No More Learning

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.
These clashes mostly flared on the question of whether patriotism, and thus a patrie, even existed in France. In 1755, for instance, a journeyman purveyor of Enlightenment, the gadfly priest Gabriel-Franc? ois Coyer, be- wailed the disappearance of the very word patrie from the French lan- guage. It was, he claimed, no longer heard, "in either the country or the cit-
62 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ies, the provinces or the capital, and still less at court. " Coyer saw in this absence the sign of a dangerous decline of civic spirit and the triumph of crass self-interest. 47 Jaucourt echoed his complaint, sometimes word for word, in the Encyclope? die, and so did Rousseau (he did not say the word itself had disappeared, but rather that it had lost its meaning thanks to the disappearance of true patriotic sentiment). 48 Others, however, asserted just the reverse: "Patriotism in France has today reached the highest point of perfection"; "This sentiment is more alive and more generous in the French citizen than it was in the most Patriotic Roman"; "no people is more distinguished in the love of country than the French. "49
The question of the patrie's existence may seem too abstract to have gen- erated significant political passion, but in fact the political stakes behind it were huge. In the seventeenth century, Jean de la Bruye`re had reiterated classical republican assumptions in a famous dictum: "there is no patrie at all under despotism. " Many others echoed him, from d'Aguesseau and Montesquieu down to the journalist Pierre-Nicolas Chantreau's brilliant 1790 diatribe, quoted at the start of this chapter. 50 Lamenting the absence of the patrie, in other words, served as a coded but unsubtle means of ac- cusing the monarchy of despotic tendencies. As a 1787 commentator on things patriotic explained quite clearly: "It has long been complained of that this generous sentiment has died out in France, and this complaint . . . has more than once served to accuse the form of Monarchical Government and its constitution, as suitable only for weakening, even annihilating, love of the patrie. "51 The author was probably thinking of Coyer, who had made his own political sympathies clear enough by remarking that the word patrie survived among only two groups: the "depositories of the law," meaning the parlements, and "men of letters. "52 The parlements themselves occasionally reached the point of warning that if the crown attacked them, "the stability of the laws and the existence of the patrie will be destroyed, and then will commence the reign of universal slavery" (to quote a 1765 re- monstrance of the Parlement of Rouen). 53 The radical parlementaire lawyer Edme-Franc? ois Darigrand similarly asked, in an inflammatory 1763 pam- phlet that earned him a stay in the Bastille: "will the peoples . . . have to abandon their unhappy patrie, bathed as it is in their tears and blood? "54 Before 1771, however, the parlements made more systematic use of the lan- guage of the nation. The polemicists who did most to make patrie a central category in French political culture, and indeed to create a cult of it, owed their allegiance not to the high courts but to Versailles.
The Politics of Patriotism 63 Royal Patriotism
Between 1750 and 1789, the kings of France became patriots. That is to say, their apologists not only insisted, loudly and frequently, that France was indeed a patrie and brimmed with patriotic sentiment; they gave the credit entirely to the king himself. 55 "The name of the patrie can still be pro- nounced," the author of a 1762 speech to the Academy of Lyon insisted, again probably in response to Coyer. "The King and the patrie are two ob- jects that are united, incorporated together . . . in the hearts of the nation, as in the national constitution. "56 Many others argued the same case, in- cluding Coyer's critic the Chevalier d'Arcq, a self-proclaimed defender of the military nobility, who claimed "I cannot distinguish the Prince from the patrie," and a certain Beausobre, who wrote: "He who doesn't love his master, doesn't love his patrie; in vain can we distinguish these two things, they are inseparable. "57 A lawyer named Rossel dilated on the subject ad nauseam in a History of French Patriotism that highlighted the devotion of the French to the monarchy in eight long volumes. So did the contestants in a 1787 essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Cha^lons-sur-Marne, on the subject of how to foster patriotism in monarchies. Entry after entry denied the republican idea that patriotism only existed in republics, and found patriotic love flourishing nowhere so strongly as in France. 58 In a similar vein, the painter Pierre-Alexandre Wille chose to represent French Patriotism (1785) in the figure of a father gesturing towards a bust of Louis XVI at the moment of his son's departure for military service. Similar vi- sual language appeared in Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent's Me? morial pittoresque de la France, and in the many late eighteenth-century images of the "great men of the patrie," which often depicted their subjects as an honor guard surrounding the monarch. 59
Most famously, Buirette de Belloy's phenomenally popular 1765 play, the Siege of Calais, made the intensity of French patriotism and its indis- tinguishability from love of the king its principal theme, as in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. In case later readers failed to get the point, Belloy's eulogist gushed (in a lavish 1779 edition of his works) that Belloy had "taught the French that patriotism does not belong to Repub- lics alone, and that they too . . . bore in their hearts this virtuous senti- ment. "60 The royal ministry, which had encouraged Belloy from the start, showed a grateful vigor in promoting the play, sponsoring free perfor- mances at the Come? die Franc? aise and at garrisons around the country. 61
? 64 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 4. A classic example of royal patriotism, the painting shows a young military officer departing for war as his father gestures toward a bust of King Louis XVI. Pierre-Alexandre Wille, Le patriotisme franc? ais, ou le de? part (French Patriotism, or the Departure), 1785.
The Politics of Patriotism 65
? Like nearly all of the authors quoted above, Belloy also paused to take a good swipe or two at cosmopolitan philosophes--"those hearts frozen and dead to their country," as he put it. 62
Although many of these patriotic works were produced for officially supervised institutions such as the Come? die Franc? aise, the Acade? mie Franc? aise, and provincial academies, it is uncertain how many had direct sponsorship from the ministry. Nonetheless, such a large volume of mate- rial all expressing the same officially sanctioned point of view can only be considered the result of a concerted campaign of royal patriotism, pro- duced in reaction to parlementaire and enlightened critiques of Louis XV's rule. Certainly the crown's opponents themselves perceived it in this man- ner. The generally pro-parlementaire journalist Louis-Se? bastien Mercier, in his utopian 1772 novel The Year 2440, went so far as to call patriotism "a fanaticism invented by the kings and deadly to the universe. "63 Louis Petit de Bachaumont's newsletter, Me? moires secrets, commented tartly on the crown's promotion of the Siege of Calais: "In this way the present govern- ment has profited from Monsieur de Belloy's mania for writing tragedies with French heroes to engender a supposed fanaticism of the nation to- wards its kings, and to make it serve as a vehicle for the introduction of despotism. "64 The use of the word "fanaticism" underscored the connec- tion these critics perceived between the campaign and efforts to stir reli- gious passions.
As we will see in more detail in the next chapter (and as Dziembowski has exhaustively demonstrated), the campaign derived not only from the metaphorical warfare taking place in palaces and courtrooms, but from the very real Seven Years' War against England in the 1750s and 1760s. 65 Dur- ing this period, the ministry made unprecedented efforts to stimulate and publicize public expressions of patriotism, promoting plays like Belloy's, soliciting ostentatious donations to the war effort, and encouraging the publication of violently Anglophobic pamphlets and poetry. Yet even at the height of the war, officials never lost sight of the internal politi- cal stakes, and seized on the potent language of patriotism to discredit parlementaire and philosophique opponents alike. It is hardly a coincidence that they chose as their chief propagandist against Britain a man who had already proved to be their most effective writer against both domestic ene- mies: the caustic and slippery Jacob-Nicolas Moreau (he wrote the virulent anti-philosophe play Les cacouacs, as well as of some of the most important pieces of anti-parlementaire propaganda). Moreau himself recounted that
66 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the royal minister who recruited him in 1755 to write against the British lumped foreign and domestic operations together quite openly. 66 In 1759- 60, Moreau ceased publication of an anti-English broadsheet and launched his new, short-lived newspaper devoted to the praise of French patriotism and to the excoriation of parlements and philosophes: Le Moniteur franc? ois (The French Monitor). 67 The voluminous anti-Enlightenment literature of this period routinely conflated the philosophes with the national enemy across the Channel and equated cosmopolitan indifference to the patrie with treason, pure and simple. 68 "Fanaticism for the patrie is legitimate zeal," a royalist poet from 1767 strikingly declared. And he continued, in anticipation of Saint-Just: "Il faut pour la Patrie une chaleur sublime / Un amour qui soit passion; / Que l'indiffe? rence est un crime / La tie? deur une trahison" [For the Patrie, a sublime heat is needed, a love that is a passion; Here indifference is a crime, lack of enthusiasm amounts to treason]. 69
This royal patriotism, which overshadowed all other use of patriotic lan- guage in France before 1771, was a remarkable phenomenon. In one sense, it harked back to late medieval and Renaissance traditions of glorifying both France and the king, of merging the two within a single, sacred aura. 70 But in several critical ways it would have been inconceivable without the intellectual and material transformations described in the last chapter. Consider, for instance, the crown's use of print to reach "public opinion. " Organized print campaigns had precedents, of course, but now the crown was conceiving its interventions not as something exceptional, a strategy suited for moments of national crisis (such as the Wars of Religion or the Fronde), but as a normal, permanent feature of political life. Rather than just sponsor pamphlets to intervene on particular topics, the royalists now also funded periodicals such as Moreau's Moniteur franc? ois, which aimed to have a continuous and permanent effect. As Moreau himself remarked in the first issue, he saw his task less as political argument than political ed- ucation: "The instruction of men is one of the principles of all political governments. Why should it be neglected in the case of a people over whom opinion itself has so much power? "71 Secondly, in citing the extent of French patriotism as a justification for royal authority, the royal apolo- gists implicitly accepted the argument, enunciated by d'Aguesseau and others, that patriotism constituted a measure of a regime's moral worth. Just like its opponents, the crown was treating the patrie as a foundational concept, a fundamental ground against which to measure other forms of human coexistence.
The Politics of Patriotism 67
? Finally, royalist literature consistently identified "patriotism" not with a political principle, but with an emotion: the love of the French for their kings, as in Belloy's lines about the "adoration" of the king or Beausobre's equation of love for the patrie and love for one's master. In 1749, a year of bitter conflict between Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, the Acade? mie Franc? aise made "the love of the French for their kings" the subject of its annual poetry competition, and the entries sang inflated paeans to the in- tertwined figures of king and country. 72 Down to the end of the old regime, the idea that "the Patriotism of the French [is] principally founded on their love for their kings" (to cite an exemplary 1762 speech by the lawyer Basset de la Marelle) appeared incessantly, like a leitmotif. 73 As Thomas Kaiser has shown, the theme of the mutual love of king and subjects be- came a mainstay of royal ideology under Louis XIV and dominated the propaganda of his successor, who ostentatiously adopted the title "The Well-Beloved" after the demonstrative (if stage-managed) public relief at his recovery from illness in 1744. 74 Kaiser argues that royal apologists first adopted the concept to counter images of Louis XIV as a warrior king who cared more for conquest than for his subjects' welfare.
But the appeal to love needs to be situated not only in relation to the monarchy's immediate political strategies, but to the broader intellectual context of "disenchantment," philosophical skepticism, and suspicion of organized religion. In the eighteenth century, it was becoming more and more difficult to justify absolute monarchy by God's will alone, as royal apologists like Bossuet had tried to do (with an insistence that hinted at desperation). The traditional rituals and rhetoric designed to render the monarchy sacred were losing their effect. 75 Yet replacing scriptural jus- tification with one grounded in secular ideas of natural law and a social contract, even in Hobbes's absolutist version, raised the unacceptable pros- pect of the people demanding the contract's renegotiation ("would the na- tion not have the right to say that it had not entered into any contract? " mused d'Aguesseau in private reflections in 1730). 76 Until the end of the old regime, the crown firmly eschewed any resort to contract theory and natural law. A language of love, accompanied by the predictable family metaphors (the king as "father of the people"), provided a way of side- stepping this dilemma and, in a sense, potentially resacralizing the monar- chy. It presented the bond between king and subject as something that pre- ceded and transcended mere politics, as something unbreakable and above criticism: as an object, in Belloy's words, of "idolatry. " And in the mid-
68 The Cult of the Nation in France
? eighteenth century, it was a natural step for royal apologists to try and strengthen this language further by uniting it with the concept of the patrie, which had itself emerged transformed out of the same turn-of-the- century intellectual crucible and still possessed its strong religious conno- tations.
The Pre-Revolutionary Synthesis
Despite the importance of royal patriotism, until the last two decades of the old regime both patrie and nation still had distinctly limited meanings. The crown made use of these terms for the conservative purpose of de- fending the royal prerogative and silencing its critics. But even the critics invoked them principally to help restore France to an earlier and presum- ably superior state. With nation, they called for the restoration of legal ar- rangements which gave to particular institutions or legal groups a preemi- nent position within the French polity. With patrie, they called for the restoration of a moral community in which individuals worked for the common good. In each case, the practical aim was to alter the balance of power among existing political institutions. The notion that the nation might, through an act of free will, choose to dispense with these institu- tions altogether arose only in the nightmares of the absolutists. Before 1771, it was arguably the term "public opinion" which had a more radical effect in French political debate than either patrie or nation. Public opin- ion lacked the comforting classical familiarity of the one, and the associa- tions with venerable French constitutional arrangements of the other. It re- ferred instead to a new social reality that many of the French found deeply disturbing. Public opinion did not find its embodiment in the person of the king or in familiar institutions like parlements or Estates, but in the new, diffuse realm of newspapers, pamphlets, coffee houses, salons, acade- mies, and other forums which allowed the French to take part in ongoing conversation without much consideration of their formal place in the cor- porate hierarchy of the kingdom.
These equations changed, however, when Louis XV and Lord Chancellor Maupeou broke the parlements, restructuring age-old French institutions in a way that lacked any precedent in French history and law. The so-called coup of 1771 demonstrated not only to the magistrates and their support- ers, but also to a wide spectrum of French readers, that the crown itself no longer respected either the grand principles of French law or the wishes of
The Politics of Patriotism 69
? the public; neither could therefore act as an effective restraint on royal power to prevent monarchical authority from degenerating into despo- tism. From now on, opposition to the crown would have to search for dif- ferent sources of legitimization.
In the Maupeou crisis, the parlements turned to the concept of patrie as a key weapon in their conceptual armory. They began to refer to them- selves as the parti patriote and lamented, as Coyer had done, the apparent extinction of the patrie and patriotic sentiment alike at the king's hands. 77 Thus an anonymous parlementaire pamphleteer complained in 1771, echoing Coyer, that "the word patrie is scarcely known. "78 Other supporters of the high courts referred to the "misfortunes" and "suffering" of the patrie and hailed the magistrates as the "guardians," even the "guardian an- gels" of this fragile and abused entity. 79 They repeatedly emphasized their own "patriotic sentiments," taking advantage of the enormously wider cur- rency that the vocabulary had acquired as a result of the program of royal patriotism (in this sense, at least, the program can be said to have rather spectacularly backfired). 80
The rise in the use of the words "patriote" and "patriotique" was par- ticularly dramatic and significant--in the French texts available in the principal electronic database, their use increased nearly fourfold between 1765-1769 and 1770-1774. 81 Just as the birth of the adjective "revolution- ary" after 1789 signified a new conception of "revolution" itself as an active process, driven by human will, rather than as something beyond human control (the sense in which the word had formerly been used), so the use of "patriote" and "patriotique" suggested that the fatal corruption and de- cline of the patrie was not merely something to be lamented, but some- thing that could be fought against and even reversed through political ac- tion. 82 The patriotes rejected the royal claims that France already was a patrie, but, they claimed, it could still become one. And they therefore held out the prospect that this form of sacred, ideal human community, in which affective and moral ties bound individuals together into a single family, could be created on this earth. In this promise of a new birth of pa- triotism they rejected the classical republican tenet that the patrie could only decline, not progress. The patrie, always treated as a political artifact because of its close association with republics, was now also perceived as something whose reconstruction was still a possible and indeed an urgent task.
Meanwhile, in their discussions of the nation, these dissident writers be-
70 The Cult of the Nation in France
? gan to consider political options from outside their well-worn legal play- book, and some started to embrace a full-blown theory of absolute na- tional sovereignty in which the nation could indeed freely choose its form of government. "It is the nation which is sovereign," wrote the Comte de Lauragais in one of the most popular pamphlets of the crisis. "It is so by its power, and by the nature of things. "83 The anonymous L'inauguration de Pharamond (referring to a mythical king of the Franks) added that "The Nation has the right to convoke itself. "84 Even an innately conservative and consensus-seeking lawyer like Le Paige belatedly acknowledged that the parlements could not take the place of the Estates General, whose convoca- tion after more than 150 years he suddenly deemed desirable. 85 His more adventurous Jansenist colleagues Claude Mey, Gabriel-Nicolas Maultrot, and Armand-Gaston Camus started to draw on natural law as well as on classical republican ideas in their hugely influential 1772 Maximes du droit public franc? ois. 86
Going even further than these Jansenists, some particularly radical law- yers (anticipating the leading role their profession would take in 1789) started infusing the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract into the mainstream of French political discussion. In 1775, the young Parisian Jacques-Claude Martin de Mariveaux published L'ami des lois, which re- hearsed the familiar potted histories of the Franks and their successors but then went much farther. "Man is born free," declared Martin vigorously if not originally, and added for good measure that "the French Nation has a social contract" that gave it the right to choose whatever form of govern- ment it wished, without reference to any original foundation. 87 In the same year the Bordeaux lawyer Guillaume-Joseph Saige published his influential Rousseauian Cate?
chisme du citoyen, which argued the point even more ex- plicitly: "For there is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will; apart from that, everything is absolutely contingent and depends, for its form as for its existence, on the supreme will of the nation. "88 While Saige also genuflected toward the Franks and ancient French institutions, his defense of absolute national sovereignty made them entirely redundant. If the nation could at any mo- ment choose to structure the political body exactly as it wished, then French history and French law had no necessary claims on it. They no longer seemed to define the essence of the nation, as they had done in the 1750s, and in the shift there lurked a terrifying question: just what, if not history and law, did make the French into a nation?
For a brief period it seemed as if the question might go unposed. In
The Politics of Patriotism 71
? 1774 Louis XV died, and his young successor, Louis XVI, recalled the old parlements, who returned in gaudy triumph to their palaces of justice. The clock seemed to be moving backwards. But while the move succeeded in its immediate purpose of generating a halo of easy popularity for the new king, there was no return to the status quo ante, and the halo soon faded. 89 Indeed, while the self-proclaimed patriotes saluted the magistrates, they no longer considered them the nation's eternal guardians but only its best available allies. For a few years an uneasy internal peace prevailed, aided by France's revenge over Britain in the War of American Independence, and the ability of Controller General Jacques Necker to disguise the cata- strophic situation of French finances. But by 1786 the French state had started on an inexorable slide toward bankruptcy and political crisis, and the old fissures quickly reopened.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, the concepts of patrie and nation emerged as the principal sources of political legitimacy invoked by nearly all political writers, while "public opinion" fell into something of an eclipse. 90 In the period 1787-1789 alone, the words "patrie" or "nation" appeared in the titles of no fewer than 520 works. 91 An enterprising publisher, reissuing a famous Huguenot diatribe against Louis XIV originally called Les soupirs de la France esclave (The Sighs of Enslaved France) retitled it, simply, Les voeux d'un patriote (Wishes of a Patriot). 92 With state authority evaporating, patrie and nation served most effectively to mobilize readers for possible political action. For a time, the traditional juridical forms of argument about the nation remained popu- lar. The Franks and Gauls did not disappear from the scene, and "patriots" and supporters of the ministry alike continued to wrestle in the archives of medieval institutions right down to the beginning of 1789, not infre- quently choking on the dust they stirred up. 93 Writers continued to use the word "nation" in a narrowly legalistic sense, although often taking the argument to new lengths (Pierre-Jean Agier's Le jurisconsulte national, for instance, urged the Estates General to reclaim full power from the king, in the name of the ancient constitution). 94 Others sought to bolster their claims with both natural and positive law, in the manner of Martin and Saige. Comte Emmanuel d'Antraigues's enormously popular 1788 Me? moire sur les Etats-ge? ne? raux, for instance, made clear that the French had "other titles to their national liberty than those covered by eight centu- ries of archival dust," but nonetheless discussed "the precious remains of our first institutions" at length. 95
Yet even as the form of argument remained familiar, the stakes grew
72 The Cult of the Nation in France
? infinitely higher. In the "pre-revolution" of 1786-1789, most "patriotic" writers no longer invoked the "patrie" and the "nation" merely in the hopes of altering the balance of power among existing institutions. With the state collapsing, they did so in order to justify the wholesale transfor- mation of the political system. 96 Significantly, some of them now tried to do away with the very label "patriot" because of its association with the parlements, which they no longer considered an essential part of the French constitution, and adopted instead the name of "national. " They did so even after Louis XVI, desperate to institute financial reforms, again at- tempted a draconian restructuring of the parlements in May 1788, provok- ing a virtual revolt on the courts' behalf. The Parisian lawyer Jacques Godard, secretary to one of the leaders of the former "patriot" party, wrote to a cousin soon after this latest "coup" that "there are now in Paris and in the whole of the Kingdom the names of three parties: that of the royalists, that of the parlementaires and that of the Nationals. These latter two have made common cause; the Nationals hope that this alliance will be long, and that at its return the parlement, instructed by this crisis, will remain at- tached to good principles. "97 In the summer the parlements again returned, and Louis XVI capitulated to the louder and more violent protests and de- clared he would finally summon the Estates General to meet. But the Parlement of Paris, instead of remaining true to what Godard considered "good principles," ruled in September that the Estates should meet "ac- cording to the forms of 1614"--that is, clergy, nobility, and commoners would each have the same number of delegates, and each estate would vote separately, condemning the great bulk of the French population to minor- ity status. At this point the patriote alliance shattered completely, and its bourgeois members, allied with a good number of liberal nobles, turned their attention away from attacking "royal despotism" to denounce a new and virulent enemy: "aristocracy," embodied first and foremost by the parlements themselves.
These decisive events opened the way for a true revolutionary move- ment claiming to act in the name of the nation. During the eight months that separated the Paris Parlement's decision about the form of the Estates from the actual opening of that body in May 1789, a pamphlet debate erupted whose volume and intellectual audacity had no precedent in French history. The king's invitation to his subjects to express themselves, which accompanied his summoning of the Estates, had been taken as a declaration of freedom of the press. At the same time, propertied men
The Politics of Patriotism 73
? came together to elect deputies and formally express their grievances and proposals for reform. In this great blooming of political expression, the party Godard called the Nationals relentlessly advanced the idea that ev- erything depended on the supreme will of the nation. Their most impor- tant manifesto was Emmanuel Sieye`s's brilliant What Is the Third Estate? , which presented the deputies to the Third Estate as the nation's true repre- sentatives. Sieye`s, more than any other author, set the terms of the early revolutionary debate, firmly establishing the nation not only as the highest authority in France, but as an authority that could act with complete free- dom through the intermediary of elected deputies. 98 The stage was now set for the first great act of the Revolution: the Third Estate's momentous arrogation of the title National Assembly, at Sieye`s's own instigation, on June 17, 1789.
But what was the nation? Could the familiar historical legal and histori- cal definitions still prevail, and if not, what could take their place? In the months before the convocation of the Estates, the questions could not be ignored. Moreover, as the French pondered them, the nation came to seem as fragile, as threatened, and as much in need of construction as the patrie. As we have seen, more and more French writers, including Sieye`s himself, started to describe the nation as something which did not yet exist.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that during these same debates, the traditional, juridical means of argument was used not only in reference to France itself, but to individual French provinces, and in a manner which called the existence of the nation itself into question from another direc- tion. In 1788-89, it was feared, widely--and as it turned out, correctly-- that the king or the Estates General might take drastic and unprecedented measures against traditional provincial liberties and privileges. In re- sponse, self-appointed spokesmen for many provinces asserted the utter inviolability of these liberties, over even the unity of France itself, and they claimed for the provinces the status not just of "nations" (a terminology that was not uncommon in the eighteenth century) but of "nations" equal to France itself. Supporters of two regional parlements had first experi- mented with these arguments during the coup of 1771, in pamphlets enti- tled Manifesto to the Normans and Manifesto to the Bretons. The first of these asserted that "we [the Norman people] are bound to France by agreements which are no more and no less authentic than . . . all other treaties between nations," while the second similarly stressed the "volun- tary" agreement by which Brittany had passed under French domination. 99
74 The Cult of the Nation in France
? In 1788-89, these pamphlets were reprinted and widely emulated. The no- bility of the Norman capital of Rouen, for instance, now referred to Nor- mandy's "national constitution. " The magistrates of Pau, in the southwest, described themselves as inhabitants of "a country [pays] foreign to France, although ruled by the same king," and talked of the Pyrenean "nations" of Navarre and Be? arn. The former mayor of Strasbourg, Johann von Tu? rck- heim, asked: "will Lower Alsace have the courage and resolution to with- draw from a French republic . . . to declare that it was subject to the French crown but not the French nation, and intends to preserve its rights and lib- erties? " Similar claims were made in Provence. 100
To a certain extent, the language is deceptive. Not only was it not un- heard of for French provinces to be called "nations"; what was at issue was not fear of losing irreducibly unique provincial identities, but specific pro- vincial legal privileges. Lest the texts be taken as examples of regional na- tionalism, consider that despite the vast differences in language, law, his- torical tradition, and social structure between France's regions at the time, no serious movement for regional independence arose either before or during the Revolution, even at the worst moments of bloody civil war in 1793-94. Even when German-speaking Alsatians were thrown out of office and threatened with mass deportation, no movement for secession arose in Alsace. 101 Yet the pre-revolutionary declarations did explicitly, if briefly, raise the specter of France literally dissolving into smaller units. Moreover, by taking the juridical mode of argument and using it to question the na- tional unity on which the parlements' original juridical critique of the crown had been premised, they arguably undercut the credibility of the juridical language in general.
At the same time, as we will see more fully in Chapter 5, French political literature was giving plentiful expression to another powerful image: that of an "exhausted France," of a corrupt, servile, and degenerate nation on its deathbed. 102 This image, whose form owed much to Rousseau's pessimism, also dated its first appearance to the "coup" of 1771, but in 1788-89 it be- came ubiquitous. "O my Nation! To what degree of abasement have you fallen," wrote the future Jacobin Je? ro^me Pe? tion in his exemplary Avis aux Franc? ois. 103 A 1789 address to the Estates General adopted a particularly despairing tone: "Is there a nation more immoral than the French? Is there one that misunderstands and violates the laws with such le? ge`rete? ? . . . When one has grown old in corruption, one can no longer be healed, and when the maladies are at their height, the sick man shudders at the sight of the
The Politics of Patriotism 75
? doctor. So, messeigneurs, abandon the present generation. " Countless other authors experimented with variations on this dismal theme. 104
There thus arrived an extraordinary moment in the history of French national sentiment: unprecedented claims on behalf of the nation together with unprecedented doubts about it, all in a context in which leaders of the nascent revolutionary movement were also loudly lamenting France's fail- ure to constitute a true patrie. It was precisely in this condition of semantic flux that the existence of the nation itself could be questioned and that France's regional diversity could come to appear, for the first time, as a sig- nificant political problem. 105 At the very moment of the nation's political apotheosis, no one seemed to know what a nation was. A certain Toussaint Guiraudet (in obvious imitation of Sieye`s), even made the question the ti- tle of a pamphlet: Qu'est-ce que la nation et qu'est-ce que la France? (What Is the Nation and What Is France? )106
And at this moment when state authority seemed to be disappearing into a vacuum, few of the French felt capable of responding to the ques- tion by opening up their creaky volumes of legal history. Childebert and Pharamond were returning to the realms of antiquarianism and myth. 107 In the early months of 1789 invocations of the national past did not disap- pear, but they now tended to come without their previous legal historical specificity. Disquisitions on the punctuation of Carolingian capitularies were increasingly superseded by Rousseauian celebrations of the centu- ries of Gaulish or medieval vigor and strength that had supposedly pre- ceded the decadence and lethargy of the absolute monarchy. The national past of antiquarians and lawyers was giving way to the national past of Ro- mantic poets and historians. But this was not to be a simple return to every aspect of the status quo ante. While the authors used words like "revival," "restoration," and "recovery," by far the most important term was "regen- eration," which implied a new, original creation out of old and degener- ate matter. 108 Regeneration was an active process of nation construction, driven by political will.
Already in early 1789, the ongoing debates gave a sense of the different ways the French revolutionaries would attempt to define and construct the nation. In some passages, which reflected the influence of the physiocrats, the process of construction seemed to resemble an engineering problem, with the nation treated as a collection of millions of individual human building blocks. 109 "By a nation," insisted the Parisian lawyer Pierre-Louis de Lacretelle, "can be understood only the sum total of citizens who belong
76 The Cult of the Nation in France
? there by permanent residence, by landed property, or through an industry which makes them necessary. " Guiraudet similarly insisted that "the nation is not a compound of Orders, but a society of approximately twenty- five million men living under laws that it has given itself . . . France is not a compound of Provinces, but a space of twenty-five thousand square leagues. " Most powerfully, Sieye`s himself argued that the deputies to the Third Estate were the true representatives of the nation because they repre- sented the vast majority of the population and the most important "social interests. "110 A conception of political representation as the election of dep- uties on behalf of mathematically delineated constituencies was beginning to challenge the older concept of representation as the embodiment of cor- porate entities. 111
Yet if the idea of constructing a nation sometimes drove authors to speak in the accents of the engineer and statistician, it more often drew from them--as it had done from the architects of "royal patriotism"--de- liberate echoes of prophecy and the realm of the sacred. The term "regen- eration" itself, which was a key word of revolutionary vocabulary from 1789 on, offers a case in point, for it had been used, until shortly before, mostly in theological contexts. Although it occasionally signified the repair of injured bodily tissue, before the mid-century it most often meant bap- tism or resurrection. It began to pass into political usage with the Marquis de Mirabeau's L'ami des hommes, and achieved wide currency in the late 1780s. As Alyssa Sepinwall has written: "Regeneration was becoming a dis- placement of the Gospels . . . Regenerating was no longer only the province of God, but an operation which could be directed by humans"--although the process remained quasi-miraculous. 112 Similarly, to quote Jean Staro- binski: "After having made such a dark and apparently irreversible diag- nosis of their age, Rousseau and his disciples could only imagine the liber- ating change as a sort of miracle, on the religious model: the image of the resurrection, of the second coming, of regeneration, haunted them. "113 At this moment of uncertainty over the very existence of the nation and the future of the polity, French writers, accustomed to ordering the world around them without reference to God, found themselves almost instinc- tively attempting to touch their readers with words still redolent of Scrip- ture.
In sum, by the time the Estates General actually met in May 1789, the "nation" on behalf of which the deputies would imminently wage a Revo- lution had been called radically into doubt, but at the same time hopes had
The Politics of Patriotism 77
? been raised that one could still be built. In fact, in the optimistic early years of the Revolution it would be possible to believe that the construction had already, painlessly, almost miraculously taken place. Recall Chantreau's re- mark that France "really became a nation" in 1789. 114 And by the same to- ken, the early revolutionaries were now willing to admit that France had also, finally, become a true patrie. Madame Roland, in 1790, used the phrase "since we acquired a patrie," and the University of Paris, in the same year, declared that "the French have sensed that they now have a patrie. "115 The patrie, too, was the object of regeneration, promised since the 1770s and now apparently accomplished. Revolutionary radicals would soon be disabused of this easy optimism, a disappointment that led them to em- brace a far more ambitious and severe program of construction.
These shifts left room for enormous disagreement about both the patrie and the nation, particularly in regard to the position of the king within them. Throughout the Revolution, forces on what was becoming known as the right would maintain the tenets of the old regime's program of royal patriotism, insisting on the inseparability of king and patrie, and king and nation. 116 On the left, the king came to appear not only detachable from both, but positively inimical to both. Their survival required nothing less than his death. Meanwhile, the concept of regeneration was ambiguous enough to provoke far more arguments than it resolved. In sum, what had taken place before the Revolution, and particularly since Maupeou's 1771 "coup," was not the development of a single, overriding concept of the na- tion or the patrie. Rather, it was the generation of those ideological ele- ments out of which the revolutionaries would forge their own (often clash- ing) patriotic and nationalist doctrines. These doctrines would often bear more than a tint of millenarianism and would blaze so brightly across Eu- rope that Chantreau and Madame Roland (and Casanova) could be for- given for thinking that nothing like a nation or a patrie had existed in France before.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
CHAPTER 3
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
Aux armes, citoyens!
--denis-ponce ecouchard (lebrun), "ode aux franc? ais" (angers, 1762)
Va, pour t'entrede? truire, armer tes bataillons
Et de ton sang impur abreuver tes sillons.
[Go, to destroy yourself, arm your battalions,
And water your furrows with your impure blood].
--claude-rigobert lefebvre de beauvray, adresse a` la nation angloise (1757)
? In the early morning of May 28, 1754, in the woods of what is now south- western Pennsylvania, a killing took place. The victims, a thirty-six-year- old French-Canadian officer named Joseph Coulon de Jumonville and nine soldiers under his command, had pitched camp for the night on the way from their base at Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) to Britain's Fort Necessity, more than 40 miles to the south. Although supposedly at peace, France and Britain were each building chains of forts to support their rival claims to the great stretches of land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, in the great game of military chess familiar from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Jumonville's mission was to instruct the British to withdraw immediately from what the French considered their territory. At Fort Necessity, however, Seneca Indian scouts had not only in- formed the inexperienced, twenty-two-year-old British commander about Jumonville's approach, but persuaded him it was the prelude to a French attack (the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson, known as the Half King, had a grudge of his own against the French). The commander therefore moved to intercept the French with a detachment of soldiers, and they crept up on Jumonville's encampment at dawn. It is unclear exactly who opened
78
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 79
? fire, but after a few confused volleys, the French were quickly overcome. Jumonville, wounded but alive, died under the Seneca leader's hatchet. The Senecas took several French scalps, and the newly seasoned British officer wrote boastfully to his brother back home in Virginia: "I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound. "
This incident has long been familiar to North American historians. It marked not only the opening skirmish in what would soon turn into the Seven Years' War, but also a key moment in the career of the cocky young British officer--a man by the name of George Washington. In fact, it nearly brought Washington's career to a premature end. Scarcely a month after Jumonville's death, a large French force--led, dramatically enough, by Jumonville's brother--captured Fort Necessity in a pitched battle with Washington's forces. They then forced Washington to sign a confession that he had "assassinated" an ambassador traveling under a flag of truce. Only Washington's slippery insistence that he had not understood the French text he had signed allowed him to avoid a damaging scandal. His detractors and admirers have argued about the incident ever since. 1
Jumonville's death, for all its importance to the outbreak of hostili- ties and to Washington's career, also won a prominent place in a very dif- ferent theater of operations. During the Seven Years' War, the French and British alike made wide use of printed propaganda, and the French side used Jumonville's death as a leitmotif, a perfect illustration of the enemy's treacherous conduct. 2 Pamphlets, songs, journals, and supposedly impar- tial collections of documents stridently condemned the English and Wash- ington (sometimes misidentified as "Wemcheston"), while enshrining the dead officer as a martyr of the patrie. 3 The incident even gave rise to a sixty-page long epic poem, Antoine-Le? onard Thomas's ferociously patri- otic Jumonville. A few lines suffice to give the general flavor:
Par un plomb homicide indignement perce? ,
Aux pieds de ses bourreaux il tombe renverse? . Trois fois il souleva [sic] sa pesante paupie`re,
Trois fois son oeil e? teint se ferme a` la lumie`re.
De la France en mourant le tendre souvenir,
Vient charmer sa grande a^me a` son dernier soupir. Il meurt: foule? s aux pieds d'une troupe inhumaine Ses membres de? chire? s palpitent sur l'are`ne. [Unworthily pierced by a murderous bullet
80 The Cult of the Nation in France
? He falls at the feet of his executioners.
Three times he lifts his heavy eyelid,
Three times his dulled eye closes to the light.
In dying, the tender memory of France
Comes to delight his great soul.
He dies: trampled under the feet of an inhuman band, His torn members throb on the ground]. 4
The poem launched Thomas on a successful literary career and was singled out in a popular Swiss book on "national pride" as the nec plus ultra of French hatred of foreigners. 5 So it is no surprise that as early as 1757, the Jesuit newspaper Me? moires de Tre? voux could comment that "all the world has learned of the treatment meted out to the Sieur de Jumonville. "6 The unfortunate officer, his undistinguished life now eclipsed by his sensational leaving of it, gained such a posthumous reputation that collective biogra- phies of "great Frenchmen," published in profusion in the waning decades of the ancien re? gime, included him right alongside such icons of French military glory as Bayard and Duguesclin. 7 Some of the poetry lamenting Jumonville's death remained well known enough in 1792 for Rouget de Lisle to crib from it in writing the Marseillaise (see, for instance, the epi- graphs to this chapter). 8
To twentieth-century eyes such atrocity literature seems quite unre- markable--indeed, by our woefully jaded standards, rather tame, and so it has been largely ignored. 9 Yet it constituted another arena in which the French seized on the concepts of the nation and the patrie and put them to new uses. In this instance, they did so in response to the changing demands of warfare, and one effect was to change perceptions and representations of warfare itself. The war literature of the 1750s and 1760s, for the first time in French history, presented an international conflict neither as a duel between royal houses nor as a clash of religions, but as a battle between ir- reconcilable nations.
As in the case of the constitutional conflicts, on one level this shift illus- trates the progressive detachment of French political culture from its for- mer religious context. In contrast to the stridently anti-Catholic propa- ganda flowing from the other side of the Channel, French war literature rarely mentioned the religious differences between France and England-- despite the survival of anti-Protestant bigotry in France, and despite suspi- cions that some French Protestants may have had illicit contacts with the
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 81
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 5.