No More Learning

The problems that linguistic diversity might have posed for the peasants' active participation in politics--for acting as elec- tors or elected officials, for instance--received far less attention. "The peo- ple must understand the laws to sanction and obey them," Gre? goire wrote in his report to the Convention. 146 His correspondents echoed this idea, and again and again voiced the fear that translating the written law would expose it to the danger of mistranslation, whether innocent or malevolent. Chabot cautioned that "an insidiously translated word can totally change the meaning of a law. " Fonvielhe, a cure? of Bergerac, wrote: "However well the law is explained to the people, they will interpret it badly, they will sus- pect the fidelity of the translation . . . they will stick to their own ideas, in- terpret it themselves according to their own personal interests. "147 At Aix, in 1790, certain members of the Jacobin club opposed the public explana- tion of laws in Provenc? al on the grounds that "only the legislator has the right to interpret the law . . . it can happen that the instructor without meaning to can make a mistake, or even that a well-explained decree will be poorly understood by an almost entirely illiterate audience. "148
These warnings suggest that the radical revolutionaries found them- selves in much the same situation vis-a`-vis linguistic difference as Protestant reformers who insisted that individual believers read holy Scrip- ture for themselves. If what mattered was access to a text endowed with quasi-sacred qualities, then all citizens needed to know the language in which the text was written. (The revolutionaries assumed that a perfectly clear, rational legislation would need no particular legal expertise to be un- derstood. ) This need would have seemed particularly great at the height of the Terror. When deception and treason seemed to lurk almost behind ev- ery visage, representatives of the people like Gre? goire and Chabot could no more imagine entrusting the political salvation of the citizenry to poten- tially deceitful translators than pious Protestants could imagine entrusting the care of their souls to Catholic priests. In these circumstances, regardless of the practical difficulties facing Gre? goire's plan to eliminate patois, the
196 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Convention could hardly refuse its support or refrain from acting to dis- courage translation wherever possible.
To conclude, then, although the French revolutionary engagement with the language issue did not derive from religious precedents alone, in a real sense these precedents structured the debates and lurked behind them at every stage. The initial efforts to use patois to spread the revolutionary message followed from the evangelizing enterprises of the Counter-Refor- mation clergy (and indeed were partly carried out by a portion of that same clergy, who tried for a time to mix the old and new gospels). Later attempts to impose linguistic uniformity arose in part from suspicion that ill-intentioned priests were using patois as a sort of occult, mysterious tool to control a superstitious and ignorant peasantry. These efforts also stemmed, however, from much the same concerns about the relationship of the common people to the law as those that were first articulated by Protestants, concerns which did not lose their relevance when linguistic di- versity became a secular, rather than religious issue. The revolutionaries were seeking to seize the linguistic power of the priest for themselves, and this meant either destroying or seizing control of his occult language: pa- tois. In the Year II, they opted decisively for the former, just as Luther had done before them.
If the religious precedents dominated in this manner, they did so above all because, during the Revolution, the question of linguistic diversity was essentially a rural question, and the world of the peasant was still the world of the priest. For revolutionaries seeking to reach into the hearts and minds of the peasant masses and to effect what amounted to a mass con- version, the priests offered the only available model. At the same time, the priest himself remained the dominant cultural influence in the country- side, and had to be overcome if the Revolution were to triumph. Peasants might not have had salons and cabinets de lecture and academies struc- turing their cultural lives, the way educated city dwellers did, but, as Gre? goire's correspondents themselves readily attested, they had a curate who relayed news, told them what (if anything) to read, and possibly even made notes on their grammar and vocabulary. In a real sense, he was their salon and cabinet de lecture and "Acade? mie de Patois. " He gave a structure to their cultural lives, and the linguistic reformers knew they could not pursue their own program without either winning him over or in some way replacing him.
Until 1789, the priests carrying out their projects of evangelization in lo-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 197
? cal languages operated in virtually a separate sphere from elite discussions of the nation and the patrie, but the coming of the Revolution marked the eventual doom of their work on behalf of France's many "maternal lan- guages. " Thereafter, a state newly committed to molding the diverse popu- lations of France into a single nation ran unavoidably, and at full speed, into the previous efforts of the Catholic clergy to mold them all into a sin- gle church. It was at this moment that the French state came to share the clergy's perception of France as radically multilingual, and also to interpret multilingualism as a potent barrier to the construction of a properly revo- lutionary nation. And it was at this moment, therefore, that the idea of French as a uniform national language, rather than just the language of an educated elite, acquired the powerful ideological charge which it has re- tained ever since. As a result, the regional languages have now become vir- tually extinct (with--again--the exception of Alsace, which spent much of the Third Republic under German rule). Recent reforms by the Fifth Re- public allowing them to be taught in public schools only underline how small a threat they now pose. Indeed, if Hyacinthe Sermet were to return today to Toulouse and deliver once again his July 14 sermon, he would find virtually no one capable of understanding him.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
Toward the Present Day and the End of Nationalism
We do not have to renounce the nation. France cannot live without its own identity. The French people cannot live as a people whose destiny is to melt away among others.
--lionel jospin, interviewed in le monde, january 7, 1999
? "We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians. " Historians of nation- alism delight in quoting this famous saying of the Risorgimento leader Massimo d'Azeglio, but usually only to echo his own point, namely that the formal creation of the Italian nation had little meaning to most of its new citizens. 1 Whatever their formal nationality, they remained first and foremost, in language, customs, historical traditions, and political alle- giances, inhabitants of their villages and regions: Sicilians, Piedmontese, Tuscans, Calabrians, Romans, Umbrians, Venetians; not "Italians. "
Yet the saying is important for another reason. It perfectly and concisely expresses what I have argued in this book lies at the heart of modern na- tionalism: the idea of the nation as a political artifact whose construction takes precedence over all other political tasks. This idea is today utterly fa- miliar. In the catalogue of the Library of Congress, the phrase "nation- building" itself appears in the titles of no fewer 334 books, going back as far as 1902 and dealing with subjects ranging from Estonian architecture to the Singapore police. 2 Yet this familiarity has bred a forgetfulness of ori- gins. The idea of taking a population, en masse, and transforming every- thing about it--from political allegiances to dress, manners, and daily lan- guage--so as to "build a nation" is not an eternal feature of human history, but a specifically modern phenomenon. Before 1750 or so, the idea of im- posing the same language and "the same, uniform ideas" (Rabaut's phrase) on Basque shepherds and Breton fishermen, Picard farm laborers and
198
Conclusion 199
? Lyonnais servants, Parisian lawyers and Marseilles merchants, to say noth- ing of Versailles courtiers, would have struck observers as self-evidently absurd. It was only in the later eighteenth century that it became thinkable, as Marie-Joseph Che? nier put it, "to form Frenchmen, to endow the na- tion with its own, unique physiognomy. " It was this shift which made nationalism itself possible: the shift from treating nations as organic bod- ies that grow and wither according to biological rhythms, to treating them as man-made entities that humans freely create through the exercise of political will.
I have argued that nationalism took shape in France in the eighteenth century in response to a dynamic that was primarily, although by no means exclusively, religious. Building on the work of several philosophers and social theorists, I suggested that in the decades around the year 1700, a series of religious, philosophical, political and material changes combined to produce a fundamental shift in the way educated French men and women saw the world around them. They came to perceive God as absent from the sphere of human affairs. They felt the need to exclude potentially homicidal religious passions from all but carefully delineated areas of hu- man activity. And they experienced material and political changes which made it possible for them to think of France as a uniform and homo- geneous space. These far-reaching cultural shifts allowed them to imagine forms of harmonious human coexistence whose ordering principles did not derive from any entity or authority external to the human community itself. An important part of this change was the birth or transformation of foundational concepts that allowed the French to represent these forms of coexistence, including the concepts of socie? te? , civilisation, public, and also nation and patrie.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, these concepts were devel- oped and contested in a variety of contexts. Nation and patrie were at the heart of powerful disputes over the nature of the French constitution. They were systematically deployed by the monarchy to mobilize resources for the war effort against Britain during the Seven Years' War. And they were at the heart of the "cult of great men" which had so prominent a place in French culture at the end of the old regime. As a result, by the time the French monarchy shuffled toward collapse in the 1780s, nation and patrie had emerged as the key organizing principles in French political debate, put forward loudly and insistently as justification and legitimation for nearly all political claims. Yet precisely as the regime did collapse, opening
200 The Cult of the Nation in France
? up the awesome question of how to replace it, doubts arose concerning the French nation's very existence. The word nation was coming to signify not merely a particular group of people living on a particular territory, but an intense political and spiritual union of like-minded citizens--a union that manifestly remained to be built, and whose construction stood logi- cally prior to all other political tasks. The Revolution itself therefore came to embody the odd paradox at the heart of modern nationalism: claiming as justification and legitimation a nation which, as even its adherents admit, is not yet there.
What would it take to "make Frenchmen"? In 1789, the more republi- can-minded of the revolutionaries still thought of the problem in largely classical terms, essentially treating France as an ancient city-state writ large, and prescribing measures that a Pericles or Cicero would have found appropriate for stimulating patriotic, civic devotion: spectacles, in the form of festivals and theater; speeches, statuary, and inscriptions celebrat- ing the great men of the past; some form of civic religion. Rousseau, of course, had advocated precisely these measures in his political works. As I have argued, all these measures also had important Catholic precedents, although they went largely unacknowledged as such.
But the radicalization of the Revolution forever altered the terms of the debate, and, ironically, forced France's would-be nation-builders to em- brace far more directly and intensely the example of the institution they most despised: the Roman Catholic Church. For during the Revolution it became clear that building the nation was not, and could never be, the same thing as building a classical republican city-state. It was something that re- quired not only a transformation of the character of some twenty-eight million human beings spread over a large territory, but even more impor- tant, the homogenization of those twenty-eight million human beings, the reduction of their tremendous diversity to a single, national essence, and the overcoming of supposed mass ignorance. Making Frenchmen did not just entail turning a small population of sociable, elegant, pleasure-loving fops into grave, sober republican citizens. It required giving a civic educa- tion to millions of people still believed to be in thrall to the worst supersti- tions, uneducated--indeed heavily illiterate--and a great many speaking little or no French. Faced with this monumental task, the revolutionaries adopted the methods of the Reformation-era priesthood, proposing to send their own well-drilled republican versions of the Jesuits out into the countryside to teach, persuade, and indoctrinate by every possible means,
Conclusion 201
? and to provide the diverse population with a common education, a com- mon set of allegiances, and a common language.
The radical revolutionaries did not come close to succeeding in this goal. In the midst of war against external and internal enemies alike and in the throes of economic collapse, they did not have the resources to build chains of boarding schools or to send armies of French-language teachers into the provinces. Indeed, by far the most successful instrument of na- tional integration created by the radical revolutionaries was one that was never thought of primarily in these terms, and in which patriotic educa- tion, while provided, took a back seat to more immediate and prosaic tasks: the army. Here, men drafted from the various provinces of France, kept away from home for months or years, speaking French, singing re- publican songs, and receiving the occasional patriotic lesson or group reading of Jacobin newspapers, found a unity and forged a common iden- tity that civilian institutions were as yet incapable of imparting to the gen- eral population. 3
Yet despite its failure to achieve integration, the revolutionary program remains a milestone in the history of nationalism, for it not only engen- dered the idea of building a homogeneous, unified nation in a modern, di- verse, European polity, but provided a practical plan for doing so, modeled heavily on the practical, and at least partially successful efforts of the Ref- ormation-era clergy to reshape the peasantry into a new community of be- lievers. The ideas first developed in the crucible of revolutionary conflict would resound throughout the history of France, and beyond France, down to the present day. D'Azeglio's saying about making Italians, uncon- sciously echoing Che? nier's about making Frenchmen, is itself a good piece of evidence for this diffusion. 4
During the two centuries since the Revolution, French nationalism has hardly remained static or uncontested. In the early nineteenth century, virtually all its forms took a strongly historical turn. Whereas the radical revolutionaries had briefly envisaged the construction of the nation as an entirely new process, set upon foundations swept clean of the corrupt his- torical detritus of despotism and feudalism, nineteenth-century national- ists for the most part preferred the language of "regeneration" and "recov- ery. " Like many of their eighteenth-century predecessors, they envisaged a new structure, but one lovingly put together out of hallowed, ancient material. In keeping with their counterparts across Europe, they engaged
202 The Cult of the Nation in France
? in a massive effort of recuperating, preserving, and displaying what now came to be called the nation's heritage or patrimony, including folklore, artworks, music, monuments, costumes, and historical personalities such as Joan of Arc. The construction of the nation through the rediscovery of its past animated new cultural forms ranging from the museum to the sou- venir shop to the postage stamp. Of course, much of this supposed redis- covery amounted to pure invention. 5
This historical turn also helped open the door for a new, if limited, toleration of regional diversity even among committed republicans. As Gre? goire himself had believed (following Oberlin and other local savants), insofar as patois reflected the unchanging mental world of the peasant, it offered a glimpse into the remote past and thus deserved study and preser- vation. 6 Radical republicans of the late nineteenth century saw no contra- diction in advocating the universal teaching of French and also supporting the folkloric Occitan revival movement known as the Fe? librige, which treated the southern dialects not as potential languages of state, busi- ness, or education, but as living, oral museum exhibits (its leader, Fre? de? ric Mistral, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his pastoral writings in Provenc? al). When coupled with the Romantic movement's celebration of countryside and wilderness, this new attitude towards the regions fostered a widespread perception and celebration of France as a large patrie consist- ing of a mosaic of distinct, but organically linked "little patries. "7
Within this broad framework, a new variety of French nationalism emerged which defined itself in direct opposition to the republican, revo- lutionary version. This monarchical, ultra-Catholic nationalism, expressed most forcefully in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writ- ings of Charles Maurras, Maurice Barre`s, and the political platforms of the far-right Action Franc? aise, saw the national past not merely as a heritage, but as a literal destination. 8 For them, France's regional diversity in no sense constituted an obstacle to be overcome. Regional cultures were to be powerfully and consciously strengthened, not merely to be celebrated as folklore. The Third Republic's efforts to reduce France's natural variety represented, from this point of view, the true alien presence in French life. Going further, Barre`s, in his novel Les de? racine? s ("The Uprooted"), associ- ated these efforts not with the French Enlightenment or Revolution so much as with German, above all Kantian philosophy. 9 Significantly, until recent gestures in favor of the now-moribund regional languages by the Fifth Republic, the only regime in modern French history to attempt to re-
Conclusion 203
? introduce regional speech into the school system as anything more than an aid to the teaching of French was precisely the one regime most animated by this right-wing nationalism: Vichy. In 1941, it permitted an hour and a half per week of instruction in the local dialects. 10 Needless to say, in this vision of the French nation, "Frenchness" was not something made, but something inherited, something in the blood, even if political action was still necessary to purge France of impure alien influences.
If this right-wing French nationalism was so at odds with the republi- can, revolutionary version, the reason was as much religious as political, for its advocates consciously and explicitly rejected the transformations in the religious sphere that had occurred in France since 1700--indeed, in important respects, since the end of the sixteenth century. In their writings France remained a Christian, Catholic nation, part of a great and unbro- ken chain that extended from the people through the king and the pope to God and the kingdom of heaven. In their attempts to recreate an idealized medieval world of hierarchy and deference, modern right-wing French na- tionalists asserted a role for the (ultramontane) church in French affairs that a Richelieu or Louis XIV, to say nothing of a Mirabeau or Robespierre, would have found intolerable. It was perhaps precisely because these na- tionalists considered the nation so directly and completely subject to exter- nal determinations, and so firmly a part of a larger universal scheme, that they could depict the national community itself in such limited and exclu- sive (indeed, racial) terms. Significantly, important aspects of this modern right-wing nationalism recall sixteenth-century French writings on the na- tion. In this early period, too, writers tended to put a strong emphasis on blood and descent, presented radical regional and linguistic diversity as a natural tapestry, and of course stressed the place of France in a larger, di- vinely inspired hierarchy. 11 For modern right-wing nationalists, the ulti- mate symbol of France--still the key symbol for the extreme-right Na- tional Front--was Joan of Arc, the woman who saved France in the name of God and in direct response to his command. In short, this is a national- ism which, while ultimately owing as much as any other variety to the "dis- enchantment of the world," nonetheless set itself explicitly against this dis- enchantment and denied it.
This right-wing nationalism has had great importance at certain mo- ments in modern French history (for instance, the time of the Dreyfus Af- fair). In the final analysis, however, it has belonged consistently to a minor- ity. The only regime that systematically attempted to act upon it and to
204 The Cult of the Nation in France
? remake the nation according to its tenets was Vichy, which owed its exis- tence to a foreign power. Even the Restoration of 1815-30 mostly at- tempted a futile compromise between the old regime and the French Revo- lution. The July Monarchy and the two empires, not to mention the republics that have now existed for over 130 years, have all remained essen- tially loyal to the national idea as it was formulated under the First Repub- lic. Of course, the republican idea itself has hardly remained static since 1794, and the republican left fully shared in the nineteenth century's his- torical turn. One has only to consider the importance of Joan of Arc to a convinced republican like Jules Michelet to recognize this point (although Michelet would not have granted his female contemporaries the same free- dom of expression he praised in Joan--it was one thing to be a saint, an- other to be a citizen).
Thus I would argue that, in its fundamental elements, there has been a basic continuity in French republican nationalism over the past two centu- ries. The republicans, unlike their opponents on the right, distinguished between the past as heritage and the past as blueprint, and they remained true to the conviction that constructing the nation amounted to more than simply purging an idealized medieval structure of ethnic and ideological contaminants. As Michelet wrote, the era when religion still permeated French life had definitively ended, and "extinguished Christianity" had passed its torch to the republican patrie. 12 In the last pages of this book, I will speculate briefly on this continuity and on its implications for what is often called the "crisis of French national identity"--what I would in fact define as the end of nationalism in France.
The most basic element of continuity involved the conception of the na- tion as a product of political will. French republican nationalists have al- ways expressed the idea of the nation as a political construction in the most pure sense, because they have insisted that the nation can remake it- self, if not wholly as it pleases, then at least with great liberty. From this perspective, what ultimately defines the nation is less history, or race, or language, or a particular territory, although these remain important, but the common desire to join together as a nation, accepting common laws, values, institutions, and perhaps a common culture and language as well. Likewise, from this perspective the particular frontiers of France are not sacrosanct, and the status of citizen versus foreigner is defined less by birth or mother tongue than by political stance and cultural sympathies. The revolutionaries pushed these arguments to an extreme. "The only foreign-
Conclusion 205
? ers in France are the bad citizens," Tallien famously declared in 1795, while counter-revolutionaries were frequently dismissed as "foreigners," and "barbarian" ones at that--like the English, they had willfully and per- versely written themselves out of the universal human community cen- tered on France. 13 By contrast, foreign sympathizers of the Revolution flocked to Paris, and, for a time, many easily gained French citizenship. 14 Republican nationalism was, as it is now said, assimilationist, or "inte- grationist. "15
The region which has offered the most important illustration of this conception of the nation is Alsace. Largely German in language and Lu- theran in religion, under the old regime it still possessed important ves- tiges of German imperial law and noble privileges. Indeed, such was the fluid and porous nature of early modern frontiers that many areas of the province still fell under the feudal jurisdiction of, and paid feudal dues to, lords living beyond the Rhine. The city of Strasbourg had a glorious Ger- man past as a center of German humanism and the German Reformation. Even in the 1760s, as we have seen, its influential Society for the Promotion of the German Language helped give birth to German Romanticism. 16 But none of this mattered to the deputy Merlin de Douai, who declared in 1790: "What do people of Alsace, or the French people, care about those treaties which, in the time of despotism, joined the first to the second? The Alsatian people joined the French people because it wished to; it is there- fore its will alone, and not the Peace of Westphalia, which has legitimized the union. "17 And none of these qualities mattered eighty years later, when the newly united German empire defeated France and annexed Alsace, claiming as justification its German language, history, and race. It was pre- cisely in response to these German claims that Ernest Renan delivered his famous lecture, "Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation? " ("What is a Nation? ") which summarizes better than any other single text the republican nationalist creed: "A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feel- ing of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future . . . A nation's existence is, if you will par- don the metaphor, a daily plebiscite. "18 Renan continues to be cited copi- ously in France in discussions and defense of the republican ideal of the nation, including in speeches by President Chirac. 19
Yet despite this ideal, French republican nationalism over the past two centuries has also been distinguished by something else, something that comes close to contradicting it. For despite the frequent declarations that
206 The Cult of the Nation in France
? membership in the French nation depends on the will of individual citi- zens freely to embrace the elements of a common nationality, in practice French republicans have never quite trusted individuals to come to the correct decision on their own. As we have seen, in the Revolution they sought to ensure the proper result through a concerted program of what can only be called indoctrination, following on the model of the priest- hood. Recall Rabaut Saint-Etienne's words on how the French could in fact be transformed into a "new people": what was needed was "an infallible means of transmitting, constantly and immediately, to all the French at once, the same, uniform, ideas. "20 This is not quite the same thing as a "daily plebiscite," any more than adherence to correct Catholic doctrine was a matter of choice for the peasants under the old regime.
We should be careful before using this reason to label French republi- can nationalism, as an influential recent study has done, "collectivist-au- thoritarian," in contrast to a supposedly "libertarian-individualist" Anglo- American alternative. 21 Still less should we assume that this coerciveness implies any necessary relationship between French republican nationalism and the Terror. It is too often forgotten that if French republicans brought about the Terror, French republicans also ended it, and after less than two years (the Thermidorians were admittedly the least savory of deliverers, an evaluation that has significantly colored later interpretations). A total mili- tary defeat was not required to end it, nor was it necessary to wait decades for an institutionalized Terror to grow slack and corrupt and ultimately to collapse under its own weight, as was the case with the twentieth-century dictatorships sometimes described as the spiritual heirs of the French Rev- olution. In fact, since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French republican nationalism has coexisted with a succession of generally democratic and tolerant regimes, and its record as far as minorities within the nation are concerned, though far from ideal, certainly stands compar- ison with the United States or Britain. Today, critics often condemn France's Third Republic for suppressing the language and culture of Celtic Brittany, but who would trade the history of Brittany, or even that of the Vende? e, hideous as it is, for that of Ulster?
Let us remember that most modern nationalist movements, regardless of whether we choose to label them "civic," "cultural," or other, have in- sisted on some form of compulsory patriotic education to instill common values, loyalty to the nation, and perhaps also a common culture and lan- guage. French republican nationalism is no different from others in this re-
Conclusion 207
? spect, and we should give due consideration to the centrifugal forces that nationalists have struggled against before condemning them for it. What has made French republican nationalism different has been the astonishing missionary zeal with which the goal has been pursued--with which the apostles of the nation have set out to "make Frenchmen," the way the Jesu- its set out to "make Christians" in China or the Americas.
I would go so far as to argue that French republican nationalism owed its peculiar character and extraordinary vigor, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, precisely to the extraordinary sense of mis- sion and purpose that animated its principal agents: administrators, sol- diers, and above all educators. In this sense, France's experience has dif- fered greatly from that of its neighbors. 22 Generations of teachers formed in the e? 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
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? 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?