No More Learning

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
? nothing but the symbolic practices they share: the flags, processions, and so forth. It takes for granted that the two address identical, timeless, uni- versal spiritual longings. It also assumes that the one rushes in to supplant the other, despite the fact that nationalism has so often flourished most ostentatiously precisely where religious observance has remained most intense.
Religion most often serves these writers principally as a convenient, un- complicated symbol for something else. It can stand for irrational fanati- cism and thereby express frustration at the fact that nationalism appar- ently leads modern men and women to act so blindly, so emotionally, so much like religious zealots (those writers concerned primarily with Nazi Germany lean hard in this direction). Or it can stand for spiritual comfort and certainty, and thereby express a Romantic nostalgia for older, disap- pearing forms of spiritual community. It is no coincidence that one of the first--and incomparably the most eloquent--expositions of the compari- son between nationalism and religion came not from a modern theorist but from the greatest of Romantic historians, Jules Michelet, in 1831: "My noble country, you must take the place of the God who escapes us, that you may fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there. You owe us the equivalent of the infinite. "4
In neither schema, however, does religion have much complexity or his- tory, or do much of anything except vent its sound and fury and then, as modernity dawns, be heard no more. Thus even Benedict Anderson, per- haps the most thoughtful advocate of the comparison, ultimately gives lit- tle sustained attention to the dynamics of religious history. Early on in his book Imagined Communities, he makes an important and suggestive re- mark: "What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large [religious] cultural systems that preceded it, out of which--as well as against which--it came into being. "5 Yet Anderson does not elaborate on the insight. Indeed, he never really abandons a simple functionalism which holds religion and nationalism commensurate because each, in its way, helps people cope with "the overwhelming burden of human suffering. " He, too, sees religion "ebbing" in the eighteenth century, thereby "requir- ing" something to replace it. 6 Moreover, the nationalist deus ex machina it- self arises, in Anderson's theory, thanks to a wholly secular dynamic, which he traces principally to print capitalism and early modern imperial admin- istrative practices.
Is it, then, worth pursuing the connection between religion and nation-
24 The Cult of the Nation in France
? alism? Absolutely. Nationalism in France, at least, cannot begin to be un- derstood properly without reference to religion. The way to start, however, is not to define nationalism as a religion itself. The concepts of nation and patrie did not acquire their power because the French saw them as deities taking the place of the Christian God. Rather, I will argue in this chapter, it was in large part because the French came to see the Christian God himself in a new manner. Early French nationalists certainly borrowed wholesale from Christianity's symbolic repertory, just as Rabaut de Saint-Etienne urged them to do. Indeed, one of the purposes of this chapter will be to show just how "Catholic" the French cult of the nation remained in key re- spects, particularly in comparison with its counterpart in Protestant Great Britain. But the borrowings from Catholicism cast a deceptive aura of sim- ilarity over phenomena of a fundamentally different order. The cult of the nation did not arise as a replacement for Christianity, and it did not have as its purpose to orient believers towards any sort of heavenly city. It arose as the French came to perceive a new relation between the divine and hu- man spheres, and it had as its purpose to reorder the latter, at precisely the moment when modern concepts of the "secular" came into being.
Foundational Concepts
What was the background against which the concepts of the nation and the patrie acquired their talismanic power in the eighteenth century? The most convincing accounts to date have mostly found an answer in the al- leged rise of noble opposition to royal absolutism, after the domineering Louis XIV gave way to successors who lacked a certain rigidity in the spinal column. 7 Their historical microscope has above all sought out anti-abso- lutist figures like the grumpy racialist Henri de Boulainvilliers, who rum- maged through the ancient history of the Gauls and Franks, tendentiously and inaccurately, to discover the supposedly original and still-binding rights of the French "nation" over its kings. 8 Of course, these writers in- tended the exercise of these immemorial rights to remain firmly in the hands of the noble descendants of the Frankish conquerors, or of the sov- ereign courts (parlements) which had supposedly succeeded their general assemblies. Several historians have argued that such anti-absolutist writ- ings served as the key source for the later, revolutionary "ideology" of the nation. 9
Boulainvilliers--whose ideas were shaped not only by his status as a no-
The National and the Sacred 25
? ble but by his membership in "libertine" religious circles--does have a real importance in the story of French nationalism, as we will see. Overall, however, the "anti-absolutist" approach takes writers like him out of sev- eral historical contexts. First, while these thinkers may have used the word "nation," they nonetheless had more in common with sixteenth-century constitutionalist predecessors like Franc? ois Hotman than with the French revolutionaries. 10 They did not equate the nation with the French popula- tion as a whole, or assert that it had any right to change France's ancient constitution and hierarchical, corporate social order, or grant it any right of resistance against tyranny, far less ground such a right in any notion of a social contract. If they used the phrase "the rights of the nation," they most often meant not natural rights but positive rights--rights defined by French law and history, whose use belonged not to the nation as a whole but to the modern French institutions that had inherited the authority of the nation's original assemblies, those imagined gatherings of the trium- phant Franks in their thousands on the Champ de Mars next to conquered Roman Lute`ce. 11 The actual political changes they demanded, as in the case of the earlier constitutionalists, consisted mostly of a shift in power from the crown to its traditional, corporate, noble rivals. 12 Nor did they treat the nation as a political artifact in need of construction, as the French revolu- tionaries would later do.
Second, the "anti-absolutist" approach privileges one particular political use of the terms "nation" and patrie, ignoring the fact that their efflo- rescence in the eighteenth century occurred across a wide cultural front, ranging from travel writing to literary depictions of foreigners, from trea- tises on civic duty to paeans to the reigning monarch, and to wartime propaganda. Did these other works simply follow in the anti-absolutists' awkward footsteps? Given the widely different political opinions they ex- pressed, this is unlikely. Did these other uses of the terms have no lasting significance? The evidence presented in this book will suggest they did.
It is crucial to recognize that the rise of these terms represented only a part of a larger shift in the language the French used to talk about them- selves and their community in the eighteenth century. 13 In taking a new, more prominent place in French public discourse, the words nation and patrie had a great deal of company. Half a century ago, historians noted the origins of the modern concept of "civilization" in the mid-eighteenth cen- tury. 14 More recently, others have explored the redefinition of socie? te? as what Keith Michael Baker calls "an autonomous ground of human exis-
26 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tence" in the earlier part of the century, and charted its vastly more promi- nent usage thereafter. 15 As for public and opinion publique, a virtual cottage industry has recently arisen to explore the way they came to signify a sort of supreme tribunal in matters both aesthetic and political. 16 The concepts of moeurs (very roughly translatable as "manners") and peuple underwent similar processes of redefinition, contestation, and expanding usage, while royal officials transformed the hard-to-translate concept of police (roughly, "public order") so that it came to signify the enlightened exercise of cen- tralized authority. 17 These shifts, which in turn relate to changing under- standings of politeness, urbanity, commerce, and citizenship, point to a fundamental transformation in what might be called the vocabulary of hu- man relations during this period. 18
The new or redefined concepts had much more in common than simple novelty. Five of them in particular--socie? te? , nation, patrie, civilisation, and public--stand out as being especially close and especially illuminating of the overall phenomenon. Each described an entity which did not owe its existence to any religious or political authority or indeed to any principle external to itself. If anything, each was conceived as something that existed prior to both politics and organized religion and that delineated elemen- tary forms of human relations. 19 Each could also appear, depending on the observer's perspective, as the fundamental ground against which to mea- sure all other forms of communal life (leading to disagreements among modern scholars, who have variously claimed that one or another was con- sidered most fundamental). 20 They can usefully be called "foundational concepts," and their history in this period needs to be understood as a broad shift in the way the French imagined the world around them: from a perspective in which the human terrestrial order was seen as subordinated to exterior (particularly divine) determinations, to one in which it was seen as autonomous and self-regulating. It was this shift which would, by the end of the eighteenth century, make it possible for the French to hold up the nation, rather than God or the king, as the source of all legitimate authority. It also made them see the thing being conceptualized as a prod- uct of human will, and therefore, potentially, as a malleable artifact.
A comprehensive history of nationalism must therefore deal with this general shift, which began in the decades around the year 1700. In this spirit, I would like to propose, in necessarily schematic form, a broad ex- planatory framework which draws, somewhat eclectically, on several theo- rists and historians who have helped transform our understandings of the
The National and the Sacred 27
? origins of religious and political modernity: above all Marcel Gauchet, Reinhart Koselleck, and Ju? rgen Habermas. 21 Their works are very different, indeed often at odds with each other, but they help illuminate different fac- ets of a complex process that did not obey any single logic or stem from any single cause.
Religion has a key place in this process, but it would be a mistake to at- tribute everything to this single factor. Historical change is never so simple. Rather, the process can usefully be thought of as having occurred in two distinct, if connected, realms. They can be called the realm of religious thought and the realm of material organization. 22 The first refers to the ar- ray of thinking about religion in France, on the part of official defenders of orthodoxy, influential religious dissenters such as the Jansenists, Erastian defenders of the state's religious authority, and also the philosophical skep- tics often treated as opponents of religion. By the second realm I mean the way the French imagined the physical space of France, and attempted to organize it, particularly for the purposes of administration and commerce.
The Realm of Religious Thought
In this first realm, the decades around 1700 have always been regarded as crucial. But for what reason? For one still influential school of intellectual history, exemplified by Paul Hazard's stirring work, Europe in this period witnessed nothing less than a blazing intellectual war. On the one side stood intrepid, aggressive rationalists; on the other, "ardent souls" desper- ately defending their faiths. The armies clashed, loudly and heroically, and the rationalists swept the field. In a single generation, Europeans went from "thinking like Bossuet" to "thinking like Voltaire. "23
While this interpretation of the period certainly reflects the perceptions of many contemporaries and has provided a heroic genealogy for subse- quent generations of professed secularists, it also effectively conceals the similarities between the two "armies" and obscures the way both partici- pated in a profound, long-term change in the relationship between God and the world in European thought. To grasp the contours of this overall change, it is more useful to turn to the work of the contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet. In his ambitious book The Disenchantment of the World (which uses the term "disenchantment" in a very different sense from Max Weber), Gauchet argues that the long-term historical "tra- jectory" of Christianity has consisted of a steady intensification of the per-
28 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ceived separation between the human and the divine. 24 By the end of the seventeenth century ("the point . . . where specifically Christian history comes to a halt"), at least for the most advanced Christian thinkers, God had become an absolute, wholly alien Other, entirely apart and withdrawn from the human world. 25 This vision of a "hidden God" could lead to an enormous, crushing, despairing sense of solitude--yet, paradoxically, Gauchet argues, it also offered liberation, for by virtue of the absolute sep- aration from the divine, the human world gained a form of autonomy. In early polytheistic religions, humanity had existed in "a position of absolute dependence" on a mythical, divine past. "The underlying belief is that we owe everything we have . . . to Ancestors, Heroes or Gods. All we can do is follow, imitate and repeat. "26 But by the endpoint of Christian evolution (which Gauchet considers, in a sense, the end of religion itself), the world had become a place which could be apprehended on its own terms and also, crucially, transformed on human terms, allowing mankind to de- velop new forms of knowledge, a new relationship with nature, and--es- pecially--a new politics. 27 "God's difference," Gauchet writes, "leaves the human community completely to itself," with the result that, ultimately, all power now has to derive legitimacy from that community. 28 The familiar modern distinction between "religious" and "secular" was being born.
In these reflections on God's "withdrawal" from the world, Gauchet clearly has in mind Calvinism and even more so, the current of early mod- ern Catholic thought called Jansenism, which emphasized the radical con- trast between God's infinite goodness and the corrupt, concupiscent state of humanity. 29 In its purest form, Jansenism flourished only in limited cler- ical circles, but its overall influence was vast, touching such key seven- teenth-century figures as Racine and Pascal, and leaving its mark on the eighteenth-century philosophes as well. It was arguably the most powerful force in French intellectual life in the decades around 1700, precisely the point where Gauchet locates the end of Christian history. 30 The particular originality of Gauchet's interpretation, however, is that it goes beyond any single movement and challenges the reader to consider pious Calvinists and Jansenists, on the one hand, and the great early modern natural and skeptical philosophers, on the other hand, as two sides of the same funda- mental process. In his vision, which accords with much recent scholarship on the period, Newton searching for order in the natural world, Locke de- riving the legitimacy of power from the consent of the governed, or Bayle challenging superstition and intolerance achieved as much as they did not
The National and the Sacred 29
? despite the efforts of Christian theologians, but in part because of the ef- forts of those theologians to delineate an autonomous and malleable ter- restrial sphere possessing its own knowable laws. 31
To illustrate the argument, consider one of the earliest French writings that entirely concerned itself with "love of country": the 1683 sermon by Jean Soanen, a future leader of French Jansenism. Preached in wartime, it mostly consisted of stern reminders about just how seriously the French needed to take their rendering unto Caesar, coupled with praise for France's current Caesar, Louis XIV. But on the first page, Soanen also laid out a set of remarkable reflections on the patrie in relation to things hu- man and divine:
The Lord, in creating these globes of fire that revolve over our heads; in drawing the flowers and fruits in which our eyes rejoice from the bowels of the earth; in commanding the sun to follow its course without inter- ruption; in tracing the paths which the stars and planets must follow without deviation, has wished to teach us just what order and harmony are, and to lead us to imitate such a beautiful arrangement and such a beautiful plan in our own behavior. Every creature stays in its place; every being fulfills its function. Only man troubles and disturbs the universe. Only man, carrying out only those duties which please him, raises up a chaos in his own heart, insults God himself, and disfigures society. 32
Here, beautifully and economically expressed, is a vision of a world which God has created and then left to its own devices, with natural objects obey- ing strict laws that human observation can presumably uncover. "Only man" disturbs the order God has established, and to recover this order man cannot rely on God but must establish a human equivalent to it. The first step in this direction, Soanen then proceeds to argue, is for "citizens" to de- vote themselves to their patrie. 33
Gauchet's work not only helps understand Soanen's sermon but suggests why the priest wanted his listeners to make the concept of patrie central to their lives. The intellectual achievements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by so clearly delineating the terrestrial sphere, also demanded a new vocabulary to describe it and to help human beings dis- cern and maintain order and stability in the face of the terrifying absence of God. Keith Baker, drawing on Gauchet's work, has recently made just such an argument about the transformation of the term socie? te? in the late seventeenth century. 34 I would argue, however, that socie? te? was just one of a
30 The Cult of the Nation in France
? number of potentially competing concepts which Europeans reached for to meet this need (Gauchet himself, interestingly, has elsewhere put partic- ular emphasis on the concept of "nation"). 35
Going beyond Gauchet, I would also argue that the new concern with a purely terrestrial order did not take shape in the philosophical and theo- logical arenas alone. Whatever its ultimate roots in the religious longue dure? e, in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France it also derived from a terror that was far more tangible than the idea of an absent deity: religious warfare. Throughout Europe, the memories of Protestant- Catholic conflict, and its attendant horrors, remained so burningly vivid in the eighteenth century that J. G. A. Pocock has recently ventured to de- fine the Enlightenment itself as "a series of programs for strengthening civil sovereignty and putting an end to the Wars of Religion. "36 In France, echoes of the horrific religious butchery of 1569-1594, which provoked Agrippa d'Aubigne? 's haunting lament "O France de? sole? e! O terre san- guinaire, / Non pas terre, mais cendre," resonated long after Henri IV finally brought it to an end with his famous Parisian mass. 37 In the eigh- teenth century, the wars inspired a virtual cult of Henri IV, and obsessed the philosophes. Voltaire, for instance, made the events the subject of his most ambitious epic, La Henriade, which dwelt at length on the grisly hor- rors (blood steaming in the streets of Paris, children dashed to their deaths against flagstones). He returned to them in many other works as well.