--inscription on the front of the
pantheon (1791)
How ridiculous it is for an assembly of slithering, vile and inept men to set themselves up as judges of immortality.
pantheon (1791)
How ridiculous it is for an assembly of slithering, vile and inept men to set themselves up as judges of immortality.
Cult of the Nation in France
And here too the war literature fit in well with the evolution of French nationalism and patriotism over the course of the eighteenth century.
As we have already seen, the way the French defined themselves in the eighteenth century did not rest primarily on a drastic drawing of borders between themselves and foreign "others. " They tended to minimize the connotations of exclusivity and fatality that had been associated with the concept of patrie from antiquity, and strove to make patriotism compatible with a universal human community in which all nations followed the same linear path of development. This universalism did not, however, imply any modesty about France's own place in the family of nations. Throughout the early modern period, dating back at least to Jean Bodin's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, French writers had generally sought to identify the highest stage of human development not merely with Eu- rope, but with France itself. Most often, they grounded their arguments in theories of climate, arguing that France's temperate weather and fertility made it welcoming soil for spiritual achievement and gave the naturally moderate French--nature's true cosmopolitans--the best qualities of all nations. 82 In the eighteenth century, the most subtle contributors to cli-
96 The Cult of the Nation in France
? mate theory (particularly Montesquieu and Buffon) eschewed these chau- vinistic claims, but many others embraced them. Antoine de Rivarol, for instance, wrote that "nature, in giving [the Frenchman] a gentle climate, could not make him rough: it has made him the man of all the nations. "83 D'Espiard de la Borde similarly argued, in his The Spirit of Nations, that "France, among all the nations, can take pride in the fortunate Tempera- ture of its Climate and Minds alike, which produces no bizarre effects, ei- ther in Nature or Morals. "84 French mores were perfectly compatible with those of all other nations, and so France, d'Espiard concluded, "is the prin- cipal Pole of Europe. "85 The cleric Thomas-Jean Pichon wrote in a work similar to d'Espiard's, The Physics of History, that "[French] souls, capable of all modifications, are, in a sense, like their territory, which can produce all sorts of fruits. "86 During the French Revolution the messianic cosmo- politan Anacharsis Cloots asked: "Why, indeed, has nature placed Paris at an equal distance from the pole and the equator, but for it to be a cradle and the metropolis for the general confederation of mankind? "87
From these arguments it followed that the French had the duty to act not only as the world's seat of learning (thus fulfilling the venerable prom- ise of a translatio studii from Athens to Rome to Paris), but also as the world's schoolmasters. 88 Fellow Europeans might recognize France's supe- riority and of their own free will copy its fashions and learn its language. Beyond Europe, however, fulfilling the Frenchman's destiny as "the man of all the nations" demanded an early version of what the nineteenth century would call the nation's "civilizing mission. "89 This mission was in fact a tenet of early modern French imperialist theory. The French authorities in Canada, for instance, declared early on that all "savages" who accepted Ca- tholicism would "be considered and reputed native French," while Con- troller General Colbert even encouraged intermarriage between Indians and French, "in order that, in the course of time, having but one law and one master, they may likewise constitute one people and one race. "90 These ideas permeated travel literature and the missionary Relations, which Jesuit colle`ges pressed on their students. 91
Not surprisingly, the ideas also appeared prominently in the polemical literature of the Seven Years' War--and most strongly in those texts which most insistently deployed the image of the English barbarian. Thomas's Jumonville, for instance, describes the American Indians in terms that Colbert himself would certainly have approved:
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 97
? Les grossiers habitants de ces lointains rivages Forme? s par nos lec? ons, instruits par nos usages, Dans l'e? cole des Arts et de l'humanite?
De leurs sauvages moeurs corrigent l'apre^te? . . . Leur coeur simple et nai? f dans sa fe? rocite? Respecte du Franc? ois la sage authorite? .
[The crude inhabitants of those distant shores, Shaped by our lessons, and instructed by our customs, Reform the harshness of their savage mores
In the school of Arts and humanity . . .
Their hearts, simple and nai? ve in their ferocity, Respect the wise authority of the Frenchman]. 92
In the poem, Jumonville's death itself provides the Indians with a salutary lesson. Until they witnessed it, nothing could overcome their "inflexible roughness," and they remained deaf to pity, taking it for weakness. But on seeing Washington's crime, "Pour la premie`re fois [ils] se sentent e? branler, / De leurs yeux attendris on voit des pleurs couler [For the first time they feel themselves weaken / And one sees tears flow from their eyes]. 93 The novelist Lesuire also cast the French as educators--but in this case unsuc- cessful--of the savage English. As he had one of his few sympathetic Eng- lish characters remark in a crucial scene: "Our [French] neighbors could, more than any other People, soften our mores, and teach us the bonds of society, which make life precious by making it pleasant; but here we make it a duty to hate them. As long as we hate the French, we will be barbarians" (emphasis mine). 94
It would be wrong to say that these representations of England, France, and the relation between them held unanimous sway in France. The heavy legacy of Anglomania and cosmopolitanism did not dissipate so easily. Be- sides, these representations were at least in part official ones, elements of a conscious strategy on the part of the ministry to mobilize the population for the war effort. It is impossible to gauge with any degree of accuracy how widely the general population shared them. What can be said, how- ever, is that these representations permanently expanded the field of French political discussion, suggesting ways of seeing nations, foreign and French alike, that would continue to reappear in French political culture (particularly during the Revolution).
98 The Cult of the Nation in France
? What was most original and significant about them, ultimately, was the idea of an essential, unalterable difference between two nations. In the eighteenth century (as we will see in more detail in Chapter 5), the most common criteria for adducing differences in national character were cli- mate, political system, and position on a linear scale of historical evolution, according to which American Indians, for instance, stood roughly equiva- lent to the early Greeks. For this reason, historians have generally opposed eighteenth-century notions of human difference to nineteenth-century ra- cially based ones, since, according to the earlier criteria, a people's char- acteristics could easily change (as in Buffon's claim that Africans trans- planted to Scandinavia would eventually become white). 95 Certainly the polemical writers of the mid-eighteenth century did not fail to link English faults to all these factors, particularly the turbulence of English politics and weather alike ("a perpetually bloody climate," as Buirette de Belloy con- cisely put it). 96 But the tactic of stigmatizing the English as barbarians, al- though rooted in notions of historical evolution, established new criteria of difference. For the writers who deployed it, even "savage" Indians did not ultimately stand beyond the reach of the French civilizing mission. The English did, owing to their perverse refusal of French wisdom. Unlike the Indians, they would never evolve beyond a fundamentally primitive histor- ical state. Lesuire, in Les sauvages de l'Europe, again expressed this idea with particular force. At the beginning of his novel, one character observes--in keeping with climate-based theories of difference--that Europe has two true barbaric peoples, both in the north: the Lapps and the English. But then he adds a further difference: "The second are barbarians in their hearts. "97 Similarly, for Lefebvre de Beauvray, the "cruelty of the fierce Afri- can" was something the Englishman carried "in [his] breast. "98 In sum, this language served to deepen the concept of a war of nations, to make it seem an inevitable fight to the finish between irreconcilable peoples.
Toward the Revolutionary Wars
When France and Britain signed the Peace of Paris in 1763, official atti- tudes towards the enemy across the Channel abruptly shifted. Martyrs like Jumonville were no longer in demand, and the specter of the English bar- barian rapidly receded. Lefebvre de Beauvray, who only recently had been spitting forth his eternal hatred of the "perjurious race" of Englishmen, suddenly and more than a little hypocritically revealed himself a secret
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 99
? Anglomaniac, rhapsodizing about "le Franc? ais et l'Anglais, par les talents unis, / Emules de tout temps, trop souvent ennemis [The French and Eng- lish, united by talents / Imitators of each other always, but too often ene- mies]. "99 As we have seen, even in the two postwar stage plays often cited by historians as prime examples of French Anglophobia (Le sie`ge de Calais and C. S. Favart's L'Anglois a` Bordeaux), a far more nuanced portrait of "English barbarians" emerged. In both, thanks in part to the civilizing in- fluence of French women (particularly important for Favart), the crude and unsociable English protagonists finally proved susceptible to the wis- dom of French ways.
Nor did "English barbarians" return in force during the War of Ameri- can Independence. Although again at war with England, the French also found themselves allied with erstwhile English colonists, commanded by the chief barbarian of 1754 (one French volunteer fighting with the Ameri- cans simply refused to believe that the imposing general was the same man as Jumonville's murderer). 100 When Lesuire published a revised version of The Savages of Europe in 1780, he toned down his portrait substantially and called England "a rival Nation, and one which we should esteem, because it can bear comparison with us from many points of view. "101 French propa- ganda in this war, including new work by Lefebvre de Beauvray, criticized the English mostly for excessive pride and for trying to establish a universal empire of the seas. 102
Yet in other ways the pattern set in the 1750s remained influential. For instance, during the War of American Independence the ministry contin- ued to use the press to mobilize domestic opinion behind the war effort. After a major naval defeat, Foreign Minister Vergennes developed what his biographer calls a "veritable press campaign," with the objective, as Vergennes himself put it, of "reestablishing and permanently fixing opin- ion. "103 The ministry called for patriotic donations to the navy and then as- siduously published news of them in supportive newspapers. Vergennes himself admitted that the donations had a greater symbolic than practical value. 104 Once again the ministry popularized the deeds of ordinary French warriors.
The French revolutionaries initially did little to revive the concept of wars of nations. These were the years of the Constituent Assembly's Decla- ration of Peace to the World and frequent proclamations about the broth- erhood of peoples. 105 Such gestures, themselves predicated on the concept of France as the pole of civilization and the world's schoolmaster, ex-
100 The Cult of the Nation in France
? pressed the hope that in the brave new world of 1789 there would be no more barbarians, and all peoples would embrace the new gospel emanat- ing from Paris. In 1789-90 Anacharsis Cloots was predicting that one day people would take stagecoaches from Paris to Beijing as they did from Bordeaux to Strasbourg, while Bertrand Bare`re was asking complacently: "What people would not want to become French? "106
But in 1793-94, as the war against the allied powers grew desperate, the ruling Convention changed tack. It enacted a series of repressive measures against foreigners living in France (including a never-realized proposal for them to wear tricolor armbands at all times), and its leading members again began to claim that the English had willfully set themselves outside the universal (and France-centered) human community. Furthermore, the Jacobins most committed to radical theories of popular sovereignty now forthrightly insisted that an irreconcilable and permanent hatred separated the English from the French, even as their moderate opponents continued to distinguish between a supposedly virtuous English people and Eng- land's depraved and corrupted government. 107 Robespierre declared fa- mously on January 30, 1794: "I do not like the English, because the very word recalls to me the idea of an insolent people who dare to make war on a generous people who have recovered their liberty . . . Let this people break its government . . . Until then I vow an implacable hatred to it. "108 Saint-Just angrily insisted: "Make your children swear immortal hatred to this other Carthage," and petitions from provincial Jacobin clubs dutifully echoed the message, in one case vowing "eternal hatred to this race of can- nibals. "109 Bare`re hammered the point home most brutally in his report on "England's crimes against the French people": "National hatred must sound forth; for the purposes of commercial and political contacts, there must be an immense ocean between Dover and Calais; young republicans must suck in a hatred of the word Englishman along with their mothers' milk. "110 These leaders clearly believed that to mobilize the French ef- fectively against the nation that seemed, superficially, most to resemble them--indeed, which French leaders in 1789-91 often presented as a polit- ical model--the supposed resemblance had once again to be exposed as the vilest sort of deception. 111
In the service of this cause, the revolutionaries engaged in massive pro- paganda campaigns against foreign enemies that dwarfed anything seen previously. They also rediscovered, with a vengeance, the image of the Eng- lish barbarian and the concept of a war of nations. In fact, they literally re-
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 101
? discovered the war propaganda of the 1750s, as shown by the ease with which old poems were simply published under new names and the way Rouget de Lisle, for example, borrowed lines from the earlier literature for the Marseillaise. As Sophie Wahnich has demonstrated in a recent book, the radical Jacobins took up the theme of the English barbarian with par- ticular intensity. 112 Provincial clubs and speakers in the Convention railed against "these barbarous islanders, banes of humanity, whom nature has already separated from humanity by the seas"; the "barbarous character and spirit of these inhabitants of an island fertile in infamies"; and "the most ferocious, the most barbarous nation, the most debased of them all. "113 Bare`re's report fairly bristled with the charges once leveled against Jumonville's killers: "Caesar, in landing on the island [Britain], found only a fierce tribe [peuplade]," he declared. "Their subsequent civilization, and their civil wars and maritime wars have all continued to bear the mark of this savage origin. " He accused the English of "corrupting the humanity of the savages" in America, and added his truly bone-chilling line: "They are a tribe foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear. "114 The ultimate fate of a people who had refused the revealed truth of superior French wisdom would be the same as Carthage's. An anonymous report, dated 1794, in the archives of the French foreign ministry, made the point with truly chilling concision. The Netherlands were to be "ruined," Spain was to be stripped of its royal house, and Prussia was to be conquered. The English and the Austrians, however, were to be "exterminated. "115 The Jacobins did not apply this logic only to foreign enemies, but even to the counter-revolutionary rebels of the Vende? e, whom they similarly labeled "foreigners" and "barbarians" and deemed fit for mass killing, with horri- fic results. "As long as this impure race exists," said Robespierre of the Vende? ens, "the Republic will be unhappy and precarious. "116
From Wars of Religion to Wars of Nations and Races
In the polemical literature of the Seven Years' War, as throughout eigh- teenth-century French patriotic writing, religion was both the great ab- sence and the great hidden presence. As previously noted, the authors almost entirely avoided denouncing the English as heretics. And when compared with the anti-Protestant literature of the late sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, or even with Jean de la Chapelle's early eighteenth-cen- tury Letters of a Swiss (which saluted the Hapsburg candidate for the Span-
102 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ish throne as "Charles III by Grace of the Heretics Catholic King [i. e. Rey Cato? lico]"), the difference is stunning. 117 Their very predilection for the image of the English barbarian, with "barbarian" understood as the opposite of a civilized person, underlined their acceptance of the idea that membership in a properly constituted universal community (soon to be called a civilization) did not depend on religion, but on customs (moeurs) and cultivation. Religion had become a private matter, an affair of con- science. It should no longer structure international animosities.
Yet the war literature resembled earlier, religiously inspired war propa- ganda so strongly that it is hard not to see deep connections between the two. To begin with, in order to arouse zeal and sacrifice from the popula- tion, French officials explicitly compared the patrie to an object of religious devotion. As Foreign Minister Vergennes wrote in 1782: "The Frenchman, proud of the name he glories in, sees the entire nation as his family, and sees his zealous sacrifices as a religious duty towards his brothers. He sees the patrie as the object of his worship. "118 Secondly, the most important precedents for using printed matter on a massive scale to mobilize a popu- lation for warfare were religious: particularly the efforts of the politique party that supported Henri of Navarre against Spain and also against their opponents in the Catholic League. 119 Third, the principal French prece- dents for the wholesale demonization of an enemy nation, at least since 1500, were religious as well. In the Wars of Religion, even pamphlets aimed at fellow Catholics still managed most often to cast their accusations in re- ligious terms. If Philip II and his subjects were barbarians, as the politiques insisted, it was precisely because they were false Catholics: secret athe- ists, or even Jews, or Muslims. "What! " exclaimed the politique Antoine Arnauld in his 1589 pamphlet, Copy of the Anti-Spaniard. "Should these Marranos become our Kings and Princes! . . . Should France be added to the titles of this King of Majorca, this half-Moor, half-Jew, half-Saracen? [sic]"120 The representation of the English as barbaric, false Europeans seems to stand as a secular parallel to these earlier exercises in xenophobia, illustrating the larger parallels between the sixteenth-century process of building a church, and the eighteenth-century one of building a nation, both of which involved not only binding people together, but also purging the body religious or body politic of impure and dangerous elements.
In addition, the "barbarians" and "savages" in the eighteenth century strongly recall earlier, religious modes of characterizing human diversity. Writers who described the American Indians as rude, unfinished people in
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 103
? need of civilizing closely echoed the Jesuit missionaries who had seen the same Indians as lost souls in need of instruction in the true faith. Anthony Pagden has noted that for centuries "barbarian" and "pagan" were virtual synonyms, while Miche`le Duchet, in her pioneering study of Enlighten- ment anthropology, has pointed out that the philosophes themselves recog- nized the connections between the religious and civilizing "missions. " It is difficult, she adds, "to conceive of a purely secular model of colonization, not only because history offers no examples of one, but because the very image of savages susceptible to persuasion, relayed by centuries of mis- siology, is still indissolubly linked to an ideal of evangelization. "121 Mean- while, the description of the English as barbarians who willfully refused the benefits of French civilization echoed earlier condemnations of groups that had seen, but willfully rejected, the revealed truth of the Gospels: here- tics, and especially Jews. Rather eerily, the nefarious qualities attributed to the English in the eighteenth century--overweening pride, irrational ha- tred of other peoples, a desire to dominate the world, and also an unrea- sonable love of money and trade (the last a favorite theme for orators in the Convention--Bare`re called the English "a mercantile horde"), recalled traits that French writers commonly attributed to the Jews. 122 The compar- ison may seem unlikely, but consider this passage written by Elie Fre? ron in 1756: "The intolerance of the Jews in religious matters made the entire universe indignant at them. The intolerance of the Tyrians and Cartha- ginians in commercial matters hastened their destruction. The English should fear the same fate, for all Europe reproaches them for the same principles, the same views and the same vices. "123
Finally, there is Joseph Coulon de Jumonville himself: an undistin- guished man, common, simple and plain but courageous--the very em- bodiment of French virtue. Previous annals of French military glory held very few precedents for a democratic hero of this sort. Volumes devoted to "great" or "illustrious" Frenchmen before the 1750s drew their military figures almost entirely from the ranks of the high nobility and great war- riors (the principal exception, Joan of Arc, was more properly seen as a religious figure). Only from the 1760s would volumes of this sort start to include common soldiers, including Jumonville himself. 124 However, in the thick ranks of Catholic martyrs and saints, men like him had long abounded. In this sense, Jumonville has a strong claim to being the first martyr of modern France (and remember Thomas's pathetic description of his martyrdom: even as his eyes close to the light, his "soul" finds
104 The Cult of the Nation in France
? "delight" not in God, but in "the tender memory of France"). He is a direct predecessor of the ostentatiously non-noble heroes of Le sie`ge de Calais, and, even more, the Christ-like boy martyrs of the French Revolution, such as the poor Viala, who supposedly choked out his last words: "I die for liberty. "125
At this point I think it useful to speculate on the implications of this view of Franco-English difference, not only for French nationalism, but also for French ways of understanding human diversity in general, and for the origins of race-based nationalism. It has often been argued that the eighteenth century saw the rise of new, essentialist ideas on the subject of human diversity in France--even the birth of modern racism--above all in order to justify the continuing enslavement of Africans. 126 As intellectual background for the shift, scholars cite the weakening of Christian theology and its insistence on the common descent of the human race from Adam ("monogenesis"), and the increasing influence of the biological sciences with their penchant for classification and ranking. The argument may be convincing as far as peoples of color were concerned, but European racial science in the modern period has sought to prove essential racial differ- ences not only between Europeans and non-Europeans, but within the Eu- ropean family itself. The intellectual framework for investigations into these narrower racial differences was largely the same, but here the "sci- ence" developed in the service of nationalism rather than of slavery and imperialism.
I would like to suggest that the essentializing of ethnic and racial differ- ences in fact began at the center as much as it did at the (perceived) pe- riphery. 127 It began as the French struggled to differentiate themselves from the people with whom they often felt the greatest affinity and similarity, yet who had also emerged as the greatest apparent threat to their own honor, prosperity, and understanding of the world: the English. True, even in the Revolution polemicists rarely described the differences between the Eng- lish and the French in biological terms. The word "race" did occasionally appear, as in the phrase "race of cannibals" or "perjurious race," and its us- age in these contexts seems to denote something more than the common eighteenth-century definition of race as "lineage. "128 But most often the fault attributed to the English was a moral one, a failing of the spirit. It in- fected the English people as a whole, generation after generation, but it did not have its origin in any specific physical difference detectable by biologi- cal science.
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 105
? Yet by making national difference into something as fierce and unforgiv- ing as religious difference had been during the era of the Reformation, the wartime polemicists helped readers to think of human diversity in a way that went beyond the detached, clinical observations of theorists interested in climate, and linear schemes of development. They suggested that na- tional groups, which is to say groups bound together by a common origin rather than by common faith, had characteristics which temperature and humidity could not explain, and which shifts in climate could not alter.
And it is precisely here that the terms "savages" and "barbarians" were so important. They were not scientific terms in the least. But they set forth a problem that biological science could later answer (however mistakenly): the problem of difference. Anthony Pagden has written that when modes of explanation of human difference shifted in the early nineteenth century from the sociological to the physiological, they did so in part because the sociological modes seemed incapable of revealing why some peoples failed to make historical progress. 129 This was precisely the problem highlighted by the figure of the English barbarian (and that would be repeatedly high- lighted by emerging nationalist movements over the next century when stigmatizing their enemies--especially the Jews). It suggested that the Eng- lish, despite their membership in the white race and in a common Euro- pean civilization, in fact were fundamentally alien, as alien as heretics had been to the mother church. And not only alien but inferior, and deserving of hatred, subjugation, or even extermination. In all the voluminous writ- ings of the French revolutionary period, there is no clearer forerunner of modern expressions of racial hatred than Bare`re's report on English crimes. "National hatred must sound forth. " Without such a rooted sense of profound difference between nations, could nineteenth-century race science have carried any sense of conviction? Would its creators have even pursued their researches in the first place?
Before the middle of the eighteenth century, such a sense of difference was lacking, at least in France. It began to arise only in the period of the Seven Years' War, in response to anxieties about France's changing position in the world, and the demands of a rapidly evolving public sphere, as sup- porters of the French crown sought to mobilize the nation as a whole against an enemy nation. The image of English barbarians, more alien even than the already frightening American savages, helped teach the French this sense of national difference. It did so, moreover, without challenging the universalism which remained so powerful a force in French culture,
106 The Cult of the Nation in France
? and which would express itself so powerfully at the start of the Revolu- tion and again under Napoleon. The English were different precisely be- cause they rejected the universal human civilization that properly revolved around France, as their murder of Jumonville symbolized most vividly. In slaying him, the French publicists were implying, the English had not only taken the life of an unarmed ambassador, but also killed their own mem- bership in the human race.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
CHAPTER 4
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
To the Great Men, the Grateful Patrie.
--inscription on the front of the
pantheon (1791)
How ridiculous it is for an assembly of slithering, vile and inept men to set themselves up as judges of immortality.
--jean-paul marat (1791)
? In the last thirty years of the old regime, the French lived amidst a glitter- ing company of ghosts. One could not belong to an academy, walk through the streets of central Paris, attend an artistic salon or visit a bookseller without coming across orations, odes, statues, paintings, engravings, and books glorifying the "great men" of France's past. Catinat and Bayard, Duguesclin and Suger, d'Aguesseau and Turenne, and many others passed ceaselessly in review. Their panegyrists placed infinite faith in the ability of images of national greatness to inspire further national greatness. Antoine- Le? onard Thomas wrote rhapsodically about an ancient Greece that he saw as a model for modern France: "Everywhere the people saw images of their great men, and . . . surrounded by a crowd of artists, orators and poets, who all painted, sculpted, celebrated and sang of these heroes . . . the free and victorious Greeks saw, felt and breathed nothing but the passion for glory and immortality. "1 Collectively, the attempts to realize this vision in France amounted to nothing less than a conscious reshaping of national memory.
This "cult of great men," as Jean-Claude Bonnet has aptly called it, was, like the political struggles over royal authority and the wars with Great Britain, an arena in which the French found the concepts of the nation and the patrie enormously useful. 2 Here, too, the concepts had powerful reso-
107
108 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nance for readers who were coming to understand the human world as something that existed on its own terms rather than being structured from without, and who increasingly saw France as a uniform and homogenous space. Here, too, writers and artists nonetheless found themselves drawing on religious language and symbolism to foster devotion to the secular deity of the patrie. Here, too, the concepts were subject to continuous debate and negotiation, involving issues of national character, history, representa- tion, and gender. And here, as well, the debate and negotiation would ulti- mately promote the idea of the nation as a political construction, an entity that could freely and consciously rebuild itself. This chapter will examine the cult from a new perspective, with particular focus on a fascinating, almost forgotten series of texts: collective biographies of "great French- men" which flowed in profusion from French presses during the eigh- teenth century.
The Rise of a Cult
As Thomas (the same man who made his reputation as the author of Jumonville) freely acknowledged, the idea of a canon of "great men" was hardly a French invention. It reached back to Roman and Greek antiquity, where it had held a central place in political life and had found its defining expression in one of the great classical works of history: Plutarch's Lives. In France itself, the canon dated to the Renaissance and initially was a multi- national one, as in Andre? Thevet's influential updating of Plutarch, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (True Portraits and Lives of Illus- trious Men). 3 Plutarch himself, with his parallel listings of Greeks and Romans, exerted an extraordinary influence on the French Renaissance imagination, serving, in the words of one historian, as "the breviary of all cultivated society in the second half of the sixteenth century. "4 His impor- tance extended to the eighteenth century, when Rousseau developed his fa- mous boyhood obsession with the Lives, and the moralist Vauvenargues memorably wrote: "I cried with joy when I read those lives. I never spent a night without talking to Alcibiades, Agesilas, and others. I visited the Ro- man Forum to harangue with the Gracchi, to defend Cato when they threw rocks at him. "5 Of course, French authors also continued to write lives of classical heroes and great men of other nations (notably, in the eighteenth century, Russia's Peter the Great).
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 109
? The first works to celebrate France alone predictably featured canons of kings, as in Ronsard's Renaissance epic the Franciade (the poet joked of having "the weight of 63 kings on my shoulders"). 6 Yet a broader, non- royal canon celebrating notable French lives did not take long to emerge in this period, which saw a great flourishing of the biographical genre in gen- eral. In 1600, Gabriel Michel de la Rochemaillet's Portraits of the Illustri- ous Men Who Flourished in France from 1500 to the Present presented 144 clerics, military leaders, statesmen, poets, and scholars. Two years later, Scaevole de Sainte-Marthe's Latin Eulogy of Illustrious Learned Frenchmen recounted the lives of 137 recent French writers. Both works held up great Frenchmen to demonstrate France's worth as successor to Greece and Rome, not to mention its superiority to Italy. 7
What distinguished the late eighteenth-century celebration of great Frenchmen from these Renaissance predecessors was less its novelty than its scale, its relentless emphasis on patriotic pedagogy, and its definition of "greatness. " To begin with, virtually every artistic and literary medium em- braced the subject. Louis XVI's effective minister for the arts, the Marquis d'Angiviller, put the enormous patronage power of the crown firmly be- hind the celebration of great Frenchmen, commissioning his series of his- tory paintings and sculptures which duly took pride of place in the artistic Salons of the late 1770s and 1780s. There visitors could contemplate the brave Constable Duguesclin receiving his final honors after a heroic death in the Hundred Years' War, the "fearless knight" Bayard saving the honor of a female prisoner, and many other statesmen and soldiers, as well as Descartes and Fe? nelon (see Table 1). 8 On the stage, Buirette de Belloy's The Siege of Calais fit into the pattern, and inspired numerous, even more for- gettable imitations. 9 Several authors, in an obvious foreshadowing of the revolutionary Pantheon, developed plans for galleries, sculpture gardens, or cemeteries of great men, again focusing primarily on statesmen and military figures. Most often, they proposed that their statues surround a statue of the king, and more than one envisioned the ensemble at the en- trance to a new national museum in the Louvre. King Louis XV himself approved one such plan in 1768, although nothing came of the idea until the Revolution. 10
The genre that the eighteenth century made peculiarly its own was the academic eulogy, which functioned as something of a successor to the older oratorical art of the funeral oration. 11 The eulogy owed its promi-
110 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 6. One of the paintings commissioned by the Marquis d'Angiviller to stimulate patriotic sentiment in France, it depicts the selfless conduct of the Renaissance hero Pierre Bayard in sparing the honor of a female prisoner. Louis- Jacques Durameau, La continence de Bayard (Bayard's Continence), 1777.
? Table 1.
1777
1779
1781
1783
1785
1787 1789
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 111 D'Angiviller's Sculpture Commissions for the Salons
Michel de l'Ho^pital (chancellor); Fe? nelon (bishop and philosopher); Sully (statesman and minister); Descartes
D'Aguesseau (chancellor); Corneille; Montesquieu; Bossuet (religious) Catinat (military); Tourville (military); Montausier (royal tutor); Pascal Vauban (military, minister); Molie`re; La Fontaine; Turenne (military) Racine; Mole? (magistrate); Duquesne (military); Conde? (prince,
military)
Bayard (military); Rollin (scholar); Luxembourg (military); Vincent de
Paul (religious)
Duguesclin (military); Poussin; Cassini (astronomer); Lamoignon
? (magistrate)
Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on. 395-6.
nence above all to the Acade? mie Franc? aise, which decided in 1758 (as it was falling into the hands of the philosophes) to change the form of its peri- odic eloquence competition. Henceforth, orators would deliver eulogies of the "great men of the nation" instead of discourses on devotional religious topics, as they had done for more than a century. Over the next thirty years the Acade? mie selected sixteen great men as subjects, including two kings, ten military figures and statesmen, and four men of letters (see Table 2). France's many provincial academies took up the eulogy as well, and it therefore came to occupy a central position in French cultural life. 12 Such was the genre's importance during the last thirty years of the regime that few philosophes and future revolutionaries failed to try their hand at it. Even Marat composed a eulogy of Montesquieu. D'Alembert (who became recording secretary of the Acade? mie) wrote more than sixty. 13 But the En- lightenment's master eulogist was Thomas, who, after making his reputa- tion with Jumonville, won the first five of the Acade? mie's new competi- tions, published an enormously long, well-received Essay on Eulogies in 1773, and helped inspire d'Angiviller's artistic program. Thanks to these achievements, he stood for some time in the front ranks of the philosophes, although his reputation has since fallen drastically. 14
Finally, there was a genre which has fallen into even greater historical oblivion than Thomas's work: the collective biography. Indeed, these fasci- nating works have never received systematic historical study. In recent years, one eminent historian has called Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent's 1786 Portraits of Great Men and Illustrious Women "an important event in the
? 112
The Cult of the Nation in France
? Table 2.
Subjects of the Acade? mie Franc? aise's Eloquence Competitions
1759 Maurice de Saxe (military)
1760 D'Aguesseau (chancellor)
1761 Duguay-Trouin (military)
1763 Sully (minister, statesman) 1765 Descartes
1767 Charles V
1769 Molie`re
1771 Fe? nelon (bishop, philosopher)
1773 Colbert (minister, statesman)
1775 Catinat (military)
1777 Michel de l'Hospital (chancellor)
1779 Suger (cleric, regent)
1781 Montausier (tutor to the royal family)
1783-4 Fontenelle (author)
1785 Louis XII (postponed until 1788)
1787 Vauban (military, minister--postponed until 1790)
? ? Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on, 391-2.
creation of a new, exclusively French pantheon of heroes," apparently unaware that the book had more than a dozen very similar precedents, stretching back across more than a century (see Table 3). 15
These volumes bore some resemblance to the collections of Thevet and Michel de la Rochemaillet, but they traced their origins most directly to a different Renaissance source: portrait galleries. In 1600, the astronomer royal Antoine de Laval, reacting against the use of profane myth and alle- gory as decoration in royal palaces, had advocated the establishment of portrait galleries modeled after the palace of Emperor Augustus, who had displayed statues of meritorious citizens, accompanied by inscriptions re- counting their deeds, in order to inspire emulation. Laval himself designed a gallery of 68 kings for the Louvre, providing a visual equivalent to the Franciade, not to mention a didactic history lesson that assimilated the story of France to the story of its monarchs. Cardinal Richelieu then took the idea in a new direction with the portrait gallery he placed in his grand Parisian palace (today's Palais-Royal), for which he commissioned Simon Voue? t and Philippe de Champaigne to depict twenty-five French kings, ministers, prelates, and warriors. The captions and other ancillary decora- tions left no doubt that Richelieu meant each portrait to express a trait he
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 113 Table 3. Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Collective Biographies
B. Griguette, Eloges des hommes illustres peints en la gallerie du Palais Royal (Dijon, 1646). Eloges des illustres Franc? ois (Caen, 1652).
Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re et al. , Les portraits des hommes illustres franc? ois, Qui sont
peints dans la galerie du Palais Cardinal de Richelieu, avec leurs principales Actions, Armes &
Deuises (Paris, 1655, 1668 [twice] & 1673).
Charles Perrault, Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris,
1697).
[Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde], Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres et grands
capitaines de France, Depuis le commencement de la Monarchie jusqu'a` pre? sent, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1726).
Me? moires contenant les principales actions de la vie des hommes illustres du re`gne de Louis XIV,
2 vols. (Avignon, 1734).
Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Gabriel Pe? rau, and Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Les vies des hommes
illustres de la France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'a` present, 26 vols. (Amsterdam, 1739-1768). See also Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Avis pour l'histoire des hommes illustres de la France (Paris, 1741).
Le ne? crologe des hommes ce? le`bres de France, 17 vols. (Paris, 1764-82).
Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy, Les vies des femmes illustres de la France, 6 vols. (Paris,
1762).
Jacques Gautier Dagoty, Galerie franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui
ont paru en France (Paris, 1770), continued by Jean-Bernard Restout, Galerie franc? oise, 2
vols. (Paris, 1771).
Tablettes historiques et chronologiques ou` l'on voit d'un coup-d'oeil le lieu, l'e? poque de la naissance & de la mort de tous les Hommes ce? le`bres en tous genres que la France a produits (Amsterdam, 1779).
Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, La France illustre, ou le Plutarque franc? ais, 5 vols. (Paris, 1777-90). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Annales pittoresques de la vertu franc? aise, ou Recueil d'estampes
destine? es a` repre? senter les belles actions qui honorent notre nation et notre a^ge (Paris,1783;
separate abridged edition of same, 1782)
[Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent], Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres, et sujets
memorables de France, grave? s et imprime? s en couleurs (Paris, 1786).
Faits et actions he? roi? ques et historiques des Grands Hommes (Paris, 1786).
Louis-Pierre Manuel, L'anne? e franc? oise, ou Vies des Hommes qui ont honore? la France, ou par
leurs talens, ou par leurs services, & surtout par leurs vertus, 4 vols. (Paris, 1789). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Histoire des illustres franc? ois sortis du ci-devant tiers-e? tat, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1792).
? ? ? 114 The Cult of the Nation in France
? associated with himself, such as loyalty, piety, or military valor, and to highlight aspects of his own career. Yet in creating the gallery, he helped es- tablish a new French canon, centered less on the monarchy than on the in- stitutions and servants of the state. 16
Unlike Horace's poetry, Richelieu's monument was less durable than bronze, for the gallery perished in an eighteenth-century fire. But for a century it featured prominently in descriptions of Paris and was memori- alized in verse. 17 And in 1655, the engravers Heince and Bignon published a volume of reproductions of the paintings and enlisted a courtier, Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, to write accompanying biographical essays. The book went through four editions in eighteen years, shrinking in the pro- cess from an in-folio to an in-quarto, and then finally an in-octavo. 18 With this shift from painting to print, a new genre had been born.
Between 1697 and 1792, at least fourteen more collective biographies appeared, many in multivolume sets. The first came from an author illus- trious in his own right, Charles Perrault, who intended his paean to a hun- dred illustrious men of the grand sie`cle primarily as a salvo in the ongoing quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Like Richelieu, Perrault limited his canon to France and insisted in the preface that he had "nothing but the honor of France in mind. "19 Later contributions tended to take both Per- rault and the engravings in Richelieu's gallery as their models--indeed, they not infrequently plagiarized these sources and each other. While a few remained essentially collections of engravings, overall the tendency, start- ing with the abbe? Morvan de Bellegarde in 1726, was toward smaller or no illustrations, and ever more voluminous essays. In some cases, individual biographies expanded to hundreds of pages each and merited volumes to themselves, as in the successful series started by Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny. The selection of great men in this genre differed substantially from those found in others, and the canon changed markedly over the course of the century.
With the exception of Perrault's work, these biographies are less inter- esting, aesthetically and intellectually, than the paintings, statues, and eulo- gies. They seem to be hastily written and their style is unremarkable, which is not surprising, as their authors mainly belonged to the profit-obsessed "Grub Street" of French publishing immortalized by Robert Darnton. 20 Louis-Pierre Manuel, for instance, was a former Bastille prisoner and fu- ture Jacobin who had failed at numerous literary endeavors. Police files de- scribed Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy as an unemployed attorney's
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 115
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 7. Renaissance hero Bayard; the engraving is copy of a painting in Cardinal Richelieu's portrait gallery in the Palais Royal. From Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres (The Illustrious Men), Paris, 1658
116 The Cult of the Nation in France
? clerk who would lend his poison pen to whatever cause would pay him. 21 Nonetheless, the books have a capital importance. In the first place, they served as a principal source of information for the other genres. The paint- ers who filled d'Angiviller's commissions, for instance, drew on material from Franc? ois-Henri Turpin's many works on great men. 22 The authors of eulogies clearly relied on the information that the collective biographies provided. 23 Secondly, the works reached far more members of the public than the paintings and sculptures and all but the most successful eulogies and stage plays. As with most eighteenth-century works, measuring their diffusion is difficult. It is worth observing, however, that publishers would probably not have committed themselves to works that often extended to a score of volumes and that faced considerable competition (particularly be- tween 1770 and 1789, when eight came out), unless the genre had com- mercial potential. Furthermore, several of the works sold by subscrip- tion--readers received new installments at regular intervals, in a sort of "great-man-of-the-month club"--and would hardly have continued, in Du Castre d'Auvigny's case for thirty years, without the subscribers' sup- port. 24
In all these media, the cult of great men had a tirelessly pedagogical, pa- triotic character. Expose the French to an endless parade of meritorious examples, so the assumption went, and imitation would naturally take place. "Great men," wrote the author of one collective biography, "are, so to speak, mirrors in which one contemplates oneself, so as to better oneself. "25 D'Angiviller told the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1775 that his purpose was to "revive virtue and patriotic sentiments," while the dramatic authors who copied Buirette de Belloy generally hoped to elicit the sort of swooning responses elicited by the Siege of Calais. Recall the words of his admirer Manson: "People will say: 'Why can I not do what this person has done? He was French; I am as well. '"26 The advocates of public galleries or cemeteries of great men tended to justify the project in the terms stated by Maille Dusaussoy, in a 1767 proposal for rebuilding the Louvre: "The revered statues . . .
As we have already seen, the way the French defined themselves in the eighteenth century did not rest primarily on a drastic drawing of borders between themselves and foreign "others. " They tended to minimize the connotations of exclusivity and fatality that had been associated with the concept of patrie from antiquity, and strove to make patriotism compatible with a universal human community in which all nations followed the same linear path of development. This universalism did not, however, imply any modesty about France's own place in the family of nations. Throughout the early modern period, dating back at least to Jean Bodin's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, French writers had generally sought to identify the highest stage of human development not merely with Eu- rope, but with France itself. Most often, they grounded their arguments in theories of climate, arguing that France's temperate weather and fertility made it welcoming soil for spiritual achievement and gave the naturally moderate French--nature's true cosmopolitans--the best qualities of all nations. 82 In the eighteenth century, the most subtle contributors to cli-
96 The Cult of the Nation in France
? mate theory (particularly Montesquieu and Buffon) eschewed these chau- vinistic claims, but many others embraced them. Antoine de Rivarol, for instance, wrote that "nature, in giving [the Frenchman] a gentle climate, could not make him rough: it has made him the man of all the nations. "83 D'Espiard de la Borde similarly argued, in his The Spirit of Nations, that "France, among all the nations, can take pride in the fortunate Tempera- ture of its Climate and Minds alike, which produces no bizarre effects, ei- ther in Nature or Morals. "84 French mores were perfectly compatible with those of all other nations, and so France, d'Espiard concluded, "is the prin- cipal Pole of Europe. "85 The cleric Thomas-Jean Pichon wrote in a work similar to d'Espiard's, The Physics of History, that "[French] souls, capable of all modifications, are, in a sense, like their territory, which can produce all sorts of fruits. "86 During the French Revolution the messianic cosmo- politan Anacharsis Cloots asked: "Why, indeed, has nature placed Paris at an equal distance from the pole and the equator, but for it to be a cradle and the metropolis for the general confederation of mankind? "87
From these arguments it followed that the French had the duty to act not only as the world's seat of learning (thus fulfilling the venerable prom- ise of a translatio studii from Athens to Rome to Paris), but also as the world's schoolmasters. 88 Fellow Europeans might recognize France's supe- riority and of their own free will copy its fashions and learn its language. Beyond Europe, however, fulfilling the Frenchman's destiny as "the man of all the nations" demanded an early version of what the nineteenth century would call the nation's "civilizing mission. "89 This mission was in fact a tenet of early modern French imperialist theory. The French authorities in Canada, for instance, declared early on that all "savages" who accepted Ca- tholicism would "be considered and reputed native French," while Con- troller General Colbert even encouraged intermarriage between Indians and French, "in order that, in the course of time, having but one law and one master, they may likewise constitute one people and one race. "90 These ideas permeated travel literature and the missionary Relations, which Jesuit colle`ges pressed on their students. 91
Not surprisingly, the ideas also appeared prominently in the polemical literature of the Seven Years' War--and most strongly in those texts which most insistently deployed the image of the English barbarian. Thomas's Jumonville, for instance, describes the American Indians in terms that Colbert himself would certainly have approved:
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 97
? Les grossiers habitants de ces lointains rivages Forme? s par nos lec? ons, instruits par nos usages, Dans l'e? cole des Arts et de l'humanite?
De leurs sauvages moeurs corrigent l'apre^te? . . . Leur coeur simple et nai? f dans sa fe? rocite? Respecte du Franc? ois la sage authorite? .
[The crude inhabitants of those distant shores, Shaped by our lessons, and instructed by our customs, Reform the harshness of their savage mores
In the school of Arts and humanity . . .
Their hearts, simple and nai? ve in their ferocity, Respect the wise authority of the Frenchman]. 92
In the poem, Jumonville's death itself provides the Indians with a salutary lesson. Until they witnessed it, nothing could overcome their "inflexible roughness," and they remained deaf to pity, taking it for weakness. But on seeing Washington's crime, "Pour la premie`re fois [ils] se sentent e? branler, / De leurs yeux attendris on voit des pleurs couler [For the first time they feel themselves weaken / And one sees tears flow from their eyes]. 93 The novelist Lesuire also cast the French as educators--but in this case unsuc- cessful--of the savage English. As he had one of his few sympathetic Eng- lish characters remark in a crucial scene: "Our [French] neighbors could, more than any other People, soften our mores, and teach us the bonds of society, which make life precious by making it pleasant; but here we make it a duty to hate them. As long as we hate the French, we will be barbarians" (emphasis mine). 94
It would be wrong to say that these representations of England, France, and the relation between them held unanimous sway in France. The heavy legacy of Anglomania and cosmopolitanism did not dissipate so easily. Be- sides, these representations were at least in part official ones, elements of a conscious strategy on the part of the ministry to mobilize the population for the war effort. It is impossible to gauge with any degree of accuracy how widely the general population shared them. What can be said, how- ever, is that these representations permanently expanded the field of French political discussion, suggesting ways of seeing nations, foreign and French alike, that would continue to reappear in French political culture (particularly during the Revolution).
98 The Cult of the Nation in France
? What was most original and significant about them, ultimately, was the idea of an essential, unalterable difference between two nations. In the eighteenth century (as we will see in more detail in Chapter 5), the most common criteria for adducing differences in national character were cli- mate, political system, and position on a linear scale of historical evolution, according to which American Indians, for instance, stood roughly equiva- lent to the early Greeks. For this reason, historians have generally opposed eighteenth-century notions of human difference to nineteenth-century ra- cially based ones, since, according to the earlier criteria, a people's char- acteristics could easily change (as in Buffon's claim that Africans trans- planted to Scandinavia would eventually become white). 95 Certainly the polemical writers of the mid-eighteenth century did not fail to link English faults to all these factors, particularly the turbulence of English politics and weather alike ("a perpetually bloody climate," as Buirette de Belloy con- cisely put it). 96 But the tactic of stigmatizing the English as barbarians, al- though rooted in notions of historical evolution, established new criteria of difference. For the writers who deployed it, even "savage" Indians did not ultimately stand beyond the reach of the French civilizing mission. The English did, owing to their perverse refusal of French wisdom. Unlike the Indians, they would never evolve beyond a fundamentally primitive histor- ical state. Lesuire, in Les sauvages de l'Europe, again expressed this idea with particular force. At the beginning of his novel, one character observes--in keeping with climate-based theories of difference--that Europe has two true barbaric peoples, both in the north: the Lapps and the English. But then he adds a further difference: "The second are barbarians in their hearts. "97 Similarly, for Lefebvre de Beauvray, the "cruelty of the fierce Afri- can" was something the Englishman carried "in [his] breast. "98 In sum, this language served to deepen the concept of a war of nations, to make it seem an inevitable fight to the finish between irreconcilable peoples.
Toward the Revolutionary Wars
When France and Britain signed the Peace of Paris in 1763, official atti- tudes towards the enemy across the Channel abruptly shifted. Martyrs like Jumonville were no longer in demand, and the specter of the English bar- barian rapidly receded. Lefebvre de Beauvray, who only recently had been spitting forth his eternal hatred of the "perjurious race" of Englishmen, suddenly and more than a little hypocritically revealed himself a secret
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 99
? Anglomaniac, rhapsodizing about "le Franc? ais et l'Anglais, par les talents unis, / Emules de tout temps, trop souvent ennemis [The French and Eng- lish, united by talents / Imitators of each other always, but too often ene- mies]. "99 As we have seen, even in the two postwar stage plays often cited by historians as prime examples of French Anglophobia (Le sie`ge de Calais and C. S. Favart's L'Anglois a` Bordeaux), a far more nuanced portrait of "English barbarians" emerged. In both, thanks in part to the civilizing in- fluence of French women (particularly important for Favart), the crude and unsociable English protagonists finally proved susceptible to the wis- dom of French ways.
Nor did "English barbarians" return in force during the War of Ameri- can Independence. Although again at war with England, the French also found themselves allied with erstwhile English colonists, commanded by the chief barbarian of 1754 (one French volunteer fighting with the Ameri- cans simply refused to believe that the imposing general was the same man as Jumonville's murderer). 100 When Lesuire published a revised version of The Savages of Europe in 1780, he toned down his portrait substantially and called England "a rival Nation, and one which we should esteem, because it can bear comparison with us from many points of view. "101 French propa- ganda in this war, including new work by Lefebvre de Beauvray, criticized the English mostly for excessive pride and for trying to establish a universal empire of the seas. 102
Yet in other ways the pattern set in the 1750s remained influential. For instance, during the War of American Independence the ministry contin- ued to use the press to mobilize domestic opinion behind the war effort. After a major naval defeat, Foreign Minister Vergennes developed what his biographer calls a "veritable press campaign," with the objective, as Vergennes himself put it, of "reestablishing and permanently fixing opin- ion. "103 The ministry called for patriotic donations to the navy and then as- siduously published news of them in supportive newspapers. Vergennes himself admitted that the donations had a greater symbolic than practical value. 104 Once again the ministry popularized the deeds of ordinary French warriors.
The French revolutionaries initially did little to revive the concept of wars of nations. These were the years of the Constituent Assembly's Decla- ration of Peace to the World and frequent proclamations about the broth- erhood of peoples. 105 Such gestures, themselves predicated on the concept of France as the pole of civilization and the world's schoolmaster, ex-
100 The Cult of the Nation in France
? pressed the hope that in the brave new world of 1789 there would be no more barbarians, and all peoples would embrace the new gospel emanat- ing from Paris. In 1789-90 Anacharsis Cloots was predicting that one day people would take stagecoaches from Paris to Beijing as they did from Bordeaux to Strasbourg, while Bertrand Bare`re was asking complacently: "What people would not want to become French? "106
But in 1793-94, as the war against the allied powers grew desperate, the ruling Convention changed tack. It enacted a series of repressive measures against foreigners living in France (including a never-realized proposal for them to wear tricolor armbands at all times), and its leading members again began to claim that the English had willfully set themselves outside the universal (and France-centered) human community. Furthermore, the Jacobins most committed to radical theories of popular sovereignty now forthrightly insisted that an irreconcilable and permanent hatred separated the English from the French, even as their moderate opponents continued to distinguish between a supposedly virtuous English people and Eng- land's depraved and corrupted government. 107 Robespierre declared fa- mously on January 30, 1794: "I do not like the English, because the very word recalls to me the idea of an insolent people who dare to make war on a generous people who have recovered their liberty . . . Let this people break its government . . . Until then I vow an implacable hatred to it. "108 Saint-Just angrily insisted: "Make your children swear immortal hatred to this other Carthage," and petitions from provincial Jacobin clubs dutifully echoed the message, in one case vowing "eternal hatred to this race of can- nibals. "109 Bare`re hammered the point home most brutally in his report on "England's crimes against the French people": "National hatred must sound forth; for the purposes of commercial and political contacts, there must be an immense ocean between Dover and Calais; young republicans must suck in a hatred of the word Englishman along with their mothers' milk. "110 These leaders clearly believed that to mobilize the French ef- fectively against the nation that seemed, superficially, most to resemble them--indeed, which French leaders in 1789-91 often presented as a polit- ical model--the supposed resemblance had once again to be exposed as the vilest sort of deception. 111
In the service of this cause, the revolutionaries engaged in massive pro- paganda campaigns against foreign enemies that dwarfed anything seen previously. They also rediscovered, with a vengeance, the image of the Eng- lish barbarian and the concept of a war of nations. In fact, they literally re-
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 101
? discovered the war propaganda of the 1750s, as shown by the ease with which old poems were simply published under new names and the way Rouget de Lisle, for example, borrowed lines from the earlier literature for the Marseillaise. As Sophie Wahnich has demonstrated in a recent book, the radical Jacobins took up the theme of the English barbarian with par- ticular intensity. 112 Provincial clubs and speakers in the Convention railed against "these barbarous islanders, banes of humanity, whom nature has already separated from humanity by the seas"; the "barbarous character and spirit of these inhabitants of an island fertile in infamies"; and "the most ferocious, the most barbarous nation, the most debased of them all. "113 Bare`re's report fairly bristled with the charges once leveled against Jumonville's killers: "Caesar, in landing on the island [Britain], found only a fierce tribe [peuplade]," he declared. "Their subsequent civilization, and their civil wars and maritime wars have all continued to bear the mark of this savage origin. " He accused the English of "corrupting the humanity of the savages" in America, and added his truly bone-chilling line: "They are a tribe foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear. "114 The ultimate fate of a people who had refused the revealed truth of superior French wisdom would be the same as Carthage's. An anonymous report, dated 1794, in the archives of the French foreign ministry, made the point with truly chilling concision. The Netherlands were to be "ruined," Spain was to be stripped of its royal house, and Prussia was to be conquered. The English and the Austrians, however, were to be "exterminated. "115 The Jacobins did not apply this logic only to foreign enemies, but even to the counter-revolutionary rebels of the Vende? e, whom they similarly labeled "foreigners" and "barbarians" and deemed fit for mass killing, with horri- fic results. "As long as this impure race exists," said Robespierre of the Vende? ens, "the Republic will be unhappy and precarious. "116
From Wars of Religion to Wars of Nations and Races
In the polemical literature of the Seven Years' War, as throughout eigh- teenth-century French patriotic writing, religion was both the great ab- sence and the great hidden presence. As previously noted, the authors almost entirely avoided denouncing the English as heretics. And when compared with the anti-Protestant literature of the late sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, or even with Jean de la Chapelle's early eighteenth-cen- tury Letters of a Swiss (which saluted the Hapsburg candidate for the Span-
102 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ish throne as "Charles III by Grace of the Heretics Catholic King [i. e. Rey Cato? lico]"), the difference is stunning. 117 Their very predilection for the image of the English barbarian, with "barbarian" understood as the opposite of a civilized person, underlined their acceptance of the idea that membership in a properly constituted universal community (soon to be called a civilization) did not depend on religion, but on customs (moeurs) and cultivation. Religion had become a private matter, an affair of con- science. It should no longer structure international animosities.
Yet the war literature resembled earlier, religiously inspired war propa- ganda so strongly that it is hard not to see deep connections between the two. To begin with, in order to arouse zeal and sacrifice from the popula- tion, French officials explicitly compared the patrie to an object of religious devotion. As Foreign Minister Vergennes wrote in 1782: "The Frenchman, proud of the name he glories in, sees the entire nation as his family, and sees his zealous sacrifices as a religious duty towards his brothers. He sees the patrie as the object of his worship. "118 Secondly, the most important precedents for using printed matter on a massive scale to mobilize a popu- lation for warfare were religious: particularly the efforts of the politique party that supported Henri of Navarre against Spain and also against their opponents in the Catholic League. 119 Third, the principal French prece- dents for the wholesale demonization of an enemy nation, at least since 1500, were religious as well. In the Wars of Religion, even pamphlets aimed at fellow Catholics still managed most often to cast their accusations in re- ligious terms. If Philip II and his subjects were barbarians, as the politiques insisted, it was precisely because they were false Catholics: secret athe- ists, or even Jews, or Muslims. "What! " exclaimed the politique Antoine Arnauld in his 1589 pamphlet, Copy of the Anti-Spaniard. "Should these Marranos become our Kings and Princes! . . . Should France be added to the titles of this King of Majorca, this half-Moor, half-Jew, half-Saracen? [sic]"120 The representation of the English as barbaric, false Europeans seems to stand as a secular parallel to these earlier exercises in xenophobia, illustrating the larger parallels between the sixteenth-century process of building a church, and the eighteenth-century one of building a nation, both of which involved not only binding people together, but also purging the body religious or body politic of impure and dangerous elements.
In addition, the "barbarians" and "savages" in the eighteenth century strongly recall earlier, religious modes of characterizing human diversity. Writers who described the American Indians as rude, unfinished people in
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 103
? need of civilizing closely echoed the Jesuit missionaries who had seen the same Indians as lost souls in need of instruction in the true faith. Anthony Pagden has noted that for centuries "barbarian" and "pagan" were virtual synonyms, while Miche`le Duchet, in her pioneering study of Enlighten- ment anthropology, has pointed out that the philosophes themselves recog- nized the connections between the religious and civilizing "missions. " It is difficult, she adds, "to conceive of a purely secular model of colonization, not only because history offers no examples of one, but because the very image of savages susceptible to persuasion, relayed by centuries of mis- siology, is still indissolubly linked to an ideal of evangelization. "121 Mean- while, the description of the English as barbarians who willfully refused the benefits of French civilization echoed earlier condemnations of groups that had seen, but willfully rejected, the revealed truth of the Gospels: here- tics, and especially Jews. Rather eerily, the nefarious qualities attributed to the English in the eighteenth century--overweening pride, irrational ha- tred of other peoples, a desire to dominate the world, and also an unrea- sonable love of money and trade (the last a favorite theme for orators in the Convention--Bare`re called the English "a mercantile horde"), recalled traits that French writers commonly attributed to the Jews. 122 The compar- ison may seem unlikely, but consider this passage written by Elie Fre? ron in 1756: "The intolerance of the Jews in religious matters made the entire universe indignant at them. The intolerance of the Tyrians and Cartha- ginians in commercial matters hastened their destruction. The English should fear the same fate, for all Europe reproaches them for the same principles, the same views and the same vices. "123
Finally, there is Joseph Coulon de Jumonville himself: an undistin- guished man, common, simple and plain but courageous--the very em- bodiment of French virtue. Previous annals of French military glory held very few precedents for a democratic hero of this sort. Volumes devoted to "great" or "illustrious" Frenchmen before the 1750s drew their military figures almost entirely from the ranks of the high nobility and great war- riors (the principal exception, Joan of Arc, was more properly seen as a religious figure). Only from the 1760s would volumes of this sort start to include common soldiers, including Jumonville himself. 124 However, in the thick ranks of Catholic martyrs and saints, men like him had long abounded. In this sense, Jumonville has a strong claim to being the first martyr of modern France (and remember Thomas's pathetic description of his martyrdom: even as his eyes close to the light, his "soul" finds
104 The Cult of the Nation in France
? "delight" not in God, but in "the tender memory of France"). He is a direct predecessor of the ostentatiously non-noble heroes of Le sie`ge de Calais, and, even more, the Christ-like boy martyrs of the French Revolution, such as the poor Viala, who supposedly choked out his last words: "I die for liberty. "125
At this point I think it useful to speculate on the implications of this view of Franco-English difference, not only for French nationalism, but also for French ways of understanding human diversity in general, and for the origins of race-based nationalism. It has often been argued that the eighteenth century saw the rise of new, essentialist ideas on the subject of human diversity in France--even the birth of modern racism--above all in order to justify the continuing enslavement of Africans. 126 As intellectual background for the shift, scholars cite the weakening of Christian theology and its insistence on the common descent of the human race from Adam ("monogenesis"), and the increasing influence of the biological sciences with their penchant for classification and ranking. The argument may be convincing as far as peoples of color were concerned, but European racial science in the modern period has sought to prove essential racial differ- ences not only between Europeans and non-Europeans, but within the Eu- ropean family itself. The intellectual framework for investigations into these narrower racial differences was largely the same, but here the "sci- ence" developed in the service of nationalism rather than of slavery and imperialism.
I would like to suggest that the essentializing of ethnic and racial differ- ences in fact began at the center as much as it did at the (perceived) pe- riphery. 127 It began as the French struggled to differentiate themselves from the people with whom they often felt the greatest affinity and similarity, yet who had also emerged as the greatest apparent threat to their own honor, prosperity, and understanding of the world: the English. True, even in the Revolution polemicists rarely described the differences between the Eng- lish and the French in biological terms. The word "race" did occasionally appear, as in the phrase "race of cannibals" or "perjurious race," and its us- age in these contexts seems to denote something more than the common eighteenth-century definition of race as "lineage. "128 But most often the fault attributed to the English was a moral one, a failing of the spirit. It in- fected the English people as a whole, generation after generation, but it did not have its origin in any specific physical difference detectable by biologi- cal science.
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 105
? Yet by making national difference into something as fierce and unforgiv- ing as religious difference had been during the era of the Reformation, the wartime polemicists helped readers to think of human diversity in a way that went beyond the detached, clinical observations of theorists interested in climate, and linear schemes of development. They suggested that na- tional groups, which is to say groups bound together by a common origin rather than by common faith, had characteristics which temperature and humidity could not explain, and which shifts in climate could not alter.
And it is precisely here that the terms "savages" and "barbarians" were so important. They were not scientific terms in the least. But they set forth a problem that biological science could later answer (however mistakenly): the problem of difference. Anthony Pagden has written that when modes of explanation of human difference shifted in the early nineteenth century from the sociological to the physiological, they did so in part because the sociological modes seemed incapable of revealing why some peoples failed to make historical progress. 129 This was precisely the problem highlighted by the figure of the English barbarian (and that would be repeatedly high- lighted by emerging nationalist movements over the next century when stigmatizing their enemies--especially the Jews). It suggested that the Eng- lish, despite their membership in the white race and in a common Euro- pean civilization, in fact were fundamentally alien, as alien as heretics had been to the mother church. And not only alien but inferior, and deserving of hatred, subjugation, or even extermination. In all the voluminous writ- ings of the French revolutionary period, there is no clearer forerunner of modern expressions of racial hatred than Bare`re's report on English crimes. "National hatred must sound forth. " Without such a rooted sense of profound difference between nations, could nineteenth-century race science have carried any sense of conviction? Would its creators have even pursued their researches in the first place?
Before the middle of the eighteenth century, such a sense of difference was lacking, at least in France. It began to arise only in the period of the Seven Years' War, in response to anxieties about France's changing position in the world, and the demands of a rapidly evolving public sphere, as sup- porters of the French crown sought to mobilize the nation as a whole against an enemy nation. The image of English barbarians, more alien even than the already frightening American savages, helped teach the French this sense of national difference. It did so, moreover, without challenging the universalism which remained so powerful a force in French culture,
106 The Cult of the Nation in France
? and which would express itself so powerfully at the start of the Revolu- tion and again under Napoleon. The English were different precisely be- cause they rejected the universal human civilization that properly revolved around France, as their murder of Jumonville symbolized most vividly. In slaying him, the French publicists were implying, the English had not only taken the life of an unarmed ambassador, but also killed their own mem- bership in the human race.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
CHAPTER 4
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen
To the Great Men, the Grateful Patrie.
--inscription on the front of the
pantheon (1791)
How ridiculous it is for an assembly of slithering, vile and inept men to set themselves up as judges of immortality.
--jean-paul marat (1791)
? In the last thirty years of the old regime, the French lived amidst a glitter- ing company of ghosts. One could not belong to an academy, walk through the streets of central Paris, attend an artistic salon or visit a bookseller without coming across orations, odes, statues, paintings, engravings, and books glorifying the "great men" of France's past. Catinat and Bayard, Duguesclin and Suger, d'Aguesseau and Turenne, and many others passed ceaselessly in review. Their panegyrists placed infinite faith in the ability of images of national greatness to inspire further national greatness. Antoine- Le? onard Thomas wrote rhapsodically about an ancient Greece that he saw as a model for modern France: "Everywhere the people saw images of their great men, and . . . surrounded by a crowd of artists, orators and poets, who all painted, sculpted, celebrated and sang of these heroes . . . the free and victorious Greeks saw, felt and breathed nothing but the passion for glory and immortality. "1 Collectively, the attempts to realize this vision in France amounted to nothing less than a conscious reshaping of national memory.
This "cult of great men," as Jean-Claude Bonnet has aptly called it, was, like the political struggles over royal authority and the wars with Great Britain, an arena in which the French found the concepts of the nation and the patrie enormously useful. 2 Here, too, the concepts had powerful reso-
107
108 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nance for readers who were coming to understand the human world as something that existed on its own terms rather than being structured from without, and who increasingly saw France as a uniform and homogenous space. Here, too, writers and artists nonetheless found themselves drawing on religious language and symbolism to foster devotion to the secular deity of the patrie. Here, too, the concepts were subject to continuous debate and negotiation, involving issues of national character, history, representa- tion, and gender. And here, as well, the debate and negotiation would ulti- mately promote the idea of the nation as a political construction, an entity that could freely and consciously rebuild itself. This chapter will examine the cult from a new perspective, with particular focus on a fascinating, almost forgotten series of texts: collective biographies of "great French- men" which flowed in profusion from French presses during the eigh- teenth century.
The Rise of a Cult
As Thomas (the same man who made his reputation as the author of Jumonville) freely acknowledged, the idea of a canon of "great men" was hardly a French invention. It reached back to Roman and Greek antiquity, where it had held a central place in political life and had found its defining expression in one of the great classical works of history: Plutarch's Lives. In France itself, the canon dated to the Renaissance and initially was a multi- national one, as in Andre? Thevet's influential updating of Plutarch, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (True Portraits and Lives of Illus- trious Men). 3 Plutarch himself, with his parallel listings of Greeks and Romans, exerted an extraordinary influence on the French Renaissance imagination, serving, in the words of one historian, as "the breviary of all cultivated society in the second half of the sixteenth century. "4 His impor- tance extended to the eighteenth century, when Rousseau developed his fa- mous boyhood obsession with the Lives, and the moralist Vauvenargues memorably wrote: "I cried with joy when I read those lives. I never spent a night without talking to Alcibiades, Agesilas, and others. I visited the Ro- man Forum to harangue with the Gracchi, to defend Cato when they threw rocks at him. "5 Of course, French authors also continued to write lives of classical heroes and great men of other nations (notably, in the eighteenth century, Russia's Peter the Great).
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 109
? The first works to celebrate France alone predictably featured canons of kings, as in Ronsard's Renaissance epic the Franciade (the poet joked of having "the weight of 63 kings on my shoulders"). 6 Yet a broader, non- royal canon celebrating notable French lives did not take long to emerge in this period, which saw a great flourishing of the biographical genre in gen- eral. In 1600, Gabriel Michel de la Rochemaillet's Portraits of the Illustri- ous Men Who Flourished in France from 1500 to the Present presented 144 clerics, military leaders, statesmen, poets, and scholars. Two years later, Scaevole de Sainte-Marthe's Latin Eulogy of Illustrious Learned Frenchmen recounted the lives of 137 recent French writers. Both works held up great Frenchmen to demonstrate France's worth as successor to Greece and Rome, not to mention its superiority to Italy. 7
What distinguished the late eighteenth-century celebration of great Frenchmen from these Renaissance predecessors was less its novelty than its scale, its relentless emphasis on patriotic pedagogy, and its definition of "greatness. " To begin with, virtually every artistic and literary medium em- braced the subject. Louis XVI's effective minister for the arts, the Marquis d'Angiviller, put the enormous patronage power of the crown firmly be- hind the celebration of great Frenchmen, commissioning his series of his- tory paintings and sculptures which duly took pride of place in the artistic Salons of the late 1770s and 1780s. There visitors could contemplate the brave Constable Duguesclin receiving his final honors after a heroic death in the Hundred Years' War, the "fearless knight" Bayard saving the honor of a female prisoner, and many other statesmen and soldiers, as well as Descartes and Fe? nelon (see Table 1). 8 On the stage, Buirette de Belloy's The Siege of Calais fit into the pattern, and inspired numerous, even more for- gettable imitations. 9 Several authors, in an obvious foreshadowing of the revolutionary Pantheon, developed plans for galleries, sculpture gardens, or cemeteries of great men, again focusing primarily on statesmen and military figures. Most often, they proposed that their statues surround a statue of the king, and more than one envisioned the ensemble at the en- trance to a new national museum in the Louvre. King Louis XV himself approved one such plan in 1768, although nothing came of the idea until the Revolution. 10
The genre that the eighteenth century made peculiarly its own was the academic eulogy, which functioned as something of a successor to the older oratorical art of the funeral oration. 11 The eulogy owed its promi-
110 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 6. One of the paintings commissioned by the Marquis d'Angiviller to stimulate patriotic sentiment in France, it depicts the selfless conduct of the Renaissance hero Pierre Bayard in sparing the honor of a female prisoner. Louis- Jacques Durameau, La continence de Bayard (Bayard's Continence), 1777.
? Table 1.
1777
1779
1781
1783
1785
1787 1789
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 111 D'Angiviller's Sculpture Commissions for the Salons
Michel de l'Ho^pital (chancellor); Fe? nelon (bishop and philosopher); Sully (statesman and minister); Descartes
D'Aguesseau (chancellor); Corneille; Montesquieu; Bossuet (religious) Catinat (military); Tourville (military); Montausier (royal tutor); Pascal Vauban (military, minister); Molie`re; La Fontaine; Turenne (military) Racine; Mole? (magistrate); Duquesne (military); Conde? (prince,
military)
Bayard (military); Rollin (scholar); Luxembourg (military); Vincent de
Paul (religious)
Duguesclin (military); Poussin; Cassini (astronomer); Lamoignon
? (magistrate)
Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on. 395-6.
nence above all to the Acade? mie Franc? aise, which decided in 1758 (as it was falling into the hands of the philosophes) to change the form of its peri- odic eloquence competition. Henceforth, orators would deliver eulogies of the "great men of the nation" instead of discourses on devotional religious topics, as they had done for more than a century. Over the next thirty years the Acade? mie selected sixteen great men as subjects, including two kings, ten military figures and statesmen, and four men of letters (see Table 2). France's many provincial academies took up the eulogy as well, and it therefore came to occupy a central position in French cultural life. 12 Such was the genre's importance during the last thirty years of the regime that few philosophes and future revolutionaries failed to try their hand at it. Even Marat composed a eulogy of Montesquieu. D'Alembert (who became recording secretary of the Acade? mie) wrote more than sixty. 13 But the En- lightenment's master eulogist was Thomas, who, after making his reputa- tion with Jumonville, won the first five of the Acade? mie's new competi- tions, published an enormously long, well-received Essay on Eulogies in 1773, and helped inspire d'Angiviller's artistic program. Thanks to these achievements, he stood for some time in the front ranks of the philosophes, although his reputation has since fallen drastically. 14
Finally, there was a genre which has fallen into even greater historical oblivion than Thomas's work: the collective biography. Indeed, these fasci- nating works have never received systematic historical study. In recent years, one eminent historian has called Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent's 1786 Portraits of Great Men and Illustrious Women "an important event in the
? 112
The Cult of the Nation in France
? Table 2.
Subjects of the Acade? mie Franc? aise's Eloquence Competitions
1759 Maurice de Saxe (military)
1760 D'Aguesseau (chancellor)
1761 Duguay-Trouin (military)
1763 Sully (minister, statesman) 1765 Descartes
1767 Charles V
1769 Molie`re
1771 Fe? nelon (bishop, philosopher)
1773 Colbert (minister, statesman)
1775 Catinat (military)
1777 Michel de l'Hospital (chancellor)
1779 Suger (cleric, regent)
1781 Montausier (tutor to the royal family)
1783-4 Fontenelle (author)
1785 Louis XII (postponed until 1788)
1787 Vauban (military, minister--postponed until 1790)
? ? Source: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthe? on, 391-2.
creation of a new, exclusively French pantheon of heroes," apparently unaware that the book had more than a dozen very similar precedents, stretching back across more than a century (see Table 3). 15
These volumes bore some resemblance to the collections of Thevet and Michel de la Rochemaillet, but they traced their origins most directly to a different Renaissance source: portrait galleries. In 1600, the astronomer royal Antoine de Laval, reacting against the use of profane myth and alle- gory as decoration in royal palaces, had advocated the establishment of portrait galleries modeled after the palace of Emperor Augustus, who had displayed statues of meritorious citizens, accompanied by inscriptions re- counting their deeds, in order to inspire emulation. Laval himself designed a gallery of 68 kings for the Louvre, providing a visual equivalent to the Franciade, not to mention a didactic history lesson that assimilated the story of France to the story of its monarchs. Cardinal Richelieu then took the idea in a new direction with the portrait gallery he placed in his grand Parisian palace (today's Palais-Royal), for which he commissioned Simon Voue? t and Philippe de Champaigne to depict twenty-five French kings, ministers, prelates, and warriors. The captions and other ancillary decora- tions left no doubt that Richelieu meant each portrait to express a trait he
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 113 Table 3. Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Collective Biographies
B. Griguette, Eloges des hommes illustres peints en la gallerie du Palais Royal (Dijon, 1646). Eloges des illustres Franc? ois (Caen, 1652).
Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re et al. , Les portraits des hommes illustres franc? ois, Qui sont
peints dans la galerie du Palais Cardinal de Richelieu, avec leurs principales Actions, Armes &
Deuises (Paris, 1655, 1668 [twice] & 1673).
Charles Perrault, Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris,
1697).
[Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde], Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres et grands
capitaines de France, Depuis le commencement de la Monarchie jusqu'a` pre? sent, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1726).
Me? moires contenant les principales actions de la vie des hommes illustres du re`gne de Louis XIV,
2 vols. (Avignon, 1734).
Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Gabriel Pe? rau, and Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Les vies des hommes
illustres de la France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'a` present, 26 vols. (Amsterdam, 1739-1768). See also Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny, Avis pour l'histoire des hommes illustres de la France (Paris, 1741).
Le ne? crologe des hommes ce? le`bres de France, 17 vols. (Paris, 1764-82).
Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy, Les vies des femmes illustres de la France, 6 vols. (Paris,
1762).
Jacques Gautier Dagoty, Galerie franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui
ont paru en France (Paris, 1770), continued by Jean-Bernard Restout, Galerie franc? oise, 2
vols. (Paris, 1771).
Tablettes historiques et chronologiques ou` l'on voit d'un coup-d'oeil le lieu, l'e? poque de la naissance & de la mort de tous les Hommes ce? le`bres en tous genres que la France a produits (Amsterdam, 1779).
Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, La France illustre, ou le Plutarque franc? ais, 5 vols. (Paris, 1777-90). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Annales pittoresques de la vertu franc? aise, ou Recueil d'estampes
destine? es a` repre? senter les belles actions qui honorent notre nation et notre a^ge (Paris,1783;
separate abridged edition of same, 1782)
[Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent], Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres, et sujets
memorables de France, grave? s et imprime? s en couleurs (Paris, 1786).
Faits et actions he? roi? ques et historiques des Grands Hommes (Paris, 1786).
Louis-Pierre Manuel, L'anne? e franc? oise, ou Vies des Hommes qui ont honore? la France, ou par
leurs talens, ou par leurs services, & surtout par leurs vertus, 4 vols. (Paris, 1789). Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, Histoire des illustres franc? ois sortis du ci-devant tiers-e? tat, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1792).
? ? ? 114 The Cult of the Nation in France
? associated with himself, such as loyalty, piety, or military valor, and to highlight aspects of his own career. Yet in creating the gallery, he helped es- tablish a new French canon, centered less on the monarchy than on the in- stitutions and servants of the state. 16
Unlike Horace's poetry, Richelieu's monument was less durable than bronze, for the gallery perished in an eighteenth-century fire. But for a century it featured prominently in descriptions of Paris and was memori- alized in verse. 17 And in 1655, the engravers Heince and Bignon published a volume of reproductions of the paintings and enlisted a courtier, Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, to write accompanying biographical essays. The book went through four editions in eighteen years, shrinking in the pro- cess from an in-folio to an in-quarto, and then finally an in-octavo. 18 With this shift from painting to print, a new genre had been born.
Between 1697 and 1792, at least fourteen more collective biographies appeared, many in multivolume sets. The first came from an author illus- trious in his own right, Charles Perrault, who intended his paean to a hun- dred illustrious men of the grand sie`cle primarily as a salvo in the ongoing quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Like Richelieu, Perrault limited his canon to France and insisted in the preface that he had "nothing but the honor of France in mind. "19 Later contributions tended to take both Per- rault and the engravings in Richelieu's gallery as their models--indeed, they not infrequently plagiarized these sources and each other. While a few remained essentially collections of engravings, overall the tendency, start- ing with the abbe? Morvan de Bellegarde in 1726, was toward smaller or no illustrations, and ever more voluminous essays. In some cases, individual biographies expanded to hundreds of pages each and merited volumes to themselves, as in the successful series started by Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny. The selection of great men in this genre differed substantially from those found in others, and the canon changed markedly over the course of the century.
With the exception of Perrault's work, these biographies are less inter- esting, aesthetically and intellectually, than the paintings, statues, and eulo- gies. They seem to be hastily written and their style is unremarkable, which is not surprising, as their authors mainly belonged to the profit-obsessed "Grub Street" of French publishing immortalized by Robert Darnton. 20 Louis-Pierre Manuel, for instance, was a former Bastille prisoner and fu- ture Jacobin who had failed at numerous literary endeavors. Police files de- scribed Jean-Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy as an unemployed attorney's
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 115
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 7. Renaissance hero Bayard; the engraving is copy of a painting in Cardinal Richelieu's portrait gallery in the Palais Royal. From Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres (The Illustrious Men), Paris, 1658
116 The Cult of the Nation in France
? clerk who would lend his poison pen to whatever cause would pay him. 21 Nonetheless, the books have a capital importance. In the first place, they served as a principal source of information for the other genres. The paint- ers who filled d'Angiviller's commissions, for instance, drew on material from Franc? ois-Henri Turpin's many works on great men. 22 The authors of eulogies clearly relied on the information that the collective biographies provided. 23 Secondly, the works reached far more members of the public than the paintings and sculptures and all but the most successful eulogies and stage plays. As with most eighteenth-century works, measuring their diffusion is difficult. It is worth observing, however, that publishers would probably not have committed themselves to works that often extended to a score of volumes and that faced considerable competition (particularly be- tween 1770 and 1789, when eight came out), unless the genre had com- mercial potential. Furthermore, several of the works sold by subscrip- tion--readers received new installments at regular intervals, in a sort of "great-man-of-the-month club"--and would hardly have continued, in Du Castre d'Auvigny's case for thirty years, without the subscribers' sup- port. 24
In all these media, the cult of great men had a tirelessly pedagogical, pa- triotic character. Expose the French to an endless parade of meritorious examples, so the assumption went, and imitation would naturally take place. "Great men," wrote the author of one collective biography, "are, so to speak, mirrors in which one contemplates oneself, so as to better oneself. "25 D'Angiviller told the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1775 that his purpose was to "revive virtue and patriotic sentiments," while the dramatic authors who copied Buirette de Belloy generally hoped to elicit the sort of swooning responses elicited by the Siege of Calais. Recall the words of his admirer Manson: "People will say: 'Why can I not do what this person has done? He was French; I am as well. '"26 The advocates of public galleries or cemeteries of great men tended to justify the project in the terms stated by Maille Dusaussoy, in a 1767 proposal for rebuilding the Louvre: "The revered statues . . .
