangers? Louis XIV, les immigre? s et quelques autres (Paris, 1999). Also important are two stimulating, if more narrowly focused new works on patriotism: Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme franc? ais, 1750-1770: La France face a` la puissance anglaise a` l'e? poque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Ox- ford, 1998), and He? le`ne Dupuy, "Gene`se de la Patrie Moderne: La naissance de l'ide? e moderne de patrie en France avant et pendant la Re? volution," Ph. D. diss. , Universite? de Paris-I (1995). Other recent works on early mod- ern French national sentiment include Greenfeld, 89-188; Sophie Wahnich, L'impossible citoyen: L'e? tranger dans le discours de la Re? volution franc? aise (Paris, 1997); and the books discussed in David A. Bell, "French Na- tional Identity in the Early Modern Period," Journal of Modern History, LXVIII/1 (1996), 84-113. Steven Englund is currently writing an ambi- tious history of modern French nationalism. Michael Rapport's Nation- ality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of For- eigners, 1789-99 (Oxford, 2000) appeared too late to be consulted for this book.
34. See on this point especially Yardeni, La conscience nationale, and Alphonse Dupront, "Du sentiment national," in M. Franc? ois, ed. , La France et les franc?
