"We must, absolutely, renew the present generation, while forging the
generation
to come," he declares.
Cult of the Nation in France
?
THE CULT OF THE NATION IN FRANCE
The Cult of the Nation in France
Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800
DAVID A. BELL
? HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
Copyright (C) 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2003
Second printing, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, David Avrom.
The cult of the nation in France : inventing nationalism, 1680-1800 / David A. Bell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00447-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-01237-2 (paper)
1. Nationalism--France--History.
2. France--Politics and government--17th century. 3. France--Politics and government--18th century. 4. French language--Political aspects.
5. National characteristics, French.
I. Title.
DC121. 3 . B45 2001 320. 54? 0944? 09033--dc21 2001024695
To My Parents
? Contents
Preface xi Introduction: Constructing the Nation 1
1 The National and the Sacred 22
2 The Politics of Patriotism and National Sentiment 50
3 English Barbarians, French Martyrs 78
4 National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 107
5 National Character and the Republican Imagination 140
6 National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 169
Conclusion: Toward the Present Day and the End
of Nationalism 198
Notes 219 Note on Internet Appendices and Bibliography 292
Index
293
vii
List of Illustrations
? List of Illustrations
1. Title page from Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Projet d'e? ducation nationale, Paris, 1792 (author's personal collection). 4
2. Allegorical engraving of French military heroes from Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, Paris, 1759 (author's personal collection). 13
3. The languages of France in 1789 (map by the author). 16
4. Pierre-Alexandre Wille, Le patriotisme franc? ais, 1785 (courtesy of the Muse? e de la Coope? ration Franco-Ame? ricaine). 64
5. Allegorical engraving of Franco-British combat from Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, 1759 (author's personal collection). 81
6. Louis-Jacques Durameau, La continence de Bayard, 1777 (courtesy of the Muse? e de Peinture et de Sculpture de Grenoble). 110
7. Pierre Bayard, engraving from Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re et al. , Les hommes illustres, Paris, 1658 (author's personal collection). 115
8. "La mort de Montcalm," engraving from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets memorables de France, Paris, 1786 (Library of Congress). 118
9. Joan of Arc, engraving from Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres, 1658 (author's personal collection). 129
10. Queen Bathilde, engraving from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets me? morables de France, Paris, 1786 (Library of Congress). 133
11. Jean Astruc, engraving from Restout, Gallerie Franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui ont paru en France, 2 vols. , Paris, 1771 (courtesy of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France). 135
12. The Pantheon (photograph by author). 137
ix
x List of Illustrations
? 13. Jacques-Louis David, Les licteurs rapportent a` Brutus les corps de ses fils, 1789 (courtesy of the Muse? e du Louvre, Paris). 158
14. Naudet, La fe^te de l'e^tre supre^me, 1794 (courtesy of the Muse? e de la Ville de Paris). 166
15. Title page, Antoine-Hyacinthe Sermet, Discours prounounc? at le 14 juillet, 1790, Toulouse, 1790 (author's personal collection). 174
16. Title page, Henri Gre? goire, Rapport sur la ne? cessite? et les moyens d'ane? antir le patois, Paris, 1794 (author's personal collection). 176
Preface
Preface
? Preface
This project has been long in the making. In some ways, I can trace it back to the first kindling of my enthusiasm for history nearly thirty years ago, when, looking through a historical atlas, I found that the national bound- aries I was learning about in grade school were not timeless and immuta- ble. Instead, they had flowed back and forth across the European continent like tides, raising up and then again submerging countries with exotic names like Lotharingia and Montenegro, Lombardy and Moldavia. I won- dered about visiting these places, about crossing the Austrian-Ottoman frontier, and about what the map might look like if there were, for in- stance, a North and South France alongside West and East Germany.
I was therefore delighted, during college, to see a draft article by Patrice Higonnet with a linguistic map of France in 1789--a map that carved the familiar territory into exotic quasi-nations like Brittany, Flanders, Occi- tania, and the Basque Country. It was delicious to realize that even in the relatively recent past, crossing the Loire River could seem in some respects like crossing an international border.
Later, a book by Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue, gave me further insight into the linguistic situa- tion in France at the time of the Revolution and provided samples of revo- lutionary-era Occitan writing. The book remained vividly in my mind two years later when, in graduate school at Princeton, I made language and na- tion-building in eighteenth-century Alsace the subject of my first extended research paper.
Nationalism and language in the meantime were becoming prominent topics, thanks to the collapse of communism, the newest reshuffling of Eu- ropean borders, the apparent revival of nationalism throughout the world (including national movements in Lombardy, Montenegro, and Moldavia,
xi
xii Preface
? if not yet in Lotharingia), and a much ballyhooed crisis of national identity in France itself.
I have now been working on the topic for several years, and this book is the result. In the process I have had a considerable amount of assistance, which it is my pleasure to acknowledge here. Needless to say, the flaws which remain are my responsibility alone.
Financially, I enjoyed especially generous support from the Morse Fel- lowships of Yale University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The first of these allowed me to take a year off from teaching to do research in France, and the other two gave me the chance to take a second year off and write this book in the comfortable surroundings of the Wilson Center in Wash- ington. Additional financial support, which permitted me to take further research trips to France, came from the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, the Griswold Research Funds of Yale University, the East- West Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of the Johns Hopkins University, and the History Department of the Johns Hopkins University.
Research for this project was carried out above all at the old Bibliothe`que Nationale of the rue de Richelieu in Paris. My thanks to its staff and to the staffs of the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothe`que de la Socie? te? de Port-Royal, the Bibliothe`que Mazarine, the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Toulouse, and the Bibliothe`que Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. My thanks as well to Darrin McMahon, Matthew Lauzon, Alec Meredith, and Matthew Stephenson for valuable research assistance. I am in the debt of the cheerful and efficient staffs of the History Depart- ment at Johns Hopkins (especially Shirley Hipley, Sharon Widomski, and Lisa Enders), and the Wilson Center (especially Lindsay Collins) for mak- ing the experience of working in these places so pleasant and hassle-free.
I have had the opportunity to present aspects of this project to numer- ous professional gatherings. My thanks to all of the following, and to the audiences that attended: the Departments of History of the Univer- sity of California at Irvine, Brown University, Cornell University, Catholic University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University; the Modern French Study Groups at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago; the Washington-Baltimore Old Regime French History Group; the Center for European Studies of
Preface xiii
? Harvard University; the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University; the work-in-progress group at the Woodrow Wilson Center; the Davis Center of Princeton University; the research seminars of Roger Chartier at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Bernard Cottret at the Universite? de Paris-IV and Jean-Pierre Jessenne at the Universite? de Rouen; the East-West Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the conference on "Language and Nationalism" at the Whitney Center at Yale; the conference on "The Abbe? Gre? goire and His Causes" at the Clark Library; the conference on "France: History and Story" at the University of Birmingham; the conference on "Patriotism in the Atlantic World" at the Universite? de Versailles-Saint-Quentin; the conference on "The Tercentenary of the Bourbons" at the Universidad Auto? noma de Ma- drid; the American Historical Association; the Society for French Histori- cal Studies; the Western Society for French History; the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the Society for the History of the Early Amer- ican Republic; and the North American Society for Legal History. My spe- cial thanks to Anthony Grafton and my graduate adviser, Robert Darnton, for hosting me so warmly at the Davis Center.
Many friends and colleagues have read and responded to various parts of this project and provided valuable criticism, suggestions, and encour- agement. My deep thanks to Keith Michael Baker, Doron Ben-Atar, Philip Benedict, Ann Blair, Gail Bossenga, Gregory Brown, Jack Censer, Roger Chartier, Paul Cohen, Linda Colley, Robert Darnton, Steven Englund, Joe? l Fe? lix, Paul Friedland, Rita Hermon-Belot, Carla Hesse, Patrice Higonnet, Michael Holquist, Lynn Hunt, Colin Jones, Richard Kagan, Steven Kaplan, Michael Kazin, Sarah Maza, John Merriman, Robert Morrissey, John Pocock, Jeremy Popkin, Jeffrey Ravel, Sophia Rosenfeld, Robert Schneider, Alyssa Sepinwall, William Sewell, Gabrielle Spiegel, David Stebenne, Don- ald Sutherland, Timothy Tackett, and Judith Walkowitz. I am particularly grateful for the extensive, detailed comments I received on draft chap- ters from Daniel Gordon, Darrin McMahon (again), Orest Ranum, Peter Sahlins, and Dale Van Kley, and for the careful and sympathetic reading of the manuscript for Harvard University Press by Joan Landes and an anonymous reader. Dror Wahrman's comments, suggestions, friendship, and intellectual companionship have been invaluable. My colleagues in the History Departments at Yale and Johns Hopkins provided indispensable support. I am grateful to He? le`ne Dupuy for giving me a copy of her
xiv Preface
? me? moire de doctorat. At Harvard University Press, my heartfelt thanks to Aida Donald, Kathleen McDermott, Elizabeth Suttell, and Anita Safran.
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
?
"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.
The Cult of the Nation in France
Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800
DAVID A. BELL
? HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
Copyright (C) 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2003
Second printing, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, David Avrom.
The cult of the nation in France : inventing nationalism, 1680-1800 / David A. Bell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00447-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-01237-2 (paper)
1. Nationalism--France--History.
2. France--Politics and government--17th century. 3. France--Politics and government--18th century. 4. French language--Political aspects.
5. National characteristics, French.
I. Title.
DC121. 3 . B45 2001 320. 54? 0944? 09033--dc21 2001024695
To My Parents
? Contents
Preface xi Introduction: Constructing the Nation 1
1 The National and the Sacred 22
2 The Politics of Patriotism and National Sentiment 50
3 English Barbarians, French Martyrs 78
4 National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 107
5 National Character and the Republican Imagination 140
6 National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 169
Conclusion: Toward the Present Day and the End
of Nationalism 198
Notes 219 Note on Internet Appendices and Bibliography 292
Index
293
vii
List of Illustrations
? List of Illustrations
1. Title page from Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Projet d'e? ducation nationale, Paris, 1792 (author's personal collection). 4
2. Allegorical engraving of French military heroes from Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, Paris, 1759 (author's personal collection). 13
3. The languages of France in 1789 (map by the author). 16
4. Pierre-Alexandre Wille, Le patriotisme franc? ais, 1785 (courtesy of the Muse? e de la Coope? ration Franco-Ame? ricaine). 64
5. Allegorical engraving of Franco-British combat from Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, 1759 (author's personal collection). 81
6. Louis-Jacques Durameau, La continence de Bayard, 1777 (courtesy of the Muse? e de Peinture et de Sculpture de Grenoble). 110
7. Pierre Bayard, engraving from Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re et al. , Les hommes illustres, Paris, 1658 (author's personal collection). 115
8. "La mort de Montcalm," engraving from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets memorables de France, Paris, 1786 (Library of Congress). 118
9. Joan of Arc, engraving from Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres, 1658 (author's personal collection). 129
10. Queen Bathilde, engraving from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets me? morables de France, Paris, 1786 (Library of Congress). 133
11. Jean Astruc, engraving from Restout, Gallerie Franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui ont paru en France, 2 vols. , Paris, 1771 (courtesy of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France). 135
12. The Pantheon (photograph by author). 137
ix
x List of Illustrations
? 13. Jacques-Louis David, Les licteurs rapportent a` Brutus les corps de ses fils, 1789 (courtesy of the Muse? e du Louvre, Paris). 158
14. Naudet, La fe^te de l'e^tre supre^me, 1794 (courtesy of the Muse? e de la Ville de Paris). 166
15. Title page, Antoine-Hyacinthe Sermet, Discours prounounc? at le 14 juillet, 1790, Toulouse, 1790 (author's personal collection). 174
16. Title page, Henri Gre? goire, Rapport sur la ne? cessite? et les moyens d'ane? antir le patois, Paris, 1794 (author's personal collection). 176
Preface
Preface
? Preface
This project has been long in the making. In some ways, I can trace it back to the first kindling of my enthusiasm for history nearly thirty years ago, when, looking through a historical atlas, I found that the national bound- aries I was learning about in grade school were not timeless and immuta- ble. Instead, they had flowed back and forth across the European continent like tides, raising up and then again submerging countries with exotic names like Lotharingia and Montenegro, Lombardy and Moldavia. I won- dered about visiting these places, about crossing the Austrian-Ottoman frontier, and about what the map might look like if there were, for in- stance, a North and South France alongside West and East Germany.
I was therefore delighted, during college, to see a draft article by Patrice Higonnet with a linguistic map of France in 1789--a map that carved the familiar territory into exotic quasi-nations like Brittany, Flanders, Occi- tania, and the Basque Country. It was delicious to realize that even in the relatively recent past, crossing the Loire River could seem in some respects like crossing an international border.
Later, a book by Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue, gave me further insight into the linguistic situa- tion in France at the time of the Revolution and provided samples of revo- lutionary-era Occitan writing. The book remained vividly in my mind two years later when, in graduate school at Princeton, I made language and na- tion-building in eighteenth-century Alsace the subject of my first extended research paper.
Nationalism and language in the meantime were becoming prominent topics, thanks to the collapse of communism, the newest reshuffling of Eu- ropean borders, the apparent revival of nationalism throughout the world (including national movements in Lombardy, Montenegro, and Moldavia,
xi
xii Preface
? if not yet in Lotharingia), and a much ballyhooed crisis of national identity in France itself.
I have now been working on the topic for several years, and this book is the result. In the process I have had a considerable amount of assistance, which it is my pleasure to acknowledge here. Needless to say, the flaws which remain are my responsibility alone.
Financially, I enjoyed especially generous support from the Morse Fel- lowships of Yale University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The first of these allowed me to take a year off from teaching to do research in France, and the other two gave me the chance to take a second year off and write this book in the comfortable surroundings of the Wilson Center in Wash- ington. Additional financial support, which permitted me to take further research trips to France, came from the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, the Griswold Research Funds of Yale University, the East- West Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of the Johns Hopkins University, and the History Department of the Johns Hopkins University.
Research for this project was carried out above all at the old Bibliothe`que Nationale of the rue de Richelieu in Paris. My thanks to its staff and to the staffs of the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothe`que de la Socie? te? de Port-Royal, the Bibliothe`que Mazarine, the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Toulouse, and the Bibliothe`que Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. My thanks as well to Darrin McMahon, Matthew Lauzon, Alec Meredith, and Matthew Stephenson for valuable research assistance. I am in the debt of the cheerful and efficient staffs of the History Depart- ment at Johns Hopkins (especially Shirley Hipley, Sharon Widomski, and Lisa Enders), and the Wilson Center (especially Lindsay Collins) for mak- ing the experience of working in these places so pleasant and hassle-free.
I have had the opportunity to present aspects of this project to numer- ous professional gatherings. My thanks to all of the following, and to the audiences that attended: the Departments of History of the Univer- sity of California at Irvine, Brown University, Cornell University, Catholic University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University; the Modern French Study Groups at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago; the Washington-Baltimore Old Regime French History Group; the Center for European Studies of
Preface xiii
? Harvard University; the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University; the work-in-progress group at the Woodrow Wilson Center; the Davis Center of Princeton University; the research seminars of Roger Chartier at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Bernard Cottret at the Universite? de Paris-IV and Jean-Pierre Jessenne at the Universite? de Rouen; the East-West Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the conference on "Language and Nationalism" at the Whitney Center at Yale; the conference on "The Abbe? Gre? goire and His Causes" at the Clark Library; the conference on "France: History and Story" at the University of Birmingham; the conference on "Patriotism in the Atlantic World" at the Universite? de Versailles-Saint-Quentin; the conference on "The Tercentenary of the Bourbons" at the Universidad Auto? noma de Ma- drid; the American Historical Association; the Society for French Histori- cal Studies; the Western Society for French History; the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the Society for the History of the Early Amer- ican Republic; and the North American Society for Legal History. My spe- cial thanks to Anthony Grafton and my graduate adviser, Robert Darnton, for hosting me so warmly at the Davis Center.
Many friends and colleagues have read and responded to various parts of this project and provided valuable criticism, suggestions, and encour- agement. My deep thanks to Keith Michael Baker, Doron Ben-Atar, Philip Benedict, Ann Blair, Gail Bossenga, Gregory Brown, Jack Censer, Roger Chartier, Paul Cohen, Linda Colley, Robert Darnton, Steven Englund, Joe? l Fe? lix, Paul Friedland, Rita Hermon-Belot, Carla Hesse, Patrice Higonnet, Michael Holquist, Lynn Hunt, Colin Jones, Richard Kagan, Steven Kaplan, Michael Kazin, Sarah Maza, John Merriman, Robert Morrissey, John Pocock, Jeremy Popkin, Jeffrey Ravel, Sophia Rosenfeld, Robert Schneider, Alyssa Sepinwall, William Sewell, Gabrielle Spiegel, David Stebenne, Don- ald Sutherland, Timothy Tackett, and Judith Walkowitz. I am particularly grateful for the extensive, detailed comments I received on draft chap- ters from Daniel Gordon, Darrin McMahon (again), Orest Ranum, Peter Sahlins, and Dale Van Kley, and for the careful and sympathetic reading of the manuscript for Harvard University Press by Joan Landes and an anonymous reader. Dror Wahrman's comments, suggestions, friendship, and intellectual companionship have been invaluable. My colleagues in the History Departments at Yale and Johns Hopkins provided indispensable support. I am grateful to He? le`ne Dupuy for giving me a copy of her
xiv Preface
? me? moire de doctorat. At Harvard University Press, my heartfelt thanks to Aida Donald, Kathleen McDermott, Elizabeth Suttell, and Anita Safran.
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
?
"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.
