No More Learning

. friends, you were born French.
Don't imitate the Barbarism and the tone of the English In this horrid depredation.
Let the savage nation act . . .
An Iroquois has far more mercy in him
Than these Milords who buy their titles]. 31
The ministerial publicist Lefebvre de Beauvray told the subjects of his 1757 poetic Adresse a` la nation angloise: "Oui c'est vous qu'on a vu^s, portant dans Votre sein / Toute la cruaute? du fe? roce Africain" [Yes it is you that we have seen, carrying in your breast / All the cruelty of the fierce African]. 32 Most insistently, Robert-Martin Lesuire devoted an entire comic novel to the theme: his Les sauvages de l'Europe. 33 "The English lie at mid-point between men and beasts," says Lesuire's hero. "All the difference I can see between the English and the Savages of Africa, is that the latter spare the fair sex. "34
One further point about the theme is worth making. Polemical writing of this sort hardly lent itself to lexical precision, but nonetheless, from the 1750s through the 1790s, the texts mostly distinguished English "barbari- ans" from non-European "savages" (Lesuire was the principal exception). The latter term, in keeping with its origins in "selvaggi," or forest-dwellers, in the early modern period generally implied creatures without fixed abode, law, or polite customs, possibly even without language--but also
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 87
? without guile or hypocrisy. It most often connoted a greater closeness to nature and man's original state. The more pejorative "barbarian," by con- trast, implied a degree of social corruption and willful rejection of polite behavior (particularly respect for the law), and was most often applied to non-European peoples possessed of a high degree of social organization (such as the inhabitants of the Barbary coast). 35 As a concise example of the difference, consider that eighteenth-century authors spoke of "noble savages" but never of "noble barbarians. "36
Overall, this juxtaposition of the English to non-Europeans served an obvious polemical purpose. Not that it was an entirely new theme for French publicists. During the Wars of Religion, when the Spanish had filled the role of national enemy, Huguenots and politiques occasionally de- nounced them as barbarians and gleefully copied into their broadsides Las Casas's accounts of Spanish New World atrocities. 37 Still, the renewed pre- dilection for the theme in the 1750s, like the dimensions of the wartime lit- erature itself, was novel and deserves explanation.
Mobilizing the Nation
To find this explanation, the first questions to ask are: who wrote the litera- ture, and what readership did they hope to reach? Many of the texts ap- peared anonymously, but it is still possible to make one broad generaliza- tion: the literature did not simply well up spontaneously from the breasts of inspired patriotic authors. To a very large extent (although just how large remains uncertain), it was directed from above, by the royal ministry. As the hostile satirist Mouffle d'Angerville later wrote, "these writings [were] produced under the auspices of the Ministry, whose secret sponsor- ship remained hidden, [so that they] seemed nothing but the effusion of a patriotic heart. "38 The literature certainly cannot be read as evidence of widespread and spontaneous outbreaks of patriotic devotion and xeno- phobia, although some of this doubtless occurred. 39
The key figure was none other than Moreau, whom the foreign affairs department provided with plentiful funds, the services of a translator and clerk, and confidential papers. Thus supplied, he wrote pamphlets and produced the lion's share of two newspapers: the highly successful L'Ob- servateur hollandois, and, later in the war, Le Moniteur franc? ois. He also published in book form, in both English and French, papers seized from Washington at Fort Necessity. 40 Considerable textual evidence suggests that
88 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the other authors took their source material and their themes directly from Moreau's writings. Some openly admitted as much, while others cribbed lines and quotations from him (Thomas took the preface to Jumonville al- most verbatim from L'Observateur hollandois, and even his Virgilian epi- graph had previously appeared in its pages--to paraphrase Dr. Swift, "Get scraps of Virgil from your friends, And have them at your fingers' ends"). 41 The ministry employed other official propagandists as well, probably in- cluding the prolifical Anglophobic lawyer Lefebvre de Beauvray (who also cooperated with it against the parlements). A year after writing Jumonville, Thomas became private secretary to Foreign Minister Choiseul. 42 War po- etry flooded the pages of official periodicals such as the Mercure de France, and it seems likely that many of the more than 150 separate poems, songs, and "fe^tes" collected in one 1757 volume had official sponsorship. 43
At least at the beginning, the ministry's intended audience was not so much French as international. When it hired Moreau in 1755, it did so first and foremost with the goal of keeping the Netherlands neutral in the looming Franco-British conflict, which is why the Parisian lawyer took on the unconvincing persona of a sturdy Dutch burgher (Monsieur Van ***) in his Observateur hollandois. His publication of Washington's papers formed something of an unofficial codicil to France's formal declaration of war, a testimony to the justice of France's cause. Yet the newspaper was published in French, and when Moreau boasted of the sensation it caused, he meant the sensation in France itself, not the Netherlands. 44 Reading the paper, it is hard to believe that Moreau did not principally have a French audience in mind. In the issue centered on Jumonville's death, he wrote of the French: "When will this amiable and generous Nation learn to amuse its imagination with objects worthy of occupying its reason? When will the love of the patrie which lives in the heart of all Frenchmen convey its heat to those many minds who occupy themselves wholly with arid and frivo- lous questions? "45 It was not the sort of passage to stir the blood of Dutch readers.
As the war proceeded, the early French victories turned to ashes and France faced the prospect of massive defeat, including the loss of most of its overseas empire. The principal purpose of the propaganda then became all the more clear: to mobilize French readers behind the crown's war ef- fort. Moreau's Le Moniteur franc? ois openly aimed at a domestic audience, and Moreau recounted in his memoirs that a major pamphlet he wrote comparing France and England (whose publication the ministry hastily
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 89
? scotched when negotiators agreed on terms for peace) had as its goal "to bring back the confidence that we needed more than ever, and to raise up our courage. " Similarly, in a work entitled Lettre sur la paix, "I exhorted the nation to recapture the customs, courage and virtues of its ancestors. "46 At the same time, the ministry attempted to stifle expressions of Anglophilia, which had flourished in print without much constraint during the War of the Austrian Succession, and held up "cosmopolitanism" as a particularly grievous sin. 47 As Edmond Dziembowski has convincingly argued, the French war literature found a model of patriotic fervor in England itself (although this fervor was linked to the turbulent nature of the English and their politics, which supposedly showed through in everything from elec- tion riots to the execution of Charles I). 48
Not surprisingly, the literary propagandists seized on any and all evi- dence that the French were making unprecedented sacrifices for victory-- for instance, in voluntary contributions to the war effort. A contributor to the anti-philosophe Elie Fre? ron's newspaper L'Anne? e litte? raire had called as early as 1756 for such donations: "We have to engage the nation, or at least the well-off people, to make an effort worthy of true French patriots, in giving voluntarily what they can give without harming their fortune, which is much less than the effort one makes for one's patrie in giving up one's life. "49 In 1759 and 1760, with the disastrous state of French finances almost matching the disastrous state of French arms, the crown started encouraging this sort of "voluntary" activity, including the donation of a 74-gun warship by the Estates of Languedoc, and of at least eight other smaller ships (including one baptized the Citoyen) by a variety of benefac- tors. 50 In November of 1759, Controller General of Finances Silhouette is- sued letters patent calling on the French to bring their silver plate to the mint, either as donations or to be exchanged for promissory notes, and the king set an example with some of his own silver. These contributions had a negligible impact on the overall budgetary situation; their purpose was more symbolic than financial. 51 The letters patent actually generated a great deal of resentment and fear ("this sort of expedient is ordinarily the state's last resort in the face of calamities," noted the caustic Parisian lawyer Edmond Barbier in his diary), but few dared disobey, for fear of belying the image of national unity. 52 A letter from an adviser to a Parisian convent is particularly telling: "I informed [the nuns] that they are in circum- stances in which it is essential that they appear patriotic, and ready to obey His Majesty's wishes. "53
90 The Cult of the Nation in France
? In the shift from a propaganda effort aimed at least partly at an interna- tional audience to one designed to stimulate domestic "confidence" and "courage" and to present the image of a united nation, the literature of the Seven Years' War in some respects followed a model first elaborated earlier in the century, during the War of the Spanish Succession. Then, too, al- though on a noticeably smaller scale, the ministry underwrote pamphlets to persuade neutral foreign observers of the justice of the French cause; es- pecially notable was Jean de la Chapelle's vituperative Lettres d'un Suisse. 54 As that war turned more desperate for the French, the crown issued several public letters, supposedly written by the king himself, in which Louis XIV stressed his love for his people and his desire to secure a lasting and honor- able peace. One letter addressed to royal governors was read out from church pulpits across the kingdom. 55 Moreau consulted de la Chapelle in writing his Observateur hollandois, and several patriotic publications from the mid-century recalled Louis's letter in making their own exhortations to the French. 56
Yet in fact the difference between the two sets of war literature is enor- mous. The first presented the war as a war of kings, of royal houses. De la Chapelle consistently attacked the perfidies and infamies of the "House of Austria" and the "Emperor," not of Austrians. Although he used the word "barbarian," it was to describe the "House of Austria's barbarous max- ims. "57 When the ministry appealed to the French nation, it did so in the guise of the king speaking to noble governors about his "faithful sub- jects. "58 In contrast, the literature of the Seven Years' War, including a manifesto written by Foreign Minister Choiseul himself, presented the conflict between France and Britain in quite a different manner, as a war of nations. 59 The anonymous contributor to Fre? ron's newspaper (possibly Fre? ron himself) expressed this difference most strikingly: "There are wars in which the nation only takes an interest because of its submission to the Prince; this war is of a different nature; it is the English nation which, by unanimous agreement, has attacked our nation to deprive us of something which belongs to each of us. "60
In this light, the emphasis Moreau and his fellow authors placed on Jumonville's death takes on added significance. It was not an emissary of the House of Hanover who had cut Jumonville down in the Ohio Valley. Indeed, Britain's King George II barely figured in the war literature at all. No, the villain was an "English barbarian," and, more generally, all "English barbarians. " The victim, meanwhile, was no illustrious noble or prince of the blood. He was, wrote Thomas in Jumonville, "nothing but a simple
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 91
? French officer"--but for that very reason the prototype of his nation: "Of the virtuous Frenchman, such is the character. "61
The difference between the two bodies of propaganda shows just how much had changed in France in the forty years between Louis XIV's death and 1755. The French had grown increasingly accustomed to seeing them- selves as a "nation," and more so, a nation which could mobilize itself, in- stead of simply flocking behind a king. In this respect, the experience of the Seven Years' War contributed to the concept of the nation as a political artifact, something consciously constructed through an act of collective political will. Furthermore, France's ruling elites had become accustomed, in certain important respects, to treating France as a collectivity possessed of its own internal unity and of certain legitimate "rights. " In this respect, both the expansion of the public sphere in France and the political earth- quake of the early 1750s had an absolutely fundamental importance. By the 1750s the ministry was learning to defend its actions in print, to justify them before the "nation" or "public opinion," through the ever-expanding circuits for the distribution of printed material. It was natural, therefore, to seek to mobilize the nation (in fact, the small percentage of relatively well- off pamphlet readers), presenting the war as one in which every individual citizen had a stake.
National Identity and European Unity
If the war was a war of nations, then it was not only a war of all the French, but a war against all of the English. The publicists needed to demonize not simply an enemy king or his advisors, but an entire enemy nation. This shift from earlier modes of propaganda raised some formidable problems, however, as illustrated particularly by Moreau's contortions on the issue. In October 1755, in the Observateur hollandois, he wrote unctuously that he "didn't want to accuse a Friendly Nation"--but he immediately proceeded to ask how one could possibly "separate from the rest of the nation an officer [Washington] whose crime . . . seems to have been the signal for hostilities of all sorts. " And he added a few pages later: "Yes, Monsieur, whatever wish you may have to justify the English nation, the facts speak too loudly against it. "62 A month later, he again retreated from this posi- tion, in a fascinating disquisition on the English national character.
I do not attribute to all the English the excesses to which the bulk of the Nation seems pushed today. I do more. I distinguish two Nations, one of
92
The Cult of the Nation in France
? which is presently the small minority, the nation of the wise . . . But there is in England another nation, if you can even give this name to that ill- considered multitude who let themselves be carried away by opinion and subjugated by hatred. A tumultuous assemblage of all sorts of different parties, they are not a Nation who consult, who reflect, who deliberate; they are a people who cry, who agitate, and who demand war. 63
If elsewhere in his work Moreau (like other authors) drew a deft contrast between true French patriotism and national feeling and the English "fa- naticism" that masqueraded under those names, here he drew the bound- ary line within England itself. 64
Other writers followed Moreau's example. The Me? moires de Tre? voux ex- coriated the "English common people [petit peuple]" for "a ferocity which no longer belongs to the mores [moeurs] of Europe. "65 A semi-official French publicist, the abbe? Le Blanc, denounced "the imbecility of these [English] Fanatics, who take for the voice of the People, the cries of an mindless populace which they themselves have excited. "66 The Journal en- cyclope? dique denounced the "wild [English] populace, which, thinking it is embracing the phantom of liberty, can give itself over to horrid insults of other Nations. "67 These passages incidentally illustrate the suppleness of the publicists' vocabulary. While Moreau contrasted a presumably well- constituted and rational "nation" to a disorganized and fickle "people," us- ing the latter in the sense of the (scorned) "common people," Le Blanc dis- tinguished between a divinely wise "People" (as in vox populi, vox dei), and a (scorned) "populace. "68
It was obvious why Moreau and the others distinguished so carefully be- tween the tiny minority of benign English and the crushing majority of malignant ones. As they knew quite well, making collective accusations against the English nation might not have much credibility for the French reading public, because that public had, for more than twenty years, con- sumed a steady diet of Anglophilic literature, which taught reverence, not hatred, toward the nation across the Channel. From Voltaire's paeans to England in the Philosophical Lettters, to Montesquieu's exaltation of the English constitution, to Diderot's prostration before Samuel Richardson ("O Richardson, Richardson . . . I will keep you on the same shelf with Mo- ses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles"), to the general adulation of Locke and Newton, the major philosophes did their part. 69 Anglomania raged in many other domains as well, notably fashion and sport, while the eigh-
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 93
? teenth-century adoption of words such as "le club" and "le jockey" marked the birth of Franglais. 70 A sizeable literature grew up in the eighteenth cen- tury solely to inoculate the French against the disease of Anglomania, and it still could not prevent Mlle. de l'Espinasse from notoriously remarking that "only Voltaire's glory consoles me for not having been born English. "71 The popular novelist and poet Baculard Arnaud acknowledged the prob- lem when he wrote, in a 1762 poem, "Your Lockes and your Newtons / Were not the ones to teach you these barbaric lessons. "72
Although no other foreign nation elicited anything like the visceral emotional response from the French that England did, this Anglomania it- self fit within a broader eighteenth-century phenomenon: French readers' growing awareness of their identity as Europeans. The idea of Europe as a political unit had a long and august pedigree, and the shadow of European empire had not yet vanished from the Continent, but in the eighteenth century, writers began to perceive what we would now call a close Euro- pean cultural unity as well. 73 Voltaire wrote in his Le poe? me sur la Bataille de Fontenoy (a war poem, but from the relatively polite War of the Austrian Succession): "The peoples of Europe have common principles of humanity which cannot be found in other parts of the world . . . A Frenchman, an Englishman and a German who meet seem to have been born in the same town. "74 A 1760 review from the Journal encyclope? dique also put the point in a global context: "There is a perceptible and striking difference between the inhabitants of Asia and those of Europe . . . But it is much harder, and takes much more discernment, to grasp the slight differences that separate the inhabitants of Europe from one another. "75 The young Rousseau, in a plan for universal peace, commented that "Europe [is] not only a collec- tivity of nations . . . but also a real society, which has its own religion, its own morality, its own way of life, and even its own laws. "76 He returned to the theme more critically in Emile and the Considerations on the Govern- ment of Poland: "Today, whatever one may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen, whatever one may say on the subject there are only Europeans. They all have the same tastes, the same passions, and the same customs, because none of them has ac- quired a national form through a particular education. "77
Many factors spurred this new awareness. Among them were improved communications, the burgeoning periodical press, the enormous cultural influence of France itself, and the decline of international religious ani- mosities. The deeply Catholic commitment to a universal human commu-
94 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nity that pervaded French culture in the eighteenth century could only have reinforced all of these developments. In addition, Europe stood as the embodiment of several of the foundational concepts discussed in Chapter 1: socie? te? , police, civilisation, and moeurs. Nowhere, except perhaps in China, French authors agreed, had progress brought these things to such a high level of development--a verdict that Voltaire celebrated and Rous- seau deplored (as we will see in Chapter 5, the status of women was crucial to these arguments, although the issue did not feature prominently in the war literature). 78
Voltaire's poem and the Journal encyclope? dique review suggest a final and crucial factor: the vertiginous expansion of interest in and informa- tion about non-European cultures during the eighteenth century. Miche`le Duchet has remarked that one need read no further than Candide and the Spirit of the Laws to see how large a place the non-European world occu- pied in the French Enlightenment's imagination--and Duchet herself, fol- lowing on several earlier works, has in any case provided ample further ev- idence. 79 Travel writing, Jesuit Relations (accounts of missionary activity), newspapers, atlases, orientalist novels, and synthetic works of philosophy all made the French familiar with a much larger range of human diversity than ever before. 80
In the context of this new perception of a European identity, the Me? moires de Tre? voux's comments that the English common people dis- played a "ferocity which no longer belongs to the mores of Europe" takes on particular significance and suggests why the image of the "English bar- barian" had such powerful resonance in French propaganda. The casting of the Seven Years' War as a war of nations rather than a war of royal houses conflicted directly with the idea that Europeans were growing steadily closer together, with France and England in particular establishing sym- bolic bridges across the Channel. How could Moreau, Thomas, and the other publicists make national differences within Europe appear unbridge- ably vast, when so much of the printed matter consumed by their reader- ship implied the exact reverse?
The power of the image of the "English barbarian" lay precisely in its symbolic removal of the English from Europe--to the shores of Tripoli, or even further, to an outer darkness beyond even the "savagery" of Africans and American Indians. It revealed that the English, or at least most of them, only appeared European, but in fact lacked the requisite qualities of politeness, sociability, and respect for the law, and stood at the opposite
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 95
? end of a linear scale of historical developments. The label "barbarian" sug- gested that the English, unlike the more pliable American "savages," had actually rejected joining the company of advanced nations. In sum, if rep- resentations of savage Americans and Africans figured centrally in the in- vention of the idea of the civilized European, they also provided a radical standard of alien and primitive behavior (of otherness) that could be used, as political necessity dictated, to measure other European peoples against, thereby contributing to the construction of a new, and more specifically national, self-image.
The School of Arts and Humanity
If the image of the English barbarian functioned in this way to de- Europeanize the English, it also helped to place France itself at the sym- bolic center of Europe. The national self-image it helped to construct had little in common with the one often proposed for England by English pub- licists in this period: namely, the image of a new Israel of the elect--a cho- sen people fundamentally set apart from others. 81 The French image was rather that of a new Rome, the open and welcoming center of a universal civilization. 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
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? 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.