No More Learning

They were not scientific terms in the least. But they set forth a problem that biological science could later answer (however mistakenly): the problem of difference. Anthony Pagden has written that when modes of explanation of human difference shifted in the early nineteenth century from the sociological to the physiological, they did so in part because the sociological modes seemed incapable of revealing why some peoples failed to make historical progress. 129 This was precisely the problem highlighted by the figure of the English barbarian (and that would be repeatedly high- lighted by emerging nationalist movements over the next century when stigmatizing their enemies--especially the Jews). It suggested that the Eng- lish, despite their membership in the white race and in a common Euro- pean civilization, in fact were fundamentally alien, as alien as heretics had been to the mother church. And not only alien but inferior, and deserving of hatred, subjugation, or even extermination. In all the voluminous writ- ings of the French revolutionary period, there is no clearer forerunner of modern expressions of racial hatred than Bare`re's report on English crimes. "National hatred must sound forth. " Without such a rooted sense of profound difference between nations, could nineteenth-century race science have carried any sense of conviction? Would its creators have even pursued their researches in the first place?
Before the middle of the eighteenth century, such a sense of difference was lacking, at least in France. It began to arise only in the period of the Seven Years' War, in response to anxieties about France's changing position in the world, and the demands of a rapidly evolving public sphere, as sup- porters of the French crown sought to mobilize the nation as a whole against an enemy nation. The image of English barbarians, more alien even than the already frightening American savages, helped teach the French this sense of national difference. It did so, moreover, without challenging the universalism which remained so powerful a force in French culture,
106 The Cult of the Nation in France
? and which would express itself so powerfully at the start of the Revolu- tion and again under Napoleon. The English were different precisely be- cause they rejected the universal human civilization that properly revolved around France, as their murder of Jumonville symbolized most vividly. In slaying him, the French publicists were implying, the English had not only taken the life of an unarmed ambassador, but also killed their own mem- bership in the human race.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
CHAPTER 4
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
To the Great Men, the Grateful Patrie.
--inscription on the front of the
pantheon (1791)
How ridiculous it is for an assembly of slithering, vile and inept men to set themselves up as judges of immortality.
--jean-paul marat (1791)
? In the last thirty years of the old regime, the French lived amidst a glitter- ing company of ghosts. One could not belong to an academy, walk through the streets of central Paris, attend an artistic salon or visit a bookseller without coming across orations, odes, statues, paintings, engravings, and books glorifying the "great men" of France's past. Catinat and Bayard, Duguesclin and Suger, d'Aguesseau and Turenne, and many others passed ceaselessly in review. Their panegyrists placed infinite faith in the ability of images of national greatness to inspire further national greatness. Antoine- Le? onard Thomas wrote rhapsodically about an ancient Greece that he saw as a model for modern France: "Everywhere the people saw images of their great men, and . . . surrounded by a crowd of artists, orators and poets, who all painted, sculpted, celebrated and sang of these heroes . . . the free and victorious Greeks saw, felt and breathed nothing but the passion for glory and immortality. "1 Collectively, the attempts to realize this vision in France amounted to nothing less than a conscious reshaping of national memory.
This "cult of great men," as Jean-Claude Bonnet has aptly called it, was, like the political struggles over royal authority and the wars with Great Britain, an arena in which the French found the concepts of the nation and the patrie enormously useful. 2 Here, too, the concepts had powerful reso-
107
108 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nance for readers who were coming to understand the human world as something that existed on its own terms rather than being structured from without, and who increasingly saw France as a uniform and homogenous space. Here, too, writers and artists nonetheless found themselves drawing on religious language and symbolism to foster devotion to the secular deity of the patrie. Here, too, the concepts were subject to continuous debate and negotiation, involving issues of national character, history, representa- tion, and gender. And here, as well, the debate and negotiation would ulti- mately promote the idea of the nation as a political construction, an entity that could freely and consciously rebuild itself. This chapter will examine the cult from a new perspective, with particular focus on a fascinating, almost forgotten series of texts: collective biographies of "great French- men" which flowed in profusion from French presses during the eigh- teenth century.
The Rise of a Cult
As Thomas (the same man who made his reputation as the author of Jumonville) freely acknowledged, the idea of a canon of "great men" was hardly a French invention. It reached back to Roman and Greek antiquity, where it had held a central place in political life and had found its defining expression in one of the great classical works of history: Plutarch's Lives. In France itself, the canon dated to the Renaissance and initially was a multi- national one, as in Andre? Thevet's influential updating of Plutarch, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (True Portraits and Lives of Illus- trious Men). 3 Plutarch himself, with his parallel listings of Greeks and Romans, exerted an extraordinary influence on the French Renaissance imagination, serving, in the words of one historian, as "the breviary of all cultivated society in the second half of the sixteenth century. "4 His impor- tance extended to the eighteenth century, when Rousseau developed his fa- mous boyhood obsession with the Lives, and the moralist Vauvenargues memorably wrote: "I cried with joy when I read those lives. I never spent a night without talking to Alcibiades, Agesilas, and others. I visited the Ro- man Forum to harangue with the Gracchi, to defend Cato when they threw rocks at him. "5 Of course, French authors also continued to write lives of classical heroes and great men of other nations (notably, in the eighteenth century, Russia's Peter the Great).
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 109
? The first works to celebrate France alone predictably featured canons of kings, as in Ronsard's Renaissance epic the Franciade (the poet joked of having "the weight of 63 kings on my shoulders"). 6 Yet a broader, non- royal canon celebrating notable French lives did not take long to emerge in this period, which saw a great flourishing of the biographical genre in gen- eral. In 1600, Gabriel Michel de la Rochemaillet's Portraits of the Illustri- ous Men Who Flourished in France from 1500 to the Present presented 144 clerics, military leaders, statesmen, poets, and scholars. Two years later, Scaevole de Sainte-Marthe's Latin Eulogy of Illustrious Learned Frenchmen recounted the lives of 137 recent French writers. Both works held up great Frenchmen to demonstrate France's worth as successor to Greece and Rome, not to mention its superiority to Italy. 7
What distinguished the late eighteenth-century celebration of great Frenchmen from these Renaissance predecessors was less its novelty than its scale, its relentless emphasis on patriotic pedagogy, and its definition of "greatness. " To begin with, virtually every artistic and literary medium em- braced the subject. Louis XVI's effective minister for the arts, the Marquis d'Angiviller, put the enormous patronage power of the crown firmly be- hind the celebration of great Frenchmen, commissioning his series of his- tory paintings and sculptures which duly took pride of place in the artistic Salons of the late 1770s and 1780s. There visitors could contemplate the brave Constable Duguesclin receiving his final honors after a heroic death in the Hundred Years' War, the "fearless knight" Bayard saving the honor of a female prisoner, and many other statesmen and soldiers, as well as Descartes and Fe? nelon (see Table 1). 8 On the stage, Buirette de Belloy's The Siege of Calais fit into the pattern, and inspired numerous, even more for- gettable imitations. 9 Several authors, in an obvious foreshadowing of the revolutionary Pantheon, developed plans for galleries, sculpture gardens, or cemeteries of great men, again focusing primarily on statesmen and military figures. Most often, they proposed that their statues surround a statue of the king, and more than one envisioned the ensemble at the en- trance to a new national museum in the Louvre. King Louis XV himself approved one such plan in 1768, although nothing came of the idea until the Revolution. 10
The genre that the eighteenth century made peculiarly its own was the academic eulogy, which functioned as something of a successor to the older oratorical art of the funeral oration. 11 The eulogy owed its promi-
110 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 6. One of the paintings commissioned by the Marquis d'Angiviller to stimulate patriotic sentiment in France, it depicts the selfless conduct of the Renaissance hero Pierre Bayard in sparing the honor of a female prisoner. Louis- Jacques Durameau, La continence de Bayard (Bayard's Continence), 1777.
? Table 1.
1777
1779
1781
1783
1785
1787 1789
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 111 D'Angiviller's Sculpture Commissions for the Salons
Michel de l'Ho^pital (chancellor); Fe? nelon (bishop and philosopher); Sully (statesman and minister); Descartes
D'Aguesseau (chancellor); Corneille; Montesquieu; Bossuet (religious) Catinat (military); Tourville (military); Montausier (royal tutor); Pascal Vauban (military, minister); Molie`re; La Fontaine; Turenne (military) Racine; Mole? (magistrate); Duquesne (military); Conde? (prince,
military)
Bayard (military); Rollin (scholar); Luxembourg (military); Vincent de
Paul (religious)
Duguesclin (military); Poussin; Cassini (astronomer); Lamoignon
? (magistrate)
Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on. 395-6.
nence above all to the Acade? mie Franc? aise, which decided in 1758 (as it was falling into the hands of the philosophes) to change the form of its peri- odic eloquence competition. Henceforth, orators would deliver eulogies of the "great men of the nation" instead of discourses on devotional religious topics, as they had done for more than a century. Over the next thirty years the Acade? mie selected sixteen great men as subjects, including two kings, ten military figures and statesmen, and four men of letters (see Table 2). France's many provincial academies took up the eulogy as well, and it therefore came to occupy a central position in French cultural life. 12 Such was the genre's importance during the last thirty years of the regime that few philosophes and future revolutionaries failed to try their hand at it. Even Marat composed a eulogy of Montesquieu. D'Alembert (who became recording secretary of the Acade? mie) wrote more than sixty. 13 But the En- lightenment's master eulogist was Thomas, who, after making his reputa- tion with Jumonville, won the first five of the Acade? mie's new competi- tions, published an enormously long, well-received Essay on Eulogies in 1773, and helped inspire d'Angiviller's artistic program. Thanks to these achievements, he stood for some time in the front ranks of the philosophes, although his reputation has since fallen drastically. 14
Finally, there was a genre which has fallen into even greater historical oblivion than Thomas's work: the collective biography. Indeed, these fasci- nating works have never received systematic historical study. In recent years, one eminent historian has called Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent's 1786 Portraits of Great Men and Illustrious Women "an important event in the
? 112
The Cult of the Nation in France
? Table 2.
Subjects of the Acade? mie Franc? aise's Eloquence Competitions
1759 Maurice de Saxe (military)
1760 D'Aguesseau (chancellor)
1761 Duguay-Trouin (military)
1763 Sully (minister, statesman) 1765 Descartes
1767 Charles V
1769 Molie`re
1771 Fe? nelon (bishop, philosopher)
1773 Colbert (minister, statesman)
1775 Catinat (military)
1777 Michel de l'Hospital (chancellor)
1779 Suger (cleric, regent)
1781 Montausier (tutor to the royal family)
1783-4 Fontenelle (author)
1785 Louis XII (postponed until 1788)
1787 Vauban (military, minister--postponed until 1790)
? ? Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on, 391-2.
creation of a new, exclusively French pantheon of heroes," apparently unaware that the book had more than a dozen very similar precedents, stretching back across more than a century (see Table 3). 15
These volumes bore some resemblance to the collections of Thevet and Michel de la Rochemaillet, but they traced their origins most directly to a different Renaissance source: portrait galleries. In 1600, the astronomer royal Antoine de Laval, reacting against the use of profane myth and alle- gory as decoration in royal palaces, had advocated the establishment of portrait galleries modeled after the palace of Emperor Augustus, who had displayed statues of meritorious citizens, accompanied by inscriptions re- counting their deeds, in order to inspire emulation. Laval himself designed a gallery of 68 kings for the Louvre, providing a visual equivalent to the Franciade, not to mention a didactic history lesson that assimilated the story of France to the story of its monarchs. Cardinal Richelieu then took the idea in a new direction with the portrait gallery he placed in his grand Parisian palace (today's Palais-Royal), for which he commissioned Simon Voue? t and Philippe de Champaigne to depict twenty-five French kings, ministers, prelates, and warriors. The captions and other ancillary decora- tions left no doubt that Richelieu meant each portrait to express a trait he
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 113 Table 3. Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Collective Biographies
B. Griguette, Eloges des hommes illustres peints en la gallerie du Palais Royal (Dijon, 1646). Eloges des illustres Franc? ois (Caen, 1652).
Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re et al. , Les portraits des hommes illustres franc? ois, Qui sont
peints dans la galerie du Palais Cardinal de Richelieu, avec leurs principales Actions, Armes &
Deuises (Paris, 1655, 1668 [twice] & 1673).
Charles Perrault, Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris,
1697).
[Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde], Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres et grands
capitaines de France, Depuis le commencement de la Monarchie jusqu'a` pre? sent, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1726).
Me? moires contenant les principales actions de la vie des hommes illustres du re`gne de Louis XIV,
2 vols. (Avignon, 1734).
Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Gabriel Pe? rau, and Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Les vies des hommes
illustres de la France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'a` present, 26 vols. (Amsterdam, 1739-1768). See also Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Avis pour l'histoire des hommes illustres de la France (Paris, 1741).
Le ne? crologe des hommes ce? le`bres de France, 17 vols. (Paris, 1764-82).
Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy, Les vies des femmes illustres de la France, 6 vols. (Paris,
1762).
Jacques Gautier Dagoty, Galerie franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui
ont paru en France (Paris, 1770), continued by Jean-Bernard Restout, Galerie franc? oise, 2
vols. (Paris, 1771).
Tablettes historiques et chronologiques ou` l'on voit d'un coup-d'oeil le lieu, l'e? poque de la naissance & de la mort de tous les Hommes ce? le`bres en tous genres que la France a produits (Amsterdam, 1779).
Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, La France illustre, ou le Plutarque franc? ais, 5 vols. (Paris, 1777-90). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Annales pittoresques de la vertu franc? aise, ou Recueil d'estampes
destine? es a` repre? senter les belles actions qui honorent notre nation et notre a^ge (Paris,1783;
separate abridged edition of same, 1782)
[Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent], Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres, et sujets
memorables de France, grave? s et imprime? s en couleurs (Paris, 1786).
Faits et actions he? roi? ques et historiques des Grands Hommes (Paris, 1786).
Louis-Pierre Manuel, L'anne? e franc? oise, ou Vies des Hommes qui ont honore? la France, ou par
leurs talens, ou par leurs services, & surtout par leurs vertus, 4 vols. (Paris, 1789). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Histoire des illustres franc? ois sortis du ci-devant tiers-e? tat, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1792).
? ? ? 114 The Cult of the Nation in France
? associated with himself, such as loyalty, piety, or military valor, and to highlight aspects of his own career. Yet in creating the gallery, he helped es- tablish a new French canon, centered less on the monarchy than on the in- stitutions and servants of the state. 16
Unlike Horace's poetry, Richelieu's monument was less durable than bronze, for the gallery perished in an eighteenth-century fire. But for a century it featured prominently in descriptions of Paris and was memori- alized in verse. 17 And in 1655, the engravers Heince and Bignon published a volume of reproductions of the paintings and enlisted a courtier, Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, to write accompanying biographical essays. The book went through four editions in eighteen years, shrinking in the pro- cess from an in-folio to an in-quarto, and then finally an in-octavo. 18 With this shift from painting to print, a new genre had been born.
Between 1697 and 1792, at least fourteen more collective biographies appeared, many in multivolume sets. The first came from an author illus- trious in his own right, Charles Perrault, who intended his paean to a hun- dred illustrious men of the grand sie`cle primarily as a salvo in the ongoing quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Like Richelieu, Perrault limited his canon to France and insisted in the preface that he had "nothing but the honor of France in mind. "19 Later contributions tended to take both Per- rault and the engravings in Richelieu's gallery as their models--indeed, they not infrequently plagiarized these sources and each other. While a few remained essentially collections of engravings, overall the tendency, start- ing with the abbe? Morvan de Bellegarde in 1726, was toward smaller or no illustrations, and ever more voluminous essays. In some cases, individual biographies expanded to hundreds of pages each and merited volumes to themselves, as in the successful series started by Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny. The selection of great men in this genre differed substantially from those found in others, and the canon changed markedly over the course of the century.
With the exception of Perrault's work, these biographies are less inter- esting, aesthetically and intellectually, than the paintings, statues, and eulo- gies. They seem to be hastily written and their style is unremarkable, which is not surprising, as their authors mainly belonged to the profit-obsessed "Grub Street" of French publishing immortalized by Robert Darnton. 20 Louis-Pierre Manuel, for instance, was a former Bastille prisoner and fu- ture Jacobin who had failed at numerous literary endeavors. Police files de- scribed Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy as an unemployed attorney's
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 115
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 7. Renaissance hero Bayard; the engraving is copy of a painting in Cardinal Richelieu's portrait gallery in the Palais Royal. From Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al.
, Les hommes illustres (The Illustrious Men), Paris, 1658
116 The Cult of the Nation in France
? clerk who would lend his poison pen to whatever cause would pay him. 21 Nonetheless, the books have a capital importance. In the first place, they served as a principal source of information for the other genres. The paint- ers who filled d'Angiviller's commissions, for instance, drew on material from Franc? ois-Henri Turpin's many works on great men. 22 The authors of eulogies clearly relied on the information that the collective biographies provided. 23 Secondly, the works reached far more members of the public than the paintings and sculptures and all but the most successful eulogies and stage plays. As with most eighteenth-century works, measuring their diffusion is difficult. It is worth observing, however, that publishers would probably not have committed themselves to works that often extended to a score of volumes and that faced considerable competition (particularly be- tween 1770 and 1789, when eight came out), unless the genre had com- mercial potential. Furthermore, several of the works sold by subscrip- tion--readers received new installments at regular intervals, in a sort of "great-man-of-the-month club"--and would hardly have continued, in Du Castre d'Auvigny's case for thirty years, without the subscribers' sup- port. 24
In all these media, the cult of great men had a tirelessly pedagogical, pa- triotic character. Expose the French to an endless parade of meritorious examples, so the assumption went, and imitation would naturally take place. "Great men," wrote the author of one collective biography, "are, so to speak, mirrors in which one contemplates oneself, so as to better oneself. "25 D'Angiviller told the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1775 that his purpose was to "revive virtue and patriotic sentiments," while the dramatic authors who copied Buirette de Belloy generally hoped to elicit the sort of swooning responses elicited by the Siege of Calais. Recall the words of his admirer Manson: "People will say: 'Why can I not do what this person has done? He was French; I am as well. '"26 The advocates of public galleries or cemeteries of great men tended to justify the project in the terms stated by Maille Dusaussoy, in a 1767 proposal for rebuilding the Louvre: "The revered statues . . . placed in the Palace of our Kings, will pro- duce more Great Men who will equal and perhaps surpass them. "27
At the same time, eighteenth-century works tended increasingly to dis- tinguish between the "illustrious," whose reputation rested on heroic-- even accidentally heroic--deeds, and the "great," whose notable qualities supposedly suffused every aspect of their lives. As Bonnet has shown, this distinction owed its wide acceptance in the eighteenth century to the phi-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 117
? losopher-bishop Fe? nelon, and especially to that irenic philosopher of Eu- ropean peace, the abbe? Saint-Pierre, who emphasized that greatness arose from "inner qualities of the mind and heart alone, and from the great benefits that one brings to society. "28 Following this lead, the philosophes frequently belittled military heroes as little more than successful brigands, and reserved their admiration for true benefactors of humanity. The eulo- gists thus dwelt endlessly on their subjects' diligent cultivation of native talents, their selfless dedication to others and to the state, their humble rejection of material rewards, their wise simplicity, their steadfast courage in moments of despair and disgrace, and their magnanimity in moments of triumph. They delighted in images of Montesquieu chatting with his Gascon peasants, d'Aguesseau lost in contemplation of ancient philoso- phers, the medieval abbe? Suger tirelessly working to reconcile warring barons.
In the last decades of the old regime, some authors had taken the dis- tinction even further, finding a person's true greatness less in public acts than in private, intimate behavior. As Manuel remarked concisely in the preface to his French Year (1789), "private life is the surest testimony of public life. "29 Plutarch himself, as his eighteenth-century French translator emphasized, had focused on the "inner," as opposed to the "public" man alone. 30 But just as French lawyers of the 1770s and 1780s treated private, familial disputes as windows into public politics, so the biographers now frankly privileged the private over the public, preferring to capture the great man in the bosom of his family instead of on the battlefield, in the courtroom, or on any other public arena. "It is in domestic obscurity," Manuel continued, "that I have observed my great men. "31
Still, celebrations of illustrious figures and heroic actions continued, and the line between "illustrious" and "great" remained less rigid than has sometimes been suggested. 32 Franc? ois-Henri Turpin's Illustrious France freely mixed discussions of "heroes" and "virtuous" men, while collections of engravings continued to glorify the military triumphs that Voltaire, among others, usually sneered at. 33 Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent's elaborate series of Portraits (1786-1792) borrowed freely from Thomas's Eloge de d'Aguesseau in praise of the late Lord Chancellor's selfless actions on behalf of the starving population in 1709, but the author went back to Heince, Bignon, and Vulson to hail the victories of Duguesclin and Joan of Arc. In- deed, he copied several of his engravings directly from theirs. 34
The national cult of great men had its provincial equivalents in count-
118 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 8. Louis Joseph de Montcalm, the commander of French forces in North America during the Seven Years' War, was killed at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Que? bec in 1759. In this engraving, Indians drawn to resemble Europens serve to witness the general's heroic death. "La Mort de Montcalm" (The Death of Montcalm), engraving from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets me? morables de France (Portraits
of the Great Men, Illustrious Women and Memorable Subjects of France), Paris, 1786.
less eulogies delivered at provincial academies, in sculptures and engrav- ings, and in collective biographies dedicated to the grands hommes of Burgundy, Provence, Brittany and so forth. This material still awaits its his- torian. Still, even a brief glance indicates that it in no way constituted an expression of minority nationalism, and did not (unlike some of the pre-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 119
? revolutionary material discussed in Chapter 2) present any sort of chal- lenge to French national unity. Rather, it seems to constitute a predeces- sor to the sort of nineteenth-century local patriotism recently studied by Anne-Marie Thiesse: a patriotism which taught that allegiance to the na- tional whole began with allegiance to, and an appreciation of, what was nearby and familiar. In this sense, the provincial cults of great men only strengthened the larger, national one. 35
The Great Men and the Domain of the Sacred
The cult of great men illustrates much the same religious dynamic that I have discussed in the context of politics and warfare: on the one hand, an effort to imagine and reorder the world without reference to divine Provi- dence; on the other, a recourse to the forms and practices of Counter-Ref- ormation Catholicism. In this case, the echoes of Catholicism are entirely obvious. The celebrations of the great men clearly marked them out as sa- cred. It reserved special spaces for them, free from all possible profanity and pollution, as in the plans for a Pantheon; and it emphasized their tran- scendence through sacrifice, as in the Calais burghers' acceptance of immi- nent martyrdom in Belloy's play, or in the actual martyrdom of Jumonville or Montcalm. Furthermore, the exemplary conduct that great men report- edly displayed at every moment of their lives, and the way they served as models for others, with their images placed relentlessly before the popu- lation, recalled nothing so much as the saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Some authors came close to making the comparison explicit. Manuel's French Year, for instance, proposed a great Frenchman for every day of the year: contemporaries could hardly have missed the parallel to the church's calendar of saints. A few canonical great men--for instance, Charlemagne--were lauded as Christlike figures who had saved France from its sins. 36 A future Jacobin named Baumier wrote a poem about a well-celebrated hero--the Chevalier d'Assas of Seven Years' War fame--in which he suggested that "reading the lives of Great Men" could start a "holy fire" burning in susceptible breasts. He continued:
Ta tombe, en s'e? croulant, se transforme en Autel. O ma^nes d'un He? ros a` qui le sang me lie,
Sur cet Autel sacre? qui s'e? le`ve a` mes yeux, J'incline avec respect un front religieux,
120 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Et de? pose en ce jour L'Hommage a la Patrie! [Your tomb, falling down, becomes an Altar.
O shades of a Hero linked to me by blood,
On this holy Altar which is rising before my eyes, I bend a religious brow with respect
And lay down today Homage to the Patrie! ]37
Such words recall Carl Becker's famous contention about the eighteenth century, that "there is more of Christian philosophy in the writings of the Philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories. "38
The idea that the cult simply amounted to a substitute religion, however, is misleading. Its development does confirm just how much eighteenth- century attempts to forge a new French nation owed to earlier, Catholic at- tempts to forge a new church. But it is not as if some eternal, "furious need to believe" (to quote Bonnet) turned the French towards the cult of great men when an emotionally impoverished Catholicism had ceased to slake their spiritual thirst. 39 In the 1790s, the Revolution's cult of great men did indeed sometimes veer into a sort of substitute Christianity--as when the Cordeliers carried Marat's heart through the streets of Paris chanting "heart of Jesus, heart of Marat," or when a Jacobin preacher talked of a rev- olutionary martyr rising up to heaven on tricolor wings. 40 The old regime cult, however, was different. The admirable qualities of its great men de- rived from, and their admirable lives were lived in, a purely human, terres- trial sphere. Neither owed anything to any supernatural force. Thomas's eulogies, for instance, virtually never mentioned God or the supernatu- ral, while they implicitly celebrated humanity's ability to create value and meaning from within itself. 41 Even the most obviously "miraculous" great figure in French history, Joan of Arc, underwent a rigorous disenchant- ment in the few eighteenth-century collections which still acknowledged a public role for women in French history (as we will see, few did). In 1655, Vulson's text for the engraving of Joan's portrait in Richelieu's gallery pre- sented her as a pure instrument of God's will. 42 But Aublet de Maubuy, in his 1762 Lives of Illustrious Women of France, resolutely minimized the role of divine inspiration, arguing that Joan's visions, while not frauds, were de- lusions which grew out of her excessively "ecstatic devotion. "43 In this sense, the cult fits into the pattern of the interiorization of religious life de- scribed in Chapter 1.
Furthermore, what made the great men great was precisely their devo-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 121
? tion to their fellow humans. If they deserved respect and commemoration, it was not for their great love of God, or for Homeric, superhuman feats, but, as Saint-Pierre wrote and the eulogists repeated, for the benefits they brought to human society or the "patrie. " Thus to the prize-winning eulo- gist de la Harpe, an eminent seventeenth-century soldier like Catinat was remarkable less for his military acumen than for the humanity he showed in sparing Savoy the ravages of his armies. Thomas similarly praised the seventeenth-century sailor Duguay-Trouin for preferring the merchant marine and commerce to the navy and war. 44 Great men "need only have devoted their talents to France to have the right to our gratitude," wrote the painter Jean-Bernard Restout in his 1771 French Gallery. 45 And Manuel commented in the preface to his French Year: "I have above all looked for useful citizens. He who discovers a new form of subsistence or a new branch of commerce for his country, deserves to stand in the same rank with him who enlightens or defends it. "46 The cult of great men may have attempted to bathe its subjects in an aura of sacrality, but the men them- selves were models, not icons.
To be sure, Renaissance readers had already found in Plutarch the spec- tacle of exemplary lives in which Christian inspiration had no part. 47 What the eighteenth-century cult added was the idea that great men rendered their services first and foremost to the national community, and that they helped consciously to build that community by their efforts and examples. Saint-Pierre, in the early years of the century, might still have spoken in general terms of society, echoing Fe? nelon's embrace of a universal human community. 48 But the Acade? mie in 1758 limited itself to the "great men of the nation," and the eulogists and biographers of the 1770s and 1780s wrote almost exclusively of the nation, the patrie, and France. The eigh- teenth-century cult also added the idea that the nation itself should take charge of putting images of the great before the population. It thereby transformed the experience of reflecting on great men from an individual, voluntary act of edification into a public project of nation-forming.
The Great Men, the Monarchy, and Royal Patriotism
Like the war propaganda of the Seven Years' War, the cult of great men helped establish the nation itself as the most important reference point in French political culture. For this reason, it is tempting to think of it as sub- versive, perhaps even deliberately subversive, of the monarchy which had
122 The Cult of the Nation in France
? previously occupied this position. Jean-Claude Bonnet has recently made an argument much along these lines. The eulogy in particular, he writes, "far from being a dusty rhapsody concerned exclusively with the past, re- vealed itself to be a little machine of power which affected the immediate present, and the future of the polity. "49 Despite the monarchy's best at- tempts to control the cult, Bonnet claims, a "fatal rivalry began" between the king and the great men, which ultimately left him symbolically evacu- ated from the national space which the cult defined. 50
This argument, while compelling in some respects, disregards important features of the context in which the cult developed. To begin with, it downplays the extent to which celebrations of great Frenchmen, insofar as they had an explicit polemical purpose, were directed principally against France's supposed subjection to Greek and Roman antiquity. The archi- tects of the cult rarely compared the great men to French monarchs, but they routinely and explicitly argued that the French needed great men of their own rather than distant and alien classical ones. "The Greeks dealt with national subjects," the Journal des Savants claimed in a scathingly witty 1781 article on the theater, "and we have concluded from this that we should deal with Greek subjects. Horace praised Roman authors who had dealt with national subjects, and we have concluded simply that we can deal with Roman subjects too. "51 Buirette de Belloy wrote similarly, in his dedication to the Siege of Calais, "Let it not be said by those who come out of our theater: 'The great men I have just seen played were Romans; I was not born in a country where I can emulate them. ' Let it be said, sometimes at least: 'I have just seen a French hero; I can be such a one too. '"52 Or con- sider the argument endorsed by Lefebvre de Beauvray in his 1770 Social and Patriotic Dictionary: "The great actions of the Greeks and Romans touch only our minds, and prompt only our admiration; those of our own Na- tion would impress on our souls a livelier sentiment: emulation. "53 One of the most prolific authors of collective biographies, Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, emphasized the competition with the ancients by giving one of his works the title The French Plutarch, incidentally joining the company of British and Russian Plutarchs that also appeared in the eighteenth century. 54
In this sense, the cult traces its lineage back less to Fe? nelon and Saint-Pi- erre than to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns of the late seven- teenth century. And beyond the Quarrel, it threads its way further back, to the long struggle of French authors to see their own language and lit- erature recognized as the equal of Latin and Greek. In the Renaissance,
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 123
? Du Bellay had already sounded a clear call to arms: Were the French, he asked, inferior to the Greeks and Romans, to make so little of their own language? 55 In the seventeenth century, Franc? ois Charpentier similarly wrote that if the Greeks had used Greeks in their public Inscriptions, and the Romans had used Latin, then the French should use French. 56 By the eighteenth century, the debate had shifted to primary education and the desire to banish Latin from that domain as well. As the educational re- former La Chalotais quipped in the 1760s, "a foreigner to whom one ex- plained the details of our education would imagine that France's principal goal was to populate Latin seminaries, cloisters, and colonies. "57
From this perspective, the celebration of great Frenchmen, like the cele- bration and use of the French language, hardly dimmed the luster of the king; to the contrary. The glory of French writers and great men re- dounded on him, increasing his stature and historical reputation, indeed putting him on a level with the Roman emperors. Perrault, a collaborator of Colbert's, made the point explicitly in his Hommes illustres, when he stressed that extraordinary figures tended to be born at a time when "the heavens have decided to give to the earth some great prince," and that great men served "either as the instruments of the prince's great actions, the builders of his magnificence, or the trumpets of his glory. "58 It is hardly a coincidence that most of the eighteenth-century plans for sculpture gar- dens of great Frenchmen envisioned the men surrounding the king like so many jewels in his crown.
It is precisely because France's kings hoped to gain luster from the glory of France's great men that much of the cult amounted to a quasi-official enterprise, sanctioned and sponsored by the monarchy itself. The most di- rect cases involved d'Angiviller's commissions for paintings and sculp- tures. But as we have seen, the presentation of great Frenchmen on the stage, particularly in Belloy's Siege of Calais, enjoyed, at the very least, en- thusiastic royal support. As for the eulogies, it is hardly a coincidence that the Acade? mie Franc? aise decided to change the form of its eloquence com- petition in 1758, the year in which the Seven Years' War started to turn des- perate for France, and the anti-English propaganda campaign described in the last chapter reached its height. (This is when the master eulogist Thomas wrote the rabidly anti-English Jumonville and served as secretary to Foreign Minister Choiseul. ) And the subject of the first competition, which Thomas won, was none other than the Mare? chal de Saxe, who had won the old regime's last great military victory at Fontenoy, in 1745. As for
124 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the subject of the third competition, Duguay-Trouin, his military reputa- tion paled before that of a Vauban or Duguesclin (to put it charitably), and his selection only made sense in the context of the ongoing royal campaign to elicit voluntary donations for ship building. (Thomas, again the winner of the competition, wrote his entry while working at Versailles. ) In fact, eleven of the sixteen figures chosen by the Acade? mie between 1758 and 1790 were faithful servants of the monarchy, and the winning eulogists rarely failed to praise them for their love of the king (see Table 2). "What perhaps contributed no less to developing his talents than so much com- bat, study and reflection," wrote Thomas of Duguay-Trouin, "was his love for Louis XIV, and Louis XIV's esteem for him. "59 Another prize winner, who had served as one of Lord Chancellor Maupeou's chief defenders after the 1771 coup, used his eulogy to praise the king and lambaste the parle- ments. 60 In the last years of the old regime, Sergent's collection of 96 col- ored engravings included 46 military heroes and 30 kings and queens. 61
Indirectly, the cult did express a profound displeasure with the social hi- erarchy and the world of the royal court. As early as 1697, Perrault drew criticism for not organizing his grands hommes of the grand sie`cle by social rank, and for including men of low birth. 62 Thomas, in the same prize- winning eulogy of Duguay-Trouin, praised the sailor for "being born with- out ancestors" and contrasted his simple and upright figure to the "idle and disdainful courtiers" of Versailles. "True nobility comes from serving the state," he commented. "It is very difficult for those who have titles to forgive those who have virtues. "63 Such comments ran through the eulogies and the collective biographies, which almost always found the origins of their subjects' greatness not in blood, title, or position, but in inner quali- ties and merit, in keeping with the general theme that great men exempli- fied the potential of the human spirit.
This egalitarianism, however, was not incompatible with a powerful at- tachment to the French monarchy. The authors in question simply distin- guished between the monarchy, which they adored, and the court, which they despised. In this sense, they followed Voltaire, who notoriously com- bined a loathing for court society and the aristocracy which had spurned him with support for virtually unrestrained royal authority (he even wrote pamphlets in support of Chancellor Maupeou's coup). Thomas, not coin- cidentally, admired Voltaire more than any other contemporary figure. 64 Although the French revolutionaries would later turn the cult of great men to their own democratic purposes, under the old regime the sort of senti-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 125
? ments Thomas expressed accorded well with the enlightened absolutism advocated by Voltaire and figures like the Marquis d'Argenson, who were explicitly hostile to the parlements. It fit in directly with the project of royal patriotism discussed in the last two chapters: the attempt to ground the king's authority not in divine right, social contract, or constitutional tradi- tion, but in the direct, affective bond between the king and individual citi- zens. Thomas's celebration of the Mare? chal de Saxe, d'Aguesseau, Duguay- Trouin, and Sully during the last four years of the Seven Years' War thus served much the same political purpose as his concomitant celebration of Jumonville.
The cult of great men, like the project of royal patriotism, did raise a po- tential danger for the monarchy, for the citizens' love of the king depended on his remaining a worthy object of affection. "He loved Louis XIV, not as a Master, but as a great man," wrote Thomas of Duguay-Trouin. 65 Similarly, Manuel remarked of Renaissance France's Louis XII: "Under this citizen king, the people barely realized they had a master: serving a king whom one loves is not obedience. "66 The authors poured scorn on what Manuel called "these do-nothing kings" who had vanished into obscurity. 67 But un- til the Revolution, the greatness of the reigning king was taken, publicly at least, as axiomatic. Illicit pamphlets might mock and revile Louis XV and Louis XVI, but not until the Revolution did freely circulating works openly discuss the current monarch's failure to live up to the standard of great- ness, still less argue that this failure justified his removal.
Masculine Republicanism
Although the cult of great men did serve the project of royal patriotism, its significance for the political culture of the late old regime did not stop there. In other ways, like royal patriotism itself, it contributed deeply to the cultural shifts which made French revolutionary radicalism thinkable.
Most important, the cult not only helped popularize classical republican ideas (from the Roman tradition revived and modified in Renaissance Italy and then in England and America), but suggested that these ideas had a di- rect relevance to modern France. As a good deal of recent historical work has shown, republican ideas held a fascination for French elites in the last decades before the Revolution. From the writings of Rousseau and Mably, to the neoclassical paintings of David, to the court speeches and printed briefs of barristers denouncing corruption and injustice, reverent images
126 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of the ancient republics proliferated at the end of the old regime, along with praise for political systems in which free, independent, and equal citizens, effortlessly resistant to the blandishments of luxury and amour propre, joined together in governing and in defense of the common- wealth. 68 In strictly political terms, however, this republicanism remained for the most part an abstraction with no direct relation to the realities of French government. As Rousseau and Montesquieu themselves had stressed, republics simply could not serve as the proper form of govern- ment in large Christian monarchies located in the temperate climate of Western Europe. The very notion of a true French republic remained largely unthinkable.
The cult of great men, however, presented a canon of recognizably French, Christian figures who possessed, in the new retelling of their sto- ries, the essential attributes of exemplary republican citizens. The shift from equating distinction with heroic actions and accomplishments to equating it with inner, domestic qualities, had particular importance here. Great feats of military valor or great artistic achievements, such as those the seventeenth-century panegyrists celebrated, had nothing intrinsically republican about them. To the extent they brought classical models to mind, the names in question were Caesar, Alexander, or Achilles, not Marius or Brutus. But the qualities commonly attributed to great men in the eighteenth-century eulogies--independence, steadfastness, virtue de- fined as a solemn dedication to the common good, immunity to the seduc- tions of luxury, lucre, and sensual pleasure--were precisely those that the republican tradition identified as the hallmarks of proper citizenship, and indeed those that Montesquieu had recently identified with republics (by contrast, illustrious feats and heroic actions belonged more to the realm of honor, which Montesquieu identified with monarchies). 69 However high their birth, however well placed in the social hierarchy, however exposed to wealth and temptation, truly great men, so the eulogies and collective bi- ographies insisted, behaved like Roman citizens in the heyday of the Re- public. The concern on the part of the cult's architects to demonstrate France's parity with or even superiority to Greece and Rome only high- lighted these republican attributes further, by setting up inescapable paral- lels between the French figures and their classical predecessors. And given the cult's relentless presentation of great men as models to be emulated, its gallery of supposedly familiar French historical figures in fact constituted nothing less than a school of republican politics.
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 127
? The cult's intrinsic republicanism shows through particularly in the way its participants attempted to establish stark and unforgiving gender divi- sions. As many scholars have argued, French republicanism of the revolu- tionary era derived its polemical energy in large part from the contrast it set up between properly organized polities, where male citizens dominated the public arena and women remained in the private realm of the home, and corrupt polities, where gender boundaries became hopelessly blurred. In this perspective Versailles, a place of feminine influence and intrigue, could only be seen as the nec plus ultra of corruption and political degener- ation. Rousseau, the key figure in French republicanism of this era, first ar- ticulated the contrast, but it remained in force through the period of the radical Revolution. 70
These ideas permeated the cult of great men of the eighteenth cen- tury. The oratorical competitions of the Acade? mie Franc? aise proposed no women as subjects for eulogies, and following them, d'Angiviller chose none as the subjects of portraits or sculptures. Women often received the appellation ce? le`bre (famous) or illustre (illustrious), but French authors made no attempt to find a female equivalent for the phrase "grand(s) homme(s)" (grande femme means a large woman, rather than a great one). 71 In other words, while women could perform glorious and heroic actions, as Joan of Arc and innumerable saints had done, they did not, ac- cording to the architects of the cult, have the qualities requisite for republi- can citizenship.