No More Learning

Some material in Chapter 6 is adapted from my essay "Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism," in American Historical Review C/5 (1995). Some material in Chapter 3 is adapted from my essay "Jumonville's Death: Nation and Race in Eighteenth-century France," in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds. , The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Copyright (C) 2001, The Regents of the University of California.
My debt to Donna Lynn Farber is more personal, and the greatest of all. She and our children, Elana and Joseph, have filled the years I have worked on this book with great happiness.
This book is dedicated to Daniel and Pearl Kazin Bell: loving and sup- portive parents, intellectuals in the best sense of the word, examples that I will always try to follow. L'dor va-dor.
THE CULT OF THE NATION IN FRANCE
? The Cult of the Nation in France
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Constructing the Nation
The time has come to write about nations.
--franc? ois-ignace d'espiard de la borde, l'esprit des nations (1752)
? December 21, 1792. In the drafty, makeshift meeting hall of the National Convention in Paris, the rulers of France are drunk on history. Just four years before, they were ordinary, forgettable men, pursuing ordinary, for- gettable careers. Now they know, for a certainty, that posterity will record their names alongside those of the classical heroes they adore. In four years, they have overthrown a monarchy that had lasted for more than a thousand, and--so they believe--have opened the door to an era of uni- versal happiness, if only the truths they uphold can prevail over ignorance and egotism. To defend these truths, they are preparing to sit in judgment over their former king, to hold him responsible for his actions, and to de- mand of him the ultimate penalty. As Maximilien Robespierre declared in this same hall three weeks previously, fully aware of his words' importance to history: "Louis must die because the patrie must live. "1
But even at this grave moment, the Convention has other work to do, and so Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Etienne rises to speak on the subject of education. In this newly elected, radical assembly, Rabaut is very much yes- terday's man. An eloquent representative of France's persecuted Protes- tants under the old regime, and thus an exemplary victim of "despotism," his career as a revolutionary bloomed early and easily. Now, in the eyes of radical leaders like Robespierre, it has wilted, and gives off the disagreeable, decaying odor of moderation. Rabaut has objected to putting the king on trial and has denounced the rising tide of revolutionary violence. In re- sponse, radical demagogues have heaped insult after vituperative insult on him. Already, perhaps, Rabaut can see the path that will take him, in less than a year, to the guillotine. 2 Yet he does nothing today to appease the advocates of violence, for even while laying out his program for national
1
2 The Cult of the Nation in France
? education, he cannot resist taking a sharp jibe at them. Education, he de- clares, not only inspires the "sweet sentiment" of fraternity, but offers an alternative to "the gloomy terror which is enfolding us, and that dark be- havior in which frightened onlookers believe they can see signs of an ap- proaching storm. "3
Apart from this dark warning, however, Rabaut's speech betrays few signs of historical fatigue or doubt. He still speaks in the same accents of infinite confidence in which he proclaimed, in 1789, that the French nation was "made, not to follow examples, but to give them. "4 A good theory of education, this Calvinist pastor-turned-man-of-the-Enlightenment now explains, should begin with nothing less than the assumption "that man is capable of indefinite perfection, and that this perfection depends on the enlightenment he receives. " Millions of individuals can be, and urgently need to be, reshaped like a gigantic piece of clay through the sheer applica- tion of political will. "We must, absolutely, renew the present generation, while forging the generation to come," he declares. "We must make of the French a new people. " And to do this, he demands "an infallible means of transmitting, constantly and immediately, to all the French at once, the same uniform ideas. "5
When Rabaut speaks of education, he actually means indoctrination, at least to begin with, for France's needs are too pressing to rely on the slow, steady progress of what he calls les lumie`res--enlightenment. Reshaping the French people in a single generation demands a program of over- whelming force, a second "revolution in heads and hearts" parallel to the one already accomplished in government and society. It must use every available means: "the senses, the imagination, memory, reasoning, all the faculties that man possesses. " In practice, it entails subjecting the French to a long list of obligatory civic functions, including physical exercises, pa- rades, festivals, "morality lessons," the reading and memorization of key political texts, and the singing of patriotic songs. Rabaut stresses the need to bewitch the people, if necessary. Education must be "likeable, seductive, and entrancing. "6
What models does Rabaut offer for this vastly ambitious project of pa- triotic education? Predictably, for a participant in this most classical of rev- olutions, he evokes the regimented societies of ancient Sparta and Crete. Yet he quickly adds that enormous differences separate these "children of nature" from modern "agricultural and commercial peoples. "7 He spends far more time discussing another model, and his words on the subject are worth quoting at length:
Introduction 3
? The secret was well known to the priests, who, with their catechisms, their processions . . . their ceremonies, sermons, hymns, missions, pil- grimages, patron saints, paintings, and all that nature placed at their dis- posal, infallibly led men to the goal they designated. They took hold of a man at birth, grasped him again in childhood, adolescence and adult- hood, when he married and had children, in his moments of grief and re- morse, in the sanctum of his conscience . . . in sickness and at death. In this way they managed to cast many far-flung nations, differing in their customs, languages, laws, color and physical makeup, into the same mold, and to give them the same opinions. O cunning lawgivers, who speak to us in the name of heaven, should we not do in the name of truth and freedom, what you so often did in the name of error and slavery? 8
Driving the point home, Rabaut does not hesitate to adopt an explicitly re- ligious vocabulary for his proposed civic functions. Each canton will stage its ceremonies in National Temples, or, pending their construction, in churches. The people will sing "hymns" and learn "catechisms. " The bulk of the activities will take place on Sundays. It seems a program designed to please a Jesuit more than a Jacobin.
For the moment, though, the Jacobins are pleased. According to the newspaper Le Moniteur, the Convention interrupts Rabaut's speech several times with applause, and approves his proposals unanimously. 9 Despite the deep shadow cast by the king's trial, the "gloomy terror" of this tense win- ter momentarily recedes, and Rabaut de Saint-Etienne stands in harmony with his future executioners. His words, which he will soon publish under the title Project of National Education, have become official policy for the French state. 10
Lost in the torrents of French revolutionary politics, Rabaut's speech has received little subsequent attention. 11 Yet it marks, as well as any single event can, the historical moment at which it becomes possible to speak of nationalism in France. It is hardly the first example of French national sen- timent, a phenomenon whose history extends back to the Middle Ages. 12 But national sentiment and nationalism are by no means the same thing, even if modern theorists frequently conflate them. 13 More than a senti- ment, nationalism is a political program which has as its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one, casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form. Long before the current fashion for treating all social and cultural phenomena
4 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 1. Title page from Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Projet d'e? ducation nationale (Project of National Education), Paris, 1792. Rabaut's project, first sketched out in a speech to France's National Convention, aimed at giving all the French "the same, uniform ideas. "
Introduction 5
? as constructions, nationalists quite consciously saw their nations in this manner.
This point has not been generally recognized because nationalists have so often obscured it by invoking their nation's primordial essence, linked to its blood, or language, or historical territory. Such invocations come naturally to them, for only by presenting a nation as something whose ex- istence and rights are beyond question can they justify the large political claims they tend to make on its behalf. Nationalism almost irresistibly calls forth images of immemorial pasts, of lengthy and unbroken lineages, of deep bonds between particular peoples and particular lands. New con- structions therefore tend to be presented as acts of reconstruction, recovery, and regeneration. 14 Yet even the nationalists most convinced of their na- tion's immemorial rights still also acknowledge that large-scale political action is necessary to complete and perfect the national entity, so as to forge a truly cohesive body. Relevant measures have included education, the strengthening of common symbols and loyalties, the rectification of political borders, and the suppression or expulsion of minorities within those borders. 15 Even in the time and place--nineteenth-century Ger- many--perhaps most closely associated with lyrical invocations of a pri- mordial national essence, these tasks were still deemed vital. As Geoff Eley has concisely remarked about the early days of the newly united Second Reich: "Unification entailed a subsequent process of cultural coalescence which in theory it had already presupposed. "16 In other words, no matter how urgently it invokes the past, nationalism has something inescapably paradoxical about it. It makes political claims which take the nation's exis- tence wholly for granted, yet it proposes programs which treat the nation as something yet unbuilt.
Today, the concept of nation-building seems so natural that the fact of its relatively recent origins has gone virtually unnoticed, despite the recent efflorescence of works on nationalism. The word "nation" itself has a long lineage, as does the idea that the human race is naturally divided into na- tions. Yet until the eighteenth-century age of revolutions, the idea of ac- tively constructing a nation through political action lay beyond the mental horizons of Western Europeans. 17 In European usage, nations were facts of nature: they signified basic divisions of the human species, not products of human will. 18 From 1140, when a Norman bishop described the Welsh natio to the pope as a group distinct in "language, laws, habits, modes of judgment and customs," to 1694, when the first dictionary of the Acade? mie
6 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Franc? aise defined nation as "the inhabitants of a common country, who live under the same laws and use the same language," the meaning changed relatively little. 19 Europeans of course believed that nations could have founders, and celebrated such figures in their national literatures, much as Virgil had celebrated the founder of Rome in his Aeneid. They also appre- ciated the importance of a nation's nobility sharing the language and man- ners of its monarch. The great cardinal-ministers of seventeenth-century France, Richelieu and Mazarin, both hoped to found schools where young nobles of newly annexed provinces could learn how to be French. 20
None of this, however, amounted to nation-building in the modern sense. Neither Virgil nor Richelieu or Mazarin envisioned taking entire populations--from elegant courtiers to impoverished sharecroppers, from well-polished intellectuals to urban beggars--and forging them all, in their millions, into a single nation, transforming everything from language to manners to the most intimate ideas. They did not imagine programs of na- tional education of the sort sketched out by Rabaut, or massive political action to reduce regional differences, or laws demarcating national citizens from foreigners. Programs this breathtakingly ambitious, programs which deserve the name of "nationalist," arose only in the eighteenth century. It is this fact which makes nationalism, if not national sentiment, a peculiarly modern phenomenon. 21 It is no coincidence that the word "nationalism" itself was coined in the late 1790s, precisely as overwhelmed observers were struggling to make sense of the political deluge they had just witnessed in France. 22
This book is about the way in which the French came to think of their nation as a political construction and, furthermore, came to see the pro- cess of construction itself as a central task of political life. The pages that follow will offer a reinterpretation both of the origins of nationalism, and of an important aspect of modern French history. In the first case, I want to argue that nationalism was invented in the eighteenth century, and to offer a new explanation for why that was so. In the second case, I want to show just how much the political and cultural landscape of France itself changed in the process. For as the French began to think like nationalists, they came to understand many aspects of the world around them in radi- cally new ways.
In one sense, the French began to think like nationalists over a very short period of time: immediately before and during the French Revolu- tion of 1789, less than the space of a single generation. Yet the transforma-
Introduction 7
? tion cannot be properly understood without setting it in a deeper context: it represented the culmination of a process that had begun a century ear- lier. In this book I will show that in the decades around 1700, two inti- mately related concepts gained a political salience and centrality they had previously lacked. These were the concepts of the nation itself, and that of the patrie, or fatherland. Both referred to the entity known as France, but the first signified above all a group of people sharing certain important, binding qualities, while the second was used in the sense of a territory commanding a person's emotional attachment and ultimate political loy- alty (I will have much more to say about these definitions). Their political and cultural importance only increased over the course of the eighteenth century, and by its end they had both come to possess a talismanic power. A cult of the nation had come into being.
Much of the book will be concerned with this pre-revolutionary change. I will emphasize that it was intellectually violent, involving anxious and heated debates over the nature and condition of the French nation and patrie. But it was not intellectually unproductive, for the violence ulti- mately brought about the conditions for the invention of nationalism itself in the revolutionary period. Over the course of the century, thanks to the anxieties the debates generated, a widespread conviction arose that a true nation and a true patrie did not yet exist in France. From this conviction, in turn, emerged the sense that these entities needed, desperately, to be constructed. The book, having established this point, will then proceed to explore the French revolutionaries' proposed solutions to the problem: their conscious programs of nation-building and patriotic instruction, such as the one sketched out by Rabaut de Saint-Etienne. Finally, I will trace the consequences of the story for the history of modern France, down to the present day.
I will also argue that the dynamics that governed this story and made nationalism thinkable were principally cultural and religious in nature. Nationalism in France arose simultaneously out of, and in opposition to, Christian systems of belief. 23 The rise of the concepts of nation and patrie initially took place as Europeans came to perceive a radical separation be- tween God and the world, searched for ways to discern and maintain ter- restrial order in the face of God's absence, and struggled to relegate reli- gion to a newly defined private sphere of human endeavor, separate from politics. It was only when the French ceased to see themselves as part of a great hierarchy uniting heaven and earth, the two linked by an apostolic
8 The Cult of the Nation in France
? church and a divinely ordained king, that they could start to see themselves as equal members of a distinct, uniform, and sovereign nation.
Yet despite this desire to find explicitly nonreligious means of binding men and women into a greater whole, early French nationalism remained powerfully shaped by the heritage of Christianity. When the leaders of rev- olutionary France confronted the task of converting a largely peasant pop- ulation of twenty-eight million to new, national norms, they ironically found themselves reaching back to an older, clerical model of evangeliza- tion. Even Louis XIV, the most ambitious of France's kings, had shown lit- tle concern for molding his subjects into a single national body. It was enough that they obeyed his laws, paid his taxes, and demonstrated their loyalty to his government. 24 The precedents for revolutionary nationalism lay, rather, in the great efforts made by Catholic and Protestant churches to convert a peasantry they perceived as still largely pagan and savage to their competing visions of true Christianity. Only the churches, in their long, patient efforts to send missionaries into the villages, to root out superstition and error, and effectively to impose a new culture and new morality on the populations of Western Europe, matched the ambitions of modern nationalists. 25 Rabaut Saint-Etienne recognized this precedent when he spoke of how the priesthood had managed "to cast many far- flung nations, differing in their customs, languages, laws, color and physi- cal makeup, into the same mold. " But France now had to invent a secular version of the same process, not to mold different nations together into a single church, but to mold different regions and classes together into a single nation.
Although this is a book about France, I do not wish to claim that the French deserve particular credit for inventing nationalism. French nation- alism emerged as part of a general religious and cultural transformation that reached across Europe, from powerful monarchies such as Great Brit- ain to peripheral areas like Greece and Corsica. 26 But France was distin- guished by the self-consciousness with which the issues were discussed, the unusually strong emphasis on political will as the foundation stone of the nation (as opposed to language or blood or history), and the amazing sud- denness and strength with which a coherent nationalist program crystal- lized during the French Revolution. Moreover, French nationalism has been an almost unparalleled success story. The fascination of scholars and journalists with tiny present-day French regionalist movements, not to mention recent squawks of anxiety over a supposed "crisis of French na-
Introduction 9
? tional identity," has done much to obscure the fact that for two centuries France has been the most strongly cohesive national unit in Europe. 27 France, almost alone among all major European nations, can make the striking claim that in modern times, despite episodes of violent civil war, it has experienced no serious threat of regional secession (not counting Ger- many's forcible, temporary annexation of Alsace-Lorraine). If the French were not the sole inventors of nationalism, they have been perhaps its prin- cipal model.
A general survey of the origins of nationalism in France is by now long overdue. Despite the significance of the French story, and the fact that nearly every general history and theoretical study of nationalism makes co- pious reference to it, readers still have nothing comparable to the works of Linda Colley for Great Britain, or Eugen Weber for late-nineteenth-cen- tury French national identity. 28 This is partly because of an assumption which long went unchallenged among social scientists and social histori- ans, namely that nationalism only emerged hand-in-hand with an indus- trial, capitalist "modernity. "29 It is also partly because nationalist and patri- otic passions flared up so intensely during the French Revolution that scholars have had difficulty believing they had meaningful roots in the an- cien re? gime, still less religious roots. It has often seemed that these passions must have sprung forth fully grown in 1789 from the revolutionary process itself. As Giacomo Casanova, usually a keen observer of human impulses, wrote in 1797: "This people has become a worshipper of its patrie, without ever having known, before the Revolution, what a patrie was, or even the word itself. "30
Only recently have conditions become more favorable for a study of the sort I am undertaking. On the one hand, social scientists have begun effec- tively to challenge the necessary association of nationalism with industrial capitalism--although mostly without sufficient recognition of the impor- tance of religion. 31 And on the other, historians of France have set to work exploring the richness and dynamism of pre-revolutionary French politi- cal culture, showing that revolutionary ideologies had origins that went well beyond the circles of the philosophes and amounted to more than the simple reflection of changing social conditions. 32 Thanks to these studies, and to important new work on related subjects, it has become both neces- sary and possible to trace the great eighteenth-century ferment around the concepts of nation and patrie. 33
10 The Cult of the Nation in France
? The subject matter for such a study is copious and remarkably varied. Yet much of it remains poorly known, and so a brief overview may be use- ful at this point. What distinguishes this material is not simply the fact that the concepts of nation and patrie appear frequently in it, but that they are the objects of sustained--even obsessive--reflection and debate. It is pre- cisely this quality which separates the eighteenth century from earlier peri- ods and reveals its importance to the history of nationalism in France. The words "nation" and patrie themselves were, of course, in common usage long before the eighteenth century. Patrie served intermittently as a politi- cal rallying cry, particularly during the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century, when Protestants and moderate Catholics found it useful to place loyalty to France above loyalty to any particular confession. 34 But before the late seventeenth century, the French did not write treatises about the meanings of the words or debate these meanings in political pamphlets. They did not speak of either entity as an authority superior to the king or even as clearly distinct from him. 35 It was only in 1683 that the Jansenist cleric Jean Soanen preached a sermon on "Love of the Patrie," perhaps the first extended exploration of the theme in French. 36 In the 1710s and 1720s, nation and patrie both began to feature prominently in criticisms of the absolute monarchy and to appear more frequently in many other sorts of texts.
Then, in 1743, in a turning point of sorts, a little known priest and mag- istrate from Dijon named Franc? ois-Ignace d'Espiard de la Borde published a remarkable and unjustly ignored book entitled Essais sur le ge? nie et le caracte`re des nations (Essays on the Genius and Character of Nations). 37 Probably because of its muddy style, in a century which treasured French prose for its clarity and wit, the book sank with little trace (although a later version, entitled The Spirit of the Nations in obvious imitation of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, did enjoy moderate success). 38 But it was perhaps the first book to make nations the subject of extended schol- arly inquiry, and it powerfully foreshadowed subsequent discussions, both in its attention to the role of climate and history in shaping "national char- acter" and in its musings about whether political action could alter this character. 39 D'Espiard even speculated about what it would have taken to "remove the vices contrary to the nature of a free state" from France and create a true French republic, although he nervously insisted he was mak- ing this "most singular supposition" purely as a scholarly hypothesis. 40
Within a decade, more famous figures had begun to examine the same
Introduction 11
? issues. In 1748, Montesquieu made what he called "the general spirit of na- tions" central to his masterpiece, L'esprit des lois, and a few years after that, Voltaire published his vast comparative history of nations, whose full title read Histoire ge? ne? rale et essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations. 41 Rous- seau, meanwhile, was developing his idea that only a people whose souls had a "national physiognomy" formed by "national institutions" could re- sist the lure of "vain precepts" and the fate of blending into a vapid Euro- pean sameness. 42 Rousseau, who has a key place in the development of the idea of the nation as a political construction, pondered, more deeply than any other eighteenth-century thinker, the connections between national and religious sentiments.
Beyond these rarefied intellectual precincts, the great official institu- tions which dominated French cultural life were also increasingly defining themselves in relation to the nation. In 1758, the Acade? mie Franc? aise made "the great men of the nation" the theme of its prestigious annual oratorical competitions. 43 Soon afterwards, the Come? die Franc? aise began producing a series of stage plays celebrating famous episodes in French national his- tory. They enjoyed enormous popularity, despite Voltaire's mordant quip that audiences would eventually prefer being entertained to being praised for their choice of nationality. 44 France's recalcitrant parlements (sovereign courts) evoked "the rights of the nation" in their long-standing quarrel with France's kings over the limits of royal authority, and, as the tempera- ture of political conflict increased, so did use of the phrase. 45 Already in 1754 the Marquis d'Argenson wrote in his journal that "the words nation and state have never been repeated as often as they are today. " By 1789, one historical work reported that "the epithet 'national' is in everyone's mouth . . . A fruit merchant the other day cried out in the street, selling her mer- chandise: 'national plums, national apples. '"46
Voluminous writings likewise celebrated and attempted to stimulate love of the French patrie. Indeed, in the decades after 1750 it often seemed as if the French were gorging themselves on things patriotic. They made patriotic addresses and proposed the foundation of patriotic orders, staged patriotic festivals and even ate what one young lawyer, in the heady au- tumn of 1788, called "properly patriotic suppers. "47 Under Louis XVI, the crown commissioned paintings and sculptures specifically to stimulate pa- triotic sentiment. Several series of overtly patriotic engravings appeared, including Antoine-Franc?
ois Sergent's melodramatic riposte to Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe: his rendition of the death of the Mar-
12 The Cult of the Nation in France
? quis de Montcalm, at British hands, in 1759 (the cover illustration for this book). 48 During the century's many wars against Britain, the crown also sponsored a torrent of self-consciously patriotic war literature whose vol- ume and violence surpassed anything seen since the sixteenth century. In it, contemporary military heroes and victims of English atrocities became nothing less than the successors to the flower of French chivalry (as in the fanciful engravings, for an epic poem about the Seven Years' Wars). 49 Writers echoing the eulogists of the Acade? mie invented a virtual "cult of great men," while admirers of the patriotic stage plays gushed endlessly about the moral lessons these could impart. "True patriots can be con- firmed in their sentiments," wrote one. "People can say: 'Why can I not do what this person has done? He was French; I am as well. '"50 Pamphlets ap- peared with titles like "The Patriotic Merchant," "Patriotic Proposal on Vines, Wines and Ciders," and even "Patriotic Notice Concerning People Suffocated by Coal Vapors. "51 As an aspiring economist wrote in 1764, "from all directions I hear nothing but cries in favor of the Patrie, and see nothing but Works that recommend patriotism. "52
Two relatively crude but nonetheless large-scale measurements con- firm the growing importance of the concepts of nation and the patrie over the last century of the old regime. The catalogue of the French Na- tional Library lists no fewer than 895 French-language works published between 1700 and 1789 with the words "nation" or "national" in their title, and another 277 with the words "patrie," "patriote," "patriotique" or "patriotisme," as opposed to only 105 and 16 before 1700. The largest data- base of French writings similarly reveals a more than fourfold increase in the frequency with which French authors used the words "nation" and "patrie" over the course of the century. 53
In short, by the late 1780s the words had come to possess awesome sym- bolic power and taken their place as central organizing concepts of French political culture. For a significant part of the French population, "the na- tion" now represented the source of all legitimate authority--to the extent that they were willing, in its name, to overthrow a political system which had lasted for centuries, and which was ordained, its apologists insisted, by God himself. It is no accident that if the first great battle of the French Revolution was won on July 14, 1789, the first great challenge to the old or- der had come earlier, on June 17, when the commoner deputies to the Es- tates General unilaterally declared themselves a National Assembly. Soon enough, this new assembly would formally declare that "the source of all
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 2. The killing of French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, in a skirmish with Virginia militia and Indian auxiliaries in the Ohio Valley in 1754, became a favorite topic of French publicists during the Seven Years' War. The engraving, from Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, Paris, 1759, allegorically compares Jumonville's arrival in North America to the arrival of Crusaders in the Middle East.
14 The Cult of the Nation in France
? sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. " Its successor, the Legislative Assembly, would decree in 1792 that "in all communes an altar to the Patrie shall be erected, on which shall be engraved the Declaration of Rights, along with the inscription, 'the citizen is born, lives and dies for the patrie. '"54 It was a rare speech, newspaper, pamphlet, or book published in the years after 1789 that did not invoke the icons of nation and patrie.
Yet even as the concepts reached their apotheosis, they were simulta- neously being radically destabilized. The more they were invoked, the more they were discussed and debated, the less the French agreed about what the words actually meant, or indeed whether the things they signified ac- tually existed. This process of destabilization, which took place as tradi- tional constitutional politics collapsed, and a classical republican critique of French institutions and society arose, reached its logical conclusion on the eve of the Revolution. As the French stared into a political void, many writers made the sudden and singular discovery that, contrary to previous assumptions, France was actually not a nation. In December of 1788, for instance, the anonymous author of a book purporting to give an English- man's reaction to events in France wrote that the French "perceive quite well that they are not a nation; they want to become one. "55 A political pamphlet from the same year claimed that "this people, assembled out of a multitude of small, different nations, do not amount to a national body. "56 Soon afterwards, the great orator Mirabeau called France "nothing but an unconstituted aggregate of disunited peoples," while his colleague in Revo- lution, the abbe? Emmanuel Sieye`s, spoke of the need to make "all the parts of France a single body, and all the peoples who divide it into a single Na- tion. "57 A year later, the journalist Pierre-Nicolas Chantreau conceded that France was a nation, but said it had "really been" so only since the Revolu- tion itself. 58 In November 1793, in the midst of the Terror, the playwright Marie-Joseph Che? nier would put the point even more clearly: "What is our duty in organizing public instruction? " he asked in the Convention. "It is to form republicans; and even more so, to form Frenchmen, to endow the nation with its own, unique physiognomy. "59 Thus was posed the great na- tionalist paradox: political leaders making wholly unprecedented demands on behalf of "the nation" and justifying their actions by reference to its sovereignty, but simultaneously acknowledging that the nation did not yet exist.
This destabilization brought about an epic shift in the way the French saw themselves. Aspects of their society and culture which they had pre-
Introduction 15
? viously taken for granted, as facts of nature with little significance for France's existence as a nation, now began to appear as intolerable obstacles to its becoming a nation. For instance, the "national character," which had aroused such curiosity and celebration in previous decades, became an ob- ject of deep, visceral loathing; a supposedly natural French penchant for refinement, frivolity, and intensive sociability was now judged a species of "degeneracy" utterly unsuited to a properly national life. Similarly, France's tremendous regional diversity--from the privileges and the law codes that prevailed in the different provinces to the very languages spoken by the common people--now appeared as a towering barrier to the nation. Previ- ously, it had not seemed particularly strange to most observers that most subjects of the French king spoke Occitan, German, Basque, Breton, Cata- lan, Italian, Yiddish, or distinct French dialects, rather than standard French. Such diversity was the rule, not the exception, in most of Europe at the time. 60 The radical Jacobins, however, now saw it a fatal hindrance to "national" unity.
In short, the meaning of "nation" itself was changing, from a fact of na- ture to a product of political will. And as it changed, the most radical revo- lutionary leaders became convinced that for the Revolution to fulfill its promise, a nation had to be built where none had previously existed. As the abbe? Henri Gre? goire somewhat chillingly put it on more than one occasion, all citizens had to be "melted into the national mass. "61 Particu- larly under the Terror, in 1793-94, plans proliferated for reeducating the French, providing them with what we would now call a common national culture, and also making French the single, universal language of the republic (many took inspiration from Rabaut's Project of National Educa- tion). 62 For the most part, these programs did not come to fruition. A Jaco- bin state engaged in desperate fighting against external and internal ene- mies alike, not to mention economic collapse, had few resources available for nation-building on such an ambitious scale. With the fall of the Jaco- bins in 1794, the programs were in large measure abandoned. Nonetheless, they prefigured the extensive and ambitious nation-building programs un- dertaken by later French regimes, particularly the Third Republic of 1871- 1940, and have served as a model for other countries' efforts as well. 63
In the chapters that follow I will not analyze this material in strictly chro- nological fashion. Chapter 1 will lay out the theoretical foundation for the argument about religion and focus on the decades around 1700. The next
16 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ? The Languages of France in 1789
Flemish
? ? Corsica
Poitevin
Bordeaux
Gascon Be? arnais
Berrichon
Limousin Auvergnat
Burgundian
Lyons
Franco- Provenc? al
Provenc? al
Marseilles
Gallo
Norman
Champenois Lorrain
Picard
Paris
German
? ? ? Rennes Breton
French (and regional dialects)
Stras- bourg
? Occitan Dialects
Languedocien
Toulouse
Catalan
The languages of France in 1789. The dialects today referred to as Occitan are branches of a distinct Romance language closely related to Catalan.
three chapters will relegate the religious issues more to the background, as they trace the deployment of and debates over the concepts of the nation and the patrie before 1789. These chapters will proceed thematically, look- ing at French constitutional politics, international warfare and the percep- tion of foreigners, and French national memory as expressed in the eigh- teenth-century "cult of great men. " In the last two chapters I will again engage directly with the religious issue in the course of examining the be- ginnings of the Revolution, the subsequent attempts at "nation-building" (particularly in regard to the question of French multilingualism), and the way these attempts followed from the earlier evangelizing efforts of the Reformation-era clergy.
Throughout, I will necessarily focus on France's educated elites and the
? ? ? Italian
Basque
Non-French and non-Occitan
? ? ? Figure 3.
Introduction 17
? printed matter which circulated among them. Determining the attitudes and ideas of other social groups toward the nation and patrie may well be possible, but to do so would require research methods fundamentally dif- ferent from what I have undertaken here. 64 Furthermore, as I will argue in the conclusion, it is the ideas of the eighteenth-century elites which gave the dominant current of French nationalism the shape it would keep for more than two centuries. Only in the last two decades has this current of thought arguably changed beyond recognition, and even today, much of France's cultural leadership continues to militate for a return to an ideal- ized republican past.
In discussing the religious issues, I will not deal systematically with the theological and ecclesiastical controversies that raged in France dur- ing the eighteenth century. These controversies did turn in part around the autonomy enjoyed within Roman Catholicism by the Gallican (French) Church. Yet this autonomy was rarely, if ever, construed in what we would call cultural terms. It was a matter of jurisdiction: of the specific rights possessed by French prelates and the French monarchy vis-a`-vis the pope. It was not associated with a specifically French national character, or a specifically French set of beliefs. In the minds of jurists and the clergy, "Gallican liberties" were certainly related to French national sentiment. But Gallicanism did not contribute significantly to the invention of na- tionalism, which derived, I will argue, less from controversies within the religious sphere than from new understandings of the overall role of reli- gion in society. In exploring these new understandings, I will place great stress on the austere and difficult, but enormously influential current of Catholic thought known as Jansenism, whose persecution by the com- bined forces of the Roman church and French state dominated the eigh- teenth-century controversies. But if Jansenism has contributed to the his- tory of nationalism, it is not because there was a specifically Jansenist concept of the nation. It is rather because Jansenism encouraged radically new ways of imagining the relationship between the heavenly and terres- trial cities, allowing, in turn, for new ways of imagining the nation. 65
Before proceeding with this story, two common misconceptions about the history of French nationalism and French national sentiment need to be addressed. The origins of French nationalism may not have received a comprehensive, systematic overview, but they have nonetheless attracted the attention of many scholars, and while much of the resulting work has been invaluable, some of it has also been misleading.
18 The Cult of the Nation in France
? The first widely held misconception is that French nationalism has solely political origins. Ironically, this misconception is cast in two, mutu- ally opposing forms: that nationalism arose at the hands of the French state, continuously, since the Middle Ages; conversely, that it arose in op- position to the state. Thus, on the one hand, Pierre Nora has written elo- quently that "other countries may owe the sinews of their cohesion and the secret of their togetherness to economics, religion, language, social or eth- nic community, or to culture itself; France has owed them to the voluntary and continuous action of the State. "66 On the other hand, the sociologist Liah Greenfeld and certain historians have located the origins of French nationalism in a purported early eighteenth-century effort by frustrated nobles to present themselves as true leaders of a "nation" which predated and took precedence over the monarchy. 67
As we will see, critics have already done much to overturn the first of these assumptions; the evidence does not support the second, either. But more generally, any interpretation that reduces nationalism to a political strategy and to a series of claims about political sovereignty is fundamen- tally mistaken. 68 To be sure, in the eighteenth century the idea of sover- eignty embodied in the whole nation challenged and ultimately prevailed over the idea of sovereignty embodied in a single man. Opponents of the monarchy deployed "the nation" as a political rallying cry both before and during the revolution. But simply tracking this shift and the strategic de- ployment of the concept does not explain why the French developed the ability to imagine the nation as a sovereign entity. Earlier opponents of the monarchy had not challenged the king in the name of the nation. What made the eighteenth century different? To answer this question, we must first recognize, as the advocates of the political approach do not, that the concept of the nation was used in many different discursive arenas in the eighteenth century, not just that of constitutional politics. Moreover, the changes in its usage occurred across these different arenas, making it dif- ficult to attribute them to political strategy alone. To understand them, we must not only use linguistic analysis to excavate the way different political forces deployed different terms, but also explore the evolving religious and cultural background against which the terms could acquire radically new meanings. 69
The political approach also obscures the important point that for na- tionalists, common membership in the nation precedes and transcends po- litical relationships. They define this membership not by the vertical bonds
Introduction 19
? that join the ruler to the ruled, the sovereign to the citizen, but rather by the horizontal, affective bonds that join citizens to each other. This is pre- cisely why metaphors of the family are so often used to describe nations and fatherlands. "The Frenchman . . . sees the entire nation as his own family"; "In France, the nation practically forms a great family"; "The patrie is . . . a second, vast family whose members are linked by a sort of civil fraternity"; "France is no longer composed of anything but a single family of brothers and equals"; "All the French are brothers and make up but a single family. " These citations from eighteenth-century France could be multiplied endlessly. 70
In light of this evidence, the family itself might seem a more promising point of departure for interpreting nationalism. The problem here is sim- ply that family metaphors are ubiquitous--nationalists have no special monopoly on them. Most forms of human community have been likened to families, and never more than when a writer has wished to insist upon their affective, nonpolitical nature. The absolute monarchs spoke of France as a family. So did the constitutional monarchists of 1789-1792. So did the radical republicans of 1792-1794. So did Napoleon. Lynn Hunt has bril- liantly explored the shifting forms of family metaphor employed in French political language in the era of the Revolution. 71 But for the purposes of my argument, the self-representation of the French as brothers in the great family of the patrie is less important for itself than for the fact that their previous self-characterizations as "brothers" and "sisters" took place above all in a religious context--penitential "confraternities," monastic orders, and the words of French bishops' pastoral instructions: "My very dear brothers . . . " It is obviously significant that the patrie was consistently per- ceived as a community of brothers, not brothers and sisters, with women essentially absent. 72 I will address this problem, however, in my discussions of the gendering of the patrie and nation in French republican thought.
A second misconception that needs to be overturned is one that plagues even much of the best writing on nations and nationalism: namely, that it is at all possible to write the history of a single, relatively stable "national identity. " In fact, this project is akin to trying to chain down the sea. "Iden- tity" is, notoriously, a thing whose apparent unity and simplicity breaks down rapidly under close investigation. As the philosopher W. V. Quine has pithily written: "to say of anything that it is identical with itself is triv- ial, and to say that it is identical with anything else is absurd. What, then, is the use of identity? "73 Even to the extent that identity is defined simply as a
20 The Cult of the Nation in France
? subjective perception, it remains hugely unstable, constantly sliding be- tween the many things people think they are (and think they are not), say they are (and say they are not), what others say they are (and say they are not), and what they think, say, and do despite all of the above. Identities change not only over time, but also according to where one is, and what one is doing. This book is not a history of national identity, but rather of the extraordinary historical moment when having a national identity started to be seen as indispensable to a person's existence, and became the focus of unprecedented political efforts and ambitions. 74 One of the things that distinguishes my approach from that of Eugen Weber and Linda Colley (to both of whom I remain indebted) is that their works sometimes take polemical or programmatic statements for expressions of a general national identity, and play down the extent to which the national question could divide, as well as unite. In contrast, as I have indicated, I will treat the nation primarily as what Kathleen Wilson has nicely called a "continually contested terrain. "75 That is to say, I will trace the different things that the nation and patrie meant to educated French people during the eighteenth century, and the extraordinary actions they took to try and make the world conform to their ideal visions. 76
Given such close attention to language, it is worth underscoring that I am deliberately using the terms "patriotism" and "nationalism" themselves anachronistically (patriotisme only made its entry into the French lexicon in the middle of the eighteenth century, and nationalisme did not follow until its very end). 77 But the words are too germane to the subject mate- rial to avoid. By "patriotism" I mean an emotional attachment to a place thought of as "home," and more specifically (so as to distinguish it from "local" patriotism) to that territorial entity whose rulers possess final coer- cive authority over the persons living within it: in this case, the kingdom and then the republic of France. By "nationalism" I mean a program to build a sovereign political community grouping together people who have enough in common--whether language, customs, beliefs, traditions, or some combination of these--to allow them to act as a homogeneous, col- lective person. 78
As a foreigner to France, I have had the (sometimes questionable) luxury of standing at a remove from ongoing French debates about the nation. But of course my own beliefs have still informed and influenced my thoughts on the subject, and so, to conclude this introduction, a few gen-
Introduction 21
? eral remarks about these beliefs. The sort of nationalism that took shape in the Revolution often seems to have very few defenders in France today, and the most vociferous among them do considerably more harm than good to its image. 79 French nationalism has been attacked by regionalist militants as imperialist, and by neoliberals as collectivist and even proto-totalitar- ian. 80 These attacks fit in with the general distaste Western intellectuals have long manifested towards nationalism in general.
This general distaste is understandable, given the human price paid for national self-determination over the last two centuries. Objections to spe- cifically French varieties of nationalism must be taken seriously as well. As someone who learned to read Occitan for this project and now counts Pe`ire Godolin of Toulouse among the finer early modern poets, I would argue that the cultural uniformity advocated by most republicans, from Gre? goire onwards, has caused a real degree of French cultural impoverish- ment. Yet for all this, the architects of nationalism in eighteenth-century France were attempting, in a serious way, to address one of the great prob- lems of modernity: how to keep their community from tearing itself apart without surrendering moral authority to priests who would impose on the earth an order supposedly grounded in divine revelation. The early nation- alists sought to create a new form of civic harmony and, in the course of a period marked by vertigo-inducing change, concluded that the solution lay in giving a large and disparate community what we would call a shared culture--common language, customs, beliefs, traditions. Under the Terror they proceeded far too strongly and too rigidly towards what Mona Ozouf has strikingly called "the homogenization of mankind. "81 Yet the problem they addressed remains, and it is not at all clear that there was a realistic al- ternative to the general direction they took. 82 This book is therefore written out of sympathy--although, I hope, a detached, skeptical sympathy--with their endeavors.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
The National and the Sacred
CHAPTER 1
The National and the Sacred
Moses formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of shaping into a national Body a swarm of unhappy fugitives . . . and . . . gave it this durable form, . . . which even today retains all its strength.
--jean-jacques rousseau (1772)
The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything.
--emmanuel sieye`s (1789)
? Historically, Western nationalism, patriotism, and religion have twisted around each other like sinuous vines. They have each offered sources of meaning that stretch beyond individual lives, and that have even been deemed worth giving up lives for. (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. )1 And they have employed the same sorts of symbolic practices, both as aids to belief and commitment and as a means of delineating what is sacred and beyond criticism from what is corruptible and profane. Flags, holy days, parades, processions, shrines, and pilgrimages: all belong to nation- alist and patriotic movements, and to religions alike. Rabaut de Saint- Etienne's 1792 speech to the National Convention was not the first docu- ment to expound on these connections, and it would not be the last.
It is therefore surprising that few modern scholars have explored the connections in a satisfactory manner. It is not that they have failed to connect nationalism and religion--to the contrary. From Carlton Hayes's post-World War I essay "Nationalism as a Religion" to Josep Llobera's re- cent The God of Modernity, the tendency has been not simply to connect, but to equate the two. Many prominent authors have done so in one way or another. 2 Liah Greenfeld rightly remarks that "to say that nationalism is the modern religion has become a cliche? . "3 Yet equating nationalism and religion ultimately means taking neither one seriously. It is an approach that most often reduces these two complex intellectual phenomena to
22
The National and the Sacred 23
?