--montesquieu, the spirit of the laws
Here there arises an obstacle to be overcome, and that we cannot overcome without rigorous resolution and a vehement, continuous push forwards.
Here there arises an obstacle to be overcome, and that we cannot overcome without rigorous resolution and a vehement, continuous push forwards.
Cult of the Nation in France
As Rousseau and Montesquieu themselves had stressed, republics simply could not serve as the proper form of govern- ment in large Christian monarchies located in the temperate climate of Western Europe.
The very notion of a true French republic remained largely unthinkable.
The cult of great men, however, presented a canon of recognizably French, Christian figures who possessed, in the new retelling of their sto- ries, the essential attributes of exemplary republican citizens. The shift from equating distinction with heroic actions and accomplishments to equating it with inner, domestic qualities, had particular importance here. Great feats of military valor or great artistic achievements, such as those the seventeenth-century panegyrists celebrated, had nothing intrinsically republican about them. To the extent they brought classical models to mind, the names in question were Caesar, Alexander, or Achilles, not Marius or Brutus. But the qualities commonly attributed to great men in the eighteenth-century eulogies--independence, steadfastness, virtue de- fined as a solemn dedication to the common good, immunity to the seduc- tions of luxury, lucre, and sensual pleasure--were precisely those that the republican tradition identified as the hallmarks of proper citizenship, and indeed those that Montesquieu had recently identified with republics (by contrast, illustrious feats and heroic actions belonged more to the realm of honor, which Montesquieu identified with monarchies). 69 However high their birth, however well placed in the social hierarchy, however exposed to wealth and temptation, truly great men, so the eulogies and collective bi- ographies insisted, behaved like Roman citizens in the heyday of the Re- public. The concern on the part of the cult's architects to demonstrate France's parity with or even superiority to Greece and Rome only high- lighted these republican attributes further, by setting up inescapable paral- lels between the French figures and their classical predecessors. And given the cult's relentless presentation of great men as models to be emulated, its gallery of supposedly familiar French historical figures in fact constituted nothing less than a school of republican politics.
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 127
? The cult's intrinsic republicanism shows through particularly in the way its participants attempted to establish stark and unforgiving gender divi- sions. As many scholars have argued, French republicanism of the revolu- tionary era derived its polemical energy in large part from the contrast it set up between properly organized polities, where male citizens dominated the public arena and women remained in the private realm of the home, and corrupt polities, where gender boundaries became hopelessly blurred. In this perspective Versailles, a place of feminine influence and intrigue, could only be seen as the nec plus ultra of corruption and political degener- ation. Rousseau, the key figure in French republicanism of this era, first ar- ticulated the contrast, but it remained in force through the period of the radical Revolution. 70
These ideas permeated the cult of great men of the eighteenth cen- tury. The oratorical competitions of the Acade? mie Franc? aise proposed no women as subjects for eulogies, and following them, d'Angiviller chose none as the subjects of portraits or sculptures. Women often received the appellation ce? le`bre (famous) or illustre (illustrious), but French authors made no attempt to find a female equivalent for the phrase "grand(s) homme(s)" (grande femme means a large woman, rather than a great one). 71 In other words, while women could perform glorious and heroic actions, as Joan of Arc and innumerable saints had done, they did not, ac- cording to the architects of the cult, have the qualities requisite for republi- can citizenship.
The collective biographies seem at first to offer an exception to this rule. Richelieu's portrait gallery included three women: an improbably elegant Joan of Arc (treated as the vessel of God's will), Marie de Me? dicis (mother of the reigning Louis XIII), and Anne of Austria (Louis XIII's queen). At the end of the old regime, Sergent's Portraits included 12 women, along with 84 men. Aublet de Maubuy devoted an entire book to French women, in which he dismissed notions of natural male superiority as "prejudice," attacked a certain Monsieur R. , obviously Rousseau, for try- ing to lower women to the status of domestic animals, and added, in refer- ence to women's literary skills: "Give them an education like that given to men, excite their emulation, cultivate their talents, and soon we will see them our rivals. "72 His work fit into an established tradition of proto-femi- nist portraits of famous women. 73 Yet in Sergent's book, which spanned French history from the Gauls to Louis XVI, while half the 84 "great men" came from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most recent of
128 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the 12 women had died in 1550 (and four before 1000 a. d. ). 74 It is as if the author only felt comfortable dealing with women in the public sphere if they had lived so long before as to make them into virtual legends. Even Aublet suggested that women deserved a serious education in large part so that they could serve as properly stimulating and sympathetic companions to men. He explicitly warned against taking the mostly royal and aristo- cratic members of his female canon as role models, and lovingly recounted their crimes and follies alongside their achievements. 75 The very consign- ment of women to a volume of their own testified to a literal separation of the sexes in French history.
The cult's republicanism implicitly criticized the belief that a nation's treatment of women was a measure of its civilization. But then, the cult of great men implicitly criticized the concept of civilization itself, holding up instead the classical concept of the patria as the proper foundation of hu- man existence. To the extent that it reshaped France's national memory, therefore, it replaced the story of a nation struggling to rise out of barba- rism towards civilization by the story of a nation struggling to restore itself to a pristine condition of republican health, from which it had fallen into dangerous degeneration, in large part because of the reckless freedoms it allowed women.
The Market and the Public
Thus far I have been able to generalize about the cult of great men and to fit it into the story of pre-revolutionary French nationalism and patriotism laid out in the previous chapters. The cult, I have argued, helped the French to see the nation and the patrie as the fundamental background against which human activity took place; its architects consciously treated it as a means of establishing just order in a disenchanted world, although they often adopted the language and practices of the Catholic Church to achieve their ends. Their implicitly republican vision of the nation stood in stark contrast to portraits of France as a hierarchical society of orders. Yet to the extent the cult had an explicit political role, it was the monarchy which sought most insistently to develop and manipulate it. In these re- spects, the story of the cult complements the stories of political conflicts and war propaganda.
In another area, however, the cult of great men resists such generaliza- tion: the attitudes it embodied towards French history and memory. Here,
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 129
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 9. This engraving of Joan of Arc, copied from a painting in Cardinal Richelieu's gallery in the Palais Royal, appeared in Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres (The Illustrious Men), Paris, 1658.
130 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the collective biographies followed a unique path of their own, and they more fully anticipated the nationalism and patriotism of the Revolution than did the quasi-official eulogies, plays, paintings, and statues. Indeed, in the years before the Revolution, the biographies leaned less toward re- shaping France's collective memory for patriotic purposes than toward the beginning of a desire to wipe it clean altogether.
The biographies parted company with the quasi-official genres most obviously in the size of the canon of great men they celebrated. Over a pe- riod of thirty years, the Acade? mie Franc? aise proposed only sixteen men as subjects of its oratorical competition. D'Angiviller, in the twelve years be- fore the Revolution, commissioned twenty-eight statues of great men and twelve history paintings highlighting their actions. 76 By contrast, the canon presented in the printed biographies expanded vertiginously during the eighteenth century. Heince, Bignon, and Vulson, following Richelieu in his gallery, had presented only 25 great men. But Perrault, in 1700, chose an even hundred. His immediate successors fell back from this mark, limiting themselves to 30 or 40 each. But the series begun by Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny in 1739 reached 50, and the first solo venture by his succes- sor Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, in the 1770s, reached 65. The 1770 collection Historical Tablets went up to 296, Turpin's 1782 French Plutarch to 112, Sergent's 1786 Portraits to 96, and the same year's Heroic and Historical Deeds and Actions of Great Men (Faits et actions he? roi? ques et historiques des Grands Hommes) to 82. And of course Manuel's French Year included no fewer than 365 great men of the nation, one for each day of the year. 77
These differences resulted from strikingly different dynamics at work in the two cases. The Acade? mie was the prisoner of its biennial schedule, and d'Angiviller faced constraints of time, money, and available talent; in any case, he wanted to focus the attention of viewers in the Salons on a rela- tively small number of artworks. 78 Nor was there any pressure to find new great men to honor. Nine of the Acade? mie's sixteen also appeared in d'Angiviller's selections, and virtually all of d'Angiviller and the Acade? mie's choices had previously appeared in one or another collective biography. The point was rather to call renewed attention to what were, after all, canonical figures; to find new and striking ways of presenting fa- miliar stories, in the same way that artists returned incessantly to the story of Jesus.
The authors of the collective biographies, on the other hand, felt a con-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 131
? stant pressure to innovate and to discover new great men to honor. They did not work on commission and could not easily slip into the role of semi-official pedagogues instructing the semi-captive audience of the academy and the Salons. They were authors competing in a commercial marketplace, who had to convince their readers that they had something novel to offer, something not found in previous collections. Consider the abbe? Morvan de Bellegarde. Morvan clearly based his 1726 Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres on Heince, Bignon, and Vulson--to put it more plainly, he shamelessly pirated them. He included 19 of their 25 subjects, leaving out only Joan of Arc, kings, and members of the royal family, and he freely plagiarized Vulson's text. Nonetheless, he strove to make his book look as different as possible from its predecessor. He expanded the essays, tacking onto Vulson's rather bare lists of heroic accomplishments some new details and many homiletic asides. He updated the canon, adding eleven statesmen and soldiers who had achieved fame after the construc- tion of Richelieu's gallery. Most important, whereas Richelieu had de- signed his gallery as a celebration of the French state, Morvan's publisher, Le Gras, cast the new work as a celebration of the nobility (which explains the removal of Joan and the kings), and suggested, in a sycophantic dedica- tory epistle, that France's present-day nobles would find the book a source of pride and inspiration. 79 Le Gras and Morvan may indeed have had a sin- cere admiration for the nobility, but they were also shrewd marketers, who hoped to find new buyers for their work among the wealthiest order of the kingdom.
Similarly, when Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny launched his own hugely suc- cessful series thirteen years later (it would remain a going concern for three decades, and expand to 26 volumes), he soon felt the need to issue a pro- spectus explicitly distinguishing the work from those of Vulson, Perrault, and Morvan:
[There are] those who have reproached me for stealing the materials which make up the first part of my Book, and who have called it, without having read it, a compilation and collection of Histories; but the Public has certainly compared the Lives I have given it with what can be read elsewhere on the subject, with the works of Perrault, of [Morvan de] Bellegarde, with the Gallery of the Palais Royal [Heince, Bignon, and Vulson], or individual Histories . . . These Works are, for the most part,
132 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nothing more than very short, badly written eulogies, long Genealogies, or cold Panegyrics, or tissues of lies, dictated by private interest, fear or baseness. 80
Du Castre d'Auvigny added many more great men, as did his successors at the helm of the project, abbe? Gabriel Pe? rau, and Turpin. By 1782, when Turpin was launching yet another collection of his own, novelty had be- come the principal selling point: "nothing has yet been written on most of the Great Men whom I have given to history. I have cleared new and uncul- tivated land. "81 As for Manuel, he implicitly made the same claim when he dipped deep into the well of obscurity to find not merely a few good men, but 365 great ones. Had many of his readers ever heard of such figures as Baron d'Espagnac, Etienne Geoffroi, or Pierre Carlet?
The collective biographies clearly belonged, then, to the dynamic com- mercial publishing sector of the French economy. 82 The expansion of this sector, I have already argued, helped teach French elites to see their nation as a single, homogeneous territory, while at the same time revising the very definition of the nation, as publishers competed to sell readers an ever larger array of novel pieces of information about their new favorite subject: the French nation, a. k. a. themselves. Even more directly than the histories and pamphlets discussed in the previous two chapters, these books repre- sented, in the visions of France they put before the public, a response to commercial and political stimuli alike.
If commercial pressures helped expand the canon, however, they did not, in and of themselves, dictate where to look for new examples of great- ness. Here again, the biographers parted company with d'Angiviller and the Acade? mie. Both these quasi-official authorities, following Perrault's example, had included artists and writers in their canons of great men but kept them in a distinct minority (a third and a quarter, respectively) among the dominant statesmen, soldiers, and prelates. Their great men also came predominantly from the relatively recent past (more than half from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and fewer than a fifth had died within half a century of their selection. In short, these canons re- mained centered firmly on the absolutist state in its heyday. 83
Among the biographical works, two--Sergent's Portraits and the anony- mous Deeds and Heroic Actions--moved back from this focus towards an imagined Age of Chivalry. They chose overwhelmingly from the ranks of kings, queens, and noble military men (roughly two-thirds in Sergent,
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 133
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 10. Bathilde, queen to France's seventh-century King Clovis II, was one of several medieval queens depicted in this expensive collection of colored engravings from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets memorables de France, Paris, 1786.
134 The Cult of the Nation in France
? nearly all in Deeds and Heroic Actions), and in each, more than half the fig- ures had died before, or within in a few years of, 1600. Both works, in fact, clearly belonged to the late eighteenth-century's rediscovery of the Middle Ages and medieval chivalry. 84 Both celebrated their subjects for great ac- tions rather than great inner qualities. The philosophes would have labeled these men and women illustrious, not great.
The rest of the late eighteenth-century collective biographies, those which did adopt the Enlightenment definition of "greatness," took almost precisely the opposite tack. Restout's 1771 French Gallery (started the year earlier by Jacques Gautier Dagoty) included just 12 princes, statesmen, and military leaders (and two of the latter had risen from the ranks of common soldiers). The other 26 came primarily from the world of learning, litera- ture, and the professions, and included not only painters and playwrights, but doctors, jurists, novelists, architects, and astronomers. 85 Furthermore, all the figures except King Louis XIII had lived in the late seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Turpin's 1782 French Plutarch similarly chose its 118 men overwhelmingly from these modest social groups, and again, primar- ily from the eighteenth century. In his dedication (to Catherine the Great's Lord Chamberlain), Turpin wrote: "No, Prince, nature has not been ex- hausted by the productions of the centuries which have preceded us . . . What do we have to envy the centuries of Augustus, of Leo X, of Louis XIV, when our own has produced Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu? "86
The hundreds of great men profiled in the 1779 Tablets and Manuel's 1789 French Year omnivorously included nearly all the figures selected by d'Angiviller, the Acade? mie, and the previous collective biographies. Even so, in each case more than two-thirds of the total came from outside the ranks of kings, statesmen, and soldiers, and more than two-thirds had died within the past century. Manuel included architects, bankers, merchants, and even a few artisans. "I have missed no occasion," he wrote, "to honor the hands that till the earth and weave our clothes, the farmers and arti- sans, those to whom we owe our surpluses while lacking their own necessi- ties. "87 He had a particular fondness for poor scholars like Jean-Baptiste Ludot, whom he praised for jumping into the Seine in winter to see how long the human body could stand exposure to freezing water, and philan- thropic doctors like Augustin Roux, who devoted himself entirely to the rural poor. As we have seen, he also devoted several pages to that emblem- atic martyr of the modern French nation, Jumonville. 88
Manuel heightened the effect of raising these men, many of whom had
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 135
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 11. The inclusion of the famous eighteenth-century Doctor Jean Astruc among the portraits in this collection illustrates the broadening of the canon of "great Frenchmen" in the decades before the French Revolution. Engraving from Restout, Galerie Franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui ont paru en France (French Gallery, or Portraits of Famous Men and Women Who Have Lived in France), two vols. , Paris, 1771.
enjoyed little or no social recognition during their lives, to the ranks of the great by making the order of his French Year entirely random. The reader paging through late January, for instance, would come across the following sequence of men, appearing on an entirely equal footing: the geographer Guillaume de Lisle, the soldier Franc? ois de Chevert, the doctor Jean-Bap- tiste-Michel Bucquet, the clerical author Pierre Huet, the war minister Belle-Isle, and then, almost contemptuously, Charlemagne, greatest of French monarchs. 89 Given the loud criticism earlier authors had received
136 The Cult of the Nation in France
? for not organizing great men by social rank, the reader would have had to be singularly obtuse not to grasp Manuel's ideological point. Clearly, the book of this journalistic hack par excellence, while not illegal, like many that came out of his milieu, nonetheless amounted to a weapon in a cul- tural battle aimed at a radical restructuring of France's historical canon. 90
Therefore, despite sharing much of the rhetoric of the Academy's e? loges--even blatantly plagiarizing them on occasion--Manuel's project in fact subverted them, as did most of the collective biographies of the last twenty years of the old regime. 91 Whereas the Academy and d'Angiviller, acting in a quasi-official capacity, presented historically distant, socially eminent subjects mostly linked to the service of the absolute monarchy, Manuel and his colleagues, acting in their own capacity and competing in a commercial marketplace, presented contemporary, ordinary civilians very much like the image the reading public of the late old regime was forming of itself: virtuous and meritorious heads of households who could offer just as great service to their patrie as any grandee. Furthermore, whereas the Academy and d'Angiviller presented a relatively stable canon, casting a shadow from the century of Louis XIV over the centuries to come, Manuel, Turpin, and the other biographers, with their claim that "nature has not been exhausted," implied, none too subtly, that true French greatness was still very much in the making. In short, whereas the cult of great men as a whole amounted to a public project of nation-forming within the symbolic space vacated by the retreat of organized religion, it nonetheless took two very different forms. For the orators of the Academy and for d'Angiviller, the nation was a project to be undertaken by the mo- narchical state under the banner of royal patriotism. For the biographers, it was a project that implicitly arose from within the public as a whole--not the entire population, to be sure, but the learned, largely middle-class pub- lic represented in their pages. In a sense, their work amounted less to a cult of great men, than to a cult of the public itself.
To the extent that the celebration of great men as a whole pointed for- ward to the Revolution, the quasi-official genres and the collective biogra- phies again did so in strikingly different ways. In this realm of national memory, as with the politics of sovereignty and with war propaganda, the Revolution marked an intensification and transfiguration of trends that had begun under the old regime. The successive authorities held up great lives as examples to the citizenry, from boy martyrs cut down in battle against counter-revolutionaries to assassinated leaders like Marat and Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau. 92 In September 1793, the National Convention
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 137
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 12. The Pantheon, Paris. The former Church of Sainte-Genevie`ve was transformed during the French Revolution into a monument to (and final resting place for) "the great men of the Patrie. "
decided to establish, as its principal vehicle of civic and patriotic education for the masses, an official periodical entitled Collection of Heroic and Civic Actions of French Republicans, to be distributed to the armies and popular societies and used as mandatory texts in primary schools. The government sent out thousands of circulars requesting that incidents of patriotic hero- ism be reported to the periodical's editor, and hundreds of responses filtered back in. Five issues of the paper appeared before the fall of Robes- pierre in 1794, with print runs ranging from 80,000 to a spectacular 150,000. 93 In an equally important move, the Revolution took the newly built, gloomy neoclassical Church of Sainte-Genevie`ve, which lowered over much of the Left Bank of Paris, and expensively transformed it into a National Pantheon on the Roman model. Several reconsecrations and deconsecrations later, it again has this function today, complete with the eighteenth-century motto over its entrance: "Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie Reconnaissante" (To the Great Men, the Grateful Patrie).
This revolutionary cult of great men exhibited an intense concern for
138 The Cult of the Nation in France
? history, in the sense that the revolutionaries saw themselves as the founders of a new history and strove anxiously to influence posterity's judgment of their achievements. 94 At the same time, they rejected the actual history of pre-1789 France almost entirely, and with few exceptions celebrated only titans and martyrs of the Revolution itself. Even the Pantheon welcomed only Voltaire and Rousseau among pre-revolutionary "great men. " The en- tire panoply of Frenchmen so rhapsodized over by old regime panegyrists, from Clovis and Charlemagne to Chevert and Jumonville, suffered a total eclipse, although the nineteenth century would again recover them for France's national memory. The doughty Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, author of more biographies than any other writer, made one last attempt in 1792 (at age 81) to publish a History of Illustrious Frenchmen from the Former Third Estate, which drew together eleven of his more humbly born historical subjects. But the book vanished without a trace. 95
As Mona Ozouf has cogently argued, the various revolutionary attempts to institute an official canon of great men, and particularly the Pantheon itself, for the most part proved crashing, embarrassing failures. The fac- tions in the successive assemblies could rarely agree on which figures de- served admittance, and even when they did, a great man interred in the crypt with great pomp one year often faced eviction the next, following some political shift that revealed him a traitor and criminal. This was the case with Mirabeau and also Marat. 96 Furthermore, from the very begin- ning of the Revolution, the radical left--led, ironically enough, by Marat himself--inveighed bitterly against the very idea of a national canon of greatness, as in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. 97 The rather mournful, and carefully choreographed ceremonies of interment at the former Sainte-Genevie`ve contrasted sharply with the wild, spontaneous outpourings on behalf of Marat after his death at the hands of Charlotte Corday. The Club des Cordeliers invented rituals for Marat involving his heart, and (somewhat grotesquely) featuring the bathtub in which he had met his death as a sort of substitute crucifix, in the most emotional and bi- zarre public expression of religious passion in the city since the cult of the convulsionaries, sixty years earlier. 98
In the old regime cult of great men, it was the collective biographies which pointed most directly towards this revolutionary future. In their emphasis on men from the recent past, in their claim that "nature is not exhausted," and in their effective devaluation not only of kings, but of the entire quasi-official canon celebrated by the academy and d'Angiviller, they
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 139
? anticipated the revolutionary rejection of the French past, and the ambi- tion of the revolutionaries to cast themselves as the protagonists of a new, more perfect history, in a nation that was consciously rebuilding itself. In their freewheeling celebration of whatever figures the authors thought might sell, they anticipated somewhat the spontaneity of radical revo- lutionary commemorations and the radicals' rejection of any official canon whatsoever. In their virtual canonization of men like Ludot and Jumonville, common men who sacrificed themselves for the patrie, they anticipated the revolutionary cult of martyrs and the transformation of men like Marat into virtual saints of the patrie. In sum, most of the cult of great men under the old regime, despite its distinct republican accents, re- mained constrained within a tradition which saw the nation embodied in the king, those who served him, and those whom he designated. The col- lective biographies, however, looked ahead to a revolutionary vision in which the nation was embodied, potentially, in every citizen; in which every citizen partook, potentially, of its sacred qualities.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Character and the Republican Imagination
CHAPTER 5
National Character and the Republican Imagination
If there were in the world a nation which had a sociable humor, an openness of heart, a joy in life, a taste, an ease in communicating its thoughts; which was lively, pleasant, playful, sometimes imprudent, often indiscreet; and which had with all that, courage, generosity, frankness, and a certain point of honor, one should avoid disturbing its manners by laws, in order not to disturb its virtues. If the charac- ter is generally good, what difference do a few faults make?
--montesquieu, the spirit of the laws
Here there arises an obstacle to be overcome, and that we cannot overcome without rigorous resolution and a vehement, continuous push forwards. This obstacle is habit . . . whose dominion in the long term shapes a national character distinctive from that of other peo- ples and other men . . . To dissolve all the ties that bind a degenerate nation to ancient usages, to ingrained passions, to vicious inclina- tions, it seems that one must, so to speak, strike oneself down, sacrificing the interests of the moment.
--jacques-nicolas billaud-varenne, principes re? ge? ne? rateurs du syste`me social (1793)
? In 1769, the novelist Jean-Louis Castilhon paid the aging magistrate Fran- c? ois-Ignace d'Espiard de la Borde the most sincere of compliments: he plagiarized d'Espiard's 1752 The Spirit of the Nations, republishing it un- der his own name and a new title. 1 The compliment was limited, how- ever, for this ambitious literary pirate systematically altered d'Espiard's work. To begin with, he trimmed and smoothed out d'Espiard's repetitive and ungainly prose--a fact that became his principal line of defense after d'Espiard caught him in the theft and started a minor if entertaining liter- ary controversy over the book's paternity. 2 More seriously, he modified d'Espiard's conclusions, especially on the subject of the French national
140
National Character and the Republican Imagination 141
? character. D'Espiard had remarked that in France "women . . . soften the pride that is natural to Reason, and oblige us, if we wish to be pleasing, to disguise Philosophy and Science. "3 Castilhon changed the passage to: "The women who, in France, exert a despotic sway over the tastes and pleasures of society, oblige the French to disguise philosophy and its science as much as is needed to please them. "4 D'Espiard had also stated that "the French character is established on a foundation of reasonable Obedience, which is never unreserved, except for the sovereign. "5 Castilhon rewrote as follows: "the French are distinguished from other Europeans by their subordina- tion, by a voluntary, enlightened, and never blind obedience, by a submis- sion which is only unlimited in the case of beloved sovereigns. "6
Finally, d'Espiard had linked the French character to a particular social class. "The lordly manner [l'air Seigneur] is the manner of the Frenchman," he wrote; by contrast, "bourgeois customs [moeurs] are the customs of the Citizen . . . But all this has been sacrificed and ridiculed by the spirit of French society. " He added that "bourgeois customs . . . are the true customs of Republics. "7 Castilhon, in his version, came close to turning this idea on its head:
It is in the depths of bourgeois customs that we must search for the true national character--a happy, solid and truly estimable character, despite the scorn expressed for it by those French who do not belong, or blush to belong, to the most numerous class in the state . . . but all these virtues have been cruelly ridiculed by the ingeniously wicked spirit of brilliant French society [the aristocracy]. The great ambition of the Frenchman in all classes other than the one I have just mentioned is to behave in a no- ble, easy-going way . . . , in a lordly manner. 8
Do the differences between the two versions of the book simply reflect the contrasting personalities of a sober, tradition-minded noble magistrate and a risk-taking middle-class hack? Castilhon's specific alterations--the horror of female influence in public life, the tepid and conditional support for the monarchy, the strong condemnation of aristocratic manners--sug- gest that something more was at work, for they all fit in with the rise of a republican sensibility. D'Espiard himself had a certain sympathy for the ancient republics, but it was more in the traditional manner of the judicial nobility as exemplified by d'Aguesseau. That is to say, it was based on a strict compartmentalization of attitudes, with admiration for the ancients kept separate from acceptance of Christian monarchy in France. Recall the
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? fearful note in d'Espiard's original 1743 work, insisting on his utter lack of "republican sentiments. "9 Castilhon made no such disclaimers. He doubt- less did not imagine an end to the monarchy, but he hoped for the triumph of republican moeurs, with social distinctions reduced, female influence eliminated, and the king's power kept in check. His identification of French national character with implicitly republican "bourgeois customs" cer- tainly suggests as much.
In addition to confirming the growth of republican sensibilities in France, Castilhon's revisions reveal that the people who held such senti- ments believed that the greatest obstacle to their ambitions was the French "national character" itself. To an extent that has not been recognized, in the decades after 1750 French writers devoted enormous time and energy to analyzing the general phenomenon of "national character" or "national spirit. " Works by the major philosophes form only the most visible part of a huge mass of writing on the subject, including books specifically devoted to it, articles in periodicals, and long discussions in history and travel liter- ature. 10 The results of these inquiries generally suggested that the French were incapable of becoming good republican citizens. Even Castilhon, who had more confidence than most in a French population he chose to see as essentially "bourgeois," recognized that the seductions of "brilliant society" posed a perhaps insuperable obstacle to the advance of good republican moeurs. The republicanism that emerged during the last decades of the old regime and triumphed during the Revolution therefore saw no more fun- damental task than changing the national character.
These issues lay at the very heart of the discussion of nation-building that began in France at the end of the old regime. As we have seen, nation- building was proposed as a response to two separate problems, both of which seemed to call the very existence of the nation into question: France's regional diversity, and its supposedly corrupt moral condition. The first problem was initially posed as one of juridical diversity--the par- ticular legal rights and privileges of France's historic provinces--and then, after the Revolution eliminated these rights and privileges, primarily as one of linguistic diversity. Here, the issue of national character did not arise directly. But it did in discussions of the second problem, for if France was "the most immoral nation" in Europe, where did the fault lie if not in the collective national character? The republicans' diagnosis of France's moral ills and the program for curing them that the Jacobin regime devel- oped in 1792-1794 were predicated on the study of national character as it had evolved during the Enlightenment. It has often been remarked that
National Character and the Republican Imagination 143
? the idea of the "new man" was, in Mona Ozouf's phrase, the "central dream of the French Revolution. "11 Yet the revolutionaries spoke just as of- ten of a "new people," a collective entity, and they had very specific views, grounded in decades of investigations and polemics, as to the nature of the "old" people they hoped to toss on the scrapheap of history. 12
This chapter will first explore eighteenth-century French understand- ings of national character, proceed to the republican critique of it, and finally consider Jacobin republican efforts to reshape it. These efforts were, in theory, wholly secular, representing the logical culmination of attempts to reshape the terrestrial order without reference to the dictates of God or a divinely-ordained king. But the means which republican reformers adopted again reveals how deeply indebted they remained, in their proj- ect of building a nation, to the older, Catholic project of rebuilding the Church. Not only did they seize upon the originally theological concept of "regeneration" to express their hopes and ambitions; when they found themselves in a position actually to realize these ambitions, they proceeded in a manner that derived directly from clerical examples and that amounted to a literal campaign of conversion.
National Character Investigated
It hardly needs saying that national stereotypes, usually based on the attri- bution of exaggerated individual characteristics to an entire people, long predate the eighteenth century and remain ubiquitous in our own day. They may or may not have a basis in fact, but they have certainly provided a simple and comforting way for people to come to terms with the array of human diversity. 13 Medieval literature overflowed with them. "The peoples of Spain are very light-hearted," one typical thirteenth-century poem be- gan. "The French seem valiant knights . . . The English are handsome and false-hearted / The Lombards greedy and the Germans perfidious. "14 As far back as Aristotle, natural philosophers sought what we would now call scientific explanations for differences in national character. In the late sixteenth century Jean Bodin renewed and popularized this tradition in France, and it continued through such writers as Franc? ois La Mothe le Vayer, Charles Saint-Evremond, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and d'Espiard. 15 La Mothe notably composed a "Discourse on the Opposition of Humors be- tween Certain Nations," which attributed to the French and Spanish "as perfect an antipathy as there is in nature. "16
In the eighteenth century, the literature on national differences and na-
144 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tional character grew to massive and unprecedented dimensions, ranging from learned treatises to the crude propaganda of the Seven Years' War. The authors wrote for different purposes and in wildly varying styles. Nonetheless, they generally saw national character determined by three broad factors: climate, political action, and historical evolution. Moeurs, manners, and religion, all of which they also frequently invoked, generally depended in their schemes on politics or evolution, while the phrase "moral causes," which appears frequently in their works, usually amounted to a conflation of the two. 17
French authors generally did not ascribe "national character" to the en- tire population of a nation. Until 1789, as we have seen, few authors even acknowledged the enormous demographic, social, and cultural diversity of France's 28 million inhabitants. But in any case, most authors elided the problem altogether by straightforwardly associating the true national char- acter with a particular slice of the population. Thus Voltaire wrote that "the spirit of a nation always resides with the small number who put the large number to work, are fed by it, and govern it. " Charles Pinot-Duclos put things even more simply: "It is in Paris that you have to consider the Frenchman, because there he is more French than elsewhere. " Rousseau, by contrast, in a vision pregnant with implications for later, Romantic nation- alism, found the "genius" and moeurs of a nation in the "most distant provinces. " "It is the countryside that makes the country [pays], and the people of the countryside who make the nation. "18
Of climate, political action, and historical evolution, it was the first which perhaps most completely seduced the French of the eighteenth cen- tury. "Climate is, for a Nation, the fundamental cause . . . the principal cause presiding over the genius of peoples" wrote d'Espiard, the most un- compromising advocate of this point of view. 19 Temperature, humidity, wind, the quality of the soil: all of these shaped a person's body and behav- ior, with the result that national characters varied from one climate to the next. His work almost certainly influenced Montesquieu, who would soon make the importance of climate to national character a piece of utterly conventional wisdom. 20 In some of the most famous chapters of The Spirit of the Laws, he pursued the idea with rigor, describing how, for instance, thanks to the influence of cold weather on "surface fibers" and "tufts of nerves" (something he claimed to have verified by freezing a sheep's tongue), northern peoples were stronger, less sensitive to pain and love, and ultimately more suitable to liberty than southern ones. 21 Eighteenth-
National Character and the Republican Imagination 145
? century wits quipped that where Malebranche had seen everything in God, Montesquieu saw everything in climate. 22 Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, and Helve? tius all embraced theories of climate enthusiastically as well. 23
None of these authors, however, truly saw climate as all-determining. "Many things govern men," Montesquieu wrote: "climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, moeurs, and man- ners; a general spirit [of the nation] is formed as a result. "24 Other than cli- mate, laws and maxims were the most important. And on this subject, if he did not exactly create a piece of conventional wisdom, he certainly helped to popularize it. Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century, French au- thors routinely expressed their confidence in the ability of political action to affect national character. To quote just a few examples: "republican gov- ernment produces a particular character, and monarchical government produces another"; "it is princes who form the national character"; "the character [of the French] is a soft and flexible clay, out of which the Men in place can make vessels of glory or vessels of ignominy. "25 Above all, the idea ran like a bright thread through the political works of Rousseau, who claimed in his Confessions to have seen early on that "everything funda- mentally depended on politics . . . and that no people would ever be any- thing other than what its Government made of it. "26 Only "national insti- tutions," Rousseau admonished his readers, could shape the character, tastes, and mores of a people, distinguishing it from others and stimulating the ardent patriotism conducive to proper social relations. 27
Yet even Rousseau, along with the classical republicans he resembled in so many ways, acknowledged another crucial factor in the shaping of na- tional character. For his ideal legislators fought against a powerful enemy: time itself, which slowly and insidiously leeched virtue away and infected the healthiest body politic with the bacillus of self-interest. To Rousseau, time was a purely negative factor, which reduced well-defined, particular national characters to a common human sludge. Other authors, however, treated time far more favorably. They discerned in the history of the world a slow, irregular, but nonetheless visible evolution from savagery to civili- zation. For them, the character of a nation therefore depended in large part on how far it had scaled this chronological ladder.
French authors applied this historical theory most insistently to their own past, emphasizing France's evolution away from cruder standards of behavior. "Nearly all of us started out as sorts of savages, shut away in for- ests under a gloomy sky," wrote Antoine-Le? onard Thomas in his history
146 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of eloquence, while the playwright P. J. B. Chaussard even put the idea in verse: "Ces ge? ne? reux Franc? ais n'e? taient a` leur berceau / Qu'une horde stupide: un servile troupeau" [In the cradle these generous French were nothing / But a stupid horde, a servile flock]. 28 More systematically, the Marquis de Mirabeau likened the process to the course of nature itself and warned in L'ami des hommes, in the accents of biblical lyricism, that it could not continue indefinitely: "There is a circle prescribed to all nature, moral as well as physical, of birth, growth, fullness, decline and death. Thus are the days from morning to night, the years in their solar revolution, the life of man from cradle to tomb, and that of states from their foundation to their fall. "29 Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, provided the fullest exposi- tion of the theory, attempting to trace the progress of nearly every nation on earth. While bemoaning the capacity of stupidity, greed, intolerance, and sheer accident to block or even reverse progress, he nonetheless con- cluded that European nations, at least, had overall moved in the proper direction. 30
To the extent that French authors believed that political action and his- torical evolution determined national character, they also generally saw these two factors working through a particular intermediary: women. For if national character was heavily shaped by that elusive product of politics and history called moeurs, moeurs themselves were the province of women, both because of their general influence on social interactions and their specific role in educating the young. "Women," d'Espiard wrote, "are the essential part of moeurs. " The military reformer Guibert agreed with him. "Men make laws," but "women make moeurs, there lies their true empire. "31 Montesquieu, in his warning against altering a good national character (see the epigraph to this chapter), could envision only one way of actually doing so: "One could constrain [the] women, make laws to correct their moeurs, and limit their luxury. "32 Not coincidentally, these very measures, which Montesquieu himself hesitated to apply, formed the heart of Rous- seau's misogynistic prescription for preserving the moeurs of Geneva in his famous Letter to d'Alembert. 33 Women, in short, constituted at once a measure of a nation's civilization and the key to the preservation of its character.
A Bearable Lightness of Being
Armed with these conceptual tools, eighteenth-century French authors went eagerly about investigating national characters, and particularly the
National Character and the Republican Imagination 147
? one they saw reflected in the mirror. They were not always consistent, to say the least. At different times Voltaire described the French as "the most sociable and polite people on earth" (the preface to a stage play in the 1730s), "a people of heroes . . . a gentle and terrible people" (a war poem from the 1740s), and "monkeys and tigers" (his bitter exile in the 1760s). 34 Still, outside of wartime literature, which predictably saw a Bayard or Jumonville in every French male, the French national character was still, most generally, associated with a relatively well-defined and consistent constellation of closely related traits. 35 To be French was to be particularly social, particularly refined and polite, and particularly cheerful or flighty (le? ger, implying a mix of vivaciousness, inconstancy, and perhaps also superficiality). Sometimes these traits were invoked all at once, as in d'Hol- bach's umbrella comment that "the general character of the French nation is gaiety, activity, politeness, sociabilite? . "36 Yet if the traits themselves pro- voked few disagreements, their desirability provoked many: the same term that served as a warm commendation in one context could become a sting- ing criticism in another, even from the same author. Certain authors were consistently critical, and it was they who shaped the emerging republican critique of French national character.
Of the traits, "social" or "sociable" attracted attention from nearly all the major philosophes, eager as always to encompass a given subject in a single, overarching abstraction. 37 Thus Montesquieu had a character remark, with characteristic bite, in Persian Letters: "It is said that man is a sociable being. On this score it seems to me that a Frenchman is more human than anyone else. " Diderot similarly wrote that "there is no nation that is more like a single family. A Frenchman swarms about in his town more than ten Eng- lishmen, fifty Dutchmen, or a hundred Moslems do in theirs. "38 Beyond the ranks of the philosophes, many other writers adopted the same motif-- notably patriotic authors who wished to contrast the cheerful, sociable French to the gloomy, unsociable English. 39 As Bernardin de Saint-Pierre commented, "most of our writers brag about our nation's spirit of socie? te? "40 (emphasis mine).
Le? ge`rete? and related terms had equal popularity. To quote the Ency- clope? die: "It is a sort of proverb to say, le? ger like a Frenchman . . . "41 D'Espiard repeatedly stresssed this aspect of the French character, as did the elder Mirabeau, who called the French the most fickle, vivacious, and le? ger of nations, and the radical journalist Louis-Se? bastien Mercier, who cited their "extreme penchant" for le? ge`rete? . 42 The term often carried a criti- cal bite and easily elided into frivolity, luxury, and superficiality. Republi-
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? can-minded critics routinely used it as a term of abuse, and probably for this reason many adopted "gay" (gai) as a substitute (they contrasted le? ger and gay to "heavy," "gloomy" and "pedantic"--again, characteristics often associated with the English). The Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Cerutti wrote a twenty-page essay on "French gaiety," which he attributed in turn to the nation's sociability. Laughter, he wrote, is the distinctive quality of the French nation. 43 Yet le? ge`rete? did have its defenders. Jean-Franc? ois Sobry, in his survey of French characteristics and institutions, said that "if [the Frenchman] has le? ge`rete? , it is not at all of the sort which is fickle and superficial, but rather that le? ge`rete? which recoils from heaviness and mo- notony. The Athenians were also le? ger, and they were the foremost people in the world. " The novelist Jacques-Antoine Perrin likewise commented: "Our neighbors may well call us le? ger, frivolous, inconsequential.
The cult of great men, however, presented a canon of recognizably French, Christian figures who possessed, in the new retelling of their sto- ries, the essential attributes of exemplary republican citizens. The shift from equating distinction with heroic actions and accomplishments to equating it with inner, domestic qualities, had particular importance here. Great feats of military valor or great artistic achievements, such as those the seventeenth-century panegyrists celebrated, had nothing intrinsically republican about them. To the extent they brought classical models to mind, the names in question were Caesar, Alexander, or Achilles, not Marius or Brutus. But the qualities commonly attributed to great men in the eighteenth-century eulogies--independence, steadfastness, virtue de- fined as a solemn dedication to the common good, immunity to the seduc- tions of luxury, lucre, and sensual pleasure--were precisely those that the republican tradition identified as the hallmarks of proper citizenship, and indeed those that Montesquieu had recently identified with republics (by contrast, illustrious feats and heroic actions belonged more to the realm of honor, which Montesquieu identified with monarchies). 69 However high their birth, however well placed in the social hierarchy, however exposed to wealth and temptation, truly great men, so the eulogies and collective bi- ographies insisted, behaved like Roman citizens in the heyday of the Re- public. The concern on the part of the cult's architects to demonstrate France's parity with or even superiority to Greece and Rome only high- lighted these republican attributes further, by setting up inescapable paral- lels between the French figures and their classical predecessors. And given the cult's relentless presentation of great men as models to be emulated, its gallery of supposedly familiar French historical figures in fact constituted nothing less than a school of republican politics.
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 127
? The cult's intrinsic republicanism shows through particularly in the way its participants attempted to establish stark and unforgiving gender divi- sions. As many scholars have argued, French republicanism of the revolu- tionary era derived its polemical energy in large part from the contrast it set up between properly organized polities, where male citizens dominated the public arena and women remained in the private realm of the home, and corrupt polities, where gender boundaries became hopelessly blurred. In this perspective Versailles, a place of feminine influence and intrigue, could only be seen as the nec plus ultra of corruption and political degener- ation. Rousseau, the key figure in French republicanism of this era, first ar- ticulated the contrast, but it remained in force through the period of the radical Revolution. 70
These ideas permeated the cult of great men of the eighteenth cen- tury. The oratorical competitions of the Acade? mie Franc? aise proposed no women as subjects for eulogies, and following them, d'Angiviller chose none as the subjects of portraits or sculptures. Women often received the appellation ce? le`bre (famous) or illustre (illustrious), but French authors made no attempt to find a female equivalent for the phrase "grand(s) homme(s)" (grande femme means a large woman, rather than a great one). 71 In other words, while women could perform glorious and heroic actions, as Joan of Arc and innumerable saints had done, they did not, ac- cording to the architects of the cult, have the qualities requisite for republi- can citizenship.
The collective biographies seem at first to offer an exception to this rule. Richelieu's portrait gallery included three women: an improbably elegant Joan of Arc (treated as the vessel of God's will), Marie de Me? dicis (mother of the reigning Louis XIII), and Anne of Austria (Louis XIII's queen). At the end of the old regime, Sergent's Portraits included 12 women, along with 84 men. Aublet de Maubuy devoted an entire book to French women, in which he dismissed notions of natural male superiority as "prejudice," attacked a certain Monsieur R. , obviously Rousseau, for try- ing to lower women to the status of domestic animals, and added, in refer- ence to women's literary skills: "Give them an education like that given to men, excite their emulation, cultivate their talents, and soon we will see them our rivals. "72 His work fit into an established tradition of proto-femi- nist portraits of famous women. 73 Yet in Sergent's book, which spanned French history from the Gauls to Louis XVI, while half the 84 "great men" came from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most recent of
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? the 12 women had died in 1550 (and four before 1000 a. d. ). 74 It is as if the author only felt comfortable dealing with women in the public sphere if they had lived so long before as to make them into virtual legends. Even Aublet suggested that women deserved a serious education in large part so that they could serve as properly stimulating and sympathetic companions to men. He explicitly warned against taking the mostly royal and aristo- cratic members of his female canon as role models, and lovingly recounted their crimes and follies alongside their achievements. 75 The very consign- ment of women to a volume of their own testified to a literal separation of the sexes in French history.
The cult's republicanism implicitly criticized the belief that a nation's treatment of women was a measure of its civilization. But then, the cult of great men implicitly criticized the concept of civilization itself, holding up instead the classical concept of the patria as the proper foundation of hu- man existence. To the extent that it reshaped France's national memory, therefore, it replaced the story of a nation struggling to rise out of barba- rism towards civilization by the story of a nation struggling to restore itself to a pristine condition of republican health, from which it had fallen into dangerous degeneration, in large part because of the reckless freedoms it allowed women.
The Market and the Public
Thus far I have been able to generalize about the cult of great men and to fit it into the story of pre-revolutionary French nationalism and patriotism laid out in the previous chapters. The cult, I have argued, helped the French to see the nation and the patrie as the fundamental background against which human activity took place; its architects consciously treated it as a means of establishing just order in a disenchanted world, although they often adopted the language and practices of the Catholic Church to achieve their ends. Their implicitly republican vision of the nation stood in stark contrast to portraits of France as a hierarchical society of orders. Yet to the extent the cult had an explicit political role, it was the monarchy which sought most insistently to develop and manipulate it. In these re- spects, the story of the cult complements the stories of political conflicts and war propaganda.
In another area, however, the cult of great men resists such generaliza- tion: the attitudes it embodied towards French history and memory. Here,
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 129
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 9. This engraving of Joan of Arc, copied from a painting in Cardinal Richelieu's gallery in the Palais Royal, appeared in Marc Vulson de la Colombie`re, et al. , Les hommes illustres (The Illustrious Men), Paris, 1658.
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? the collective biographies followed a unique path of their own, and they more fully anticipated the nationalism and patriotism of the Revolution than did the quasi-official eulogies, plays, paintings, and statues. Indeed, in the years before the Revolution, the biographies leaned less toward re- shaping France's collective memory for patriotic purposes than toward the beginning of a desire to wipe it clean altogether.
The biographies parted company with the quasi-official genres most obviously in the size of the canon of great men they celebrated. Over a pe- riod of thirty years, the Acade? mie Franc? aise proposed only sixteen men as subjects of its oratorical competition. D'Angiviller, in the twelve years be- fore the Revolution, commissioned twenty-eight statues of great men and twelve history paintings highlighting their actions. 76 By contrast, the canon presented in the printed biographies expanded vertiginously during the eighteenth century. Heince, Bignon, and Vulson, following Richelieu in his gallery, had presented only 25 great men. But Perrault, in 1700, chose an even hundred. His immediate successors fell back from this mark, limiting themselves to 30 or 40 each. But the series begun by Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny in 1739 reached 50, and the first solo venture by his succes- sor Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, in the 1770s, reached 65. The 1770 collection Historical Tablets went up to 296, Turpin's 1782 French Plutarch to 112, Sergent's 1786 Portraits to 96, and the same year's Heroic and Historical Deeds and Actions of Great Men (Faits et actions he? roi? ques et historiques des Grands Hommes) to 82. And of course Manuel's French Year included no fewer than 365 great men of the nation, one for each day of the year. 77
These differences resulted from strikingly different dynamics at work in the two cases. The Acade? mie was the prisoner of its biennial schedule, and d'Angiviller faced constraints of time, money, and available talent; in any case, he wanted to focus the attention of viewers in the Salons on a rela- tively small number of artworks. 78 Nor was there any pressure to find new great men to honor. Nine of the Acade? mie's sixteen also appeared in d'Angiviller's selections, and virtually all of d'Angiviller and the Acade? mie's choices had previously appeared in one or another collective biography. The point was rather to call renewed attention to what were, after all, canonical figures; to find new and striking ways of presenting fa- miliar stories, in the same way that artists returned incessantly to the story of Jesus.
The authors of the collective biographies, on the other hand, felt a con-
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 131
? stant pressure to innovate and to discover new great men to honor. They did not work on commission and could not easily slip into the role of semi-official pedagogues instructing the semi-captive audience of the academy and the Salons. They were authors competing in a commercial marketplace, who had to convince their readers that they had something novel to offer, something not found in previous collections. Consider the abbe? Morvan de Bellegarde. Morvan clearly based his 1726 Les vies de plusieurs hommes illustres on Heince, Bignon, and Vulson--to put it more plainly, he shamelessly pirated them. He included 19 of their 25 subjects, leaving out only Joan of Arc, kings, and members of the royal family, and he freely plagiarized Vulson's text. Nonetheless, he strove to make his book look as different as possible from its predecessor. He expanded the essays, tacking onto Vulson's rather bare lists of heroic accomplishments some new details and many homiletic asides. He updated the canon, adding eleven statesmen and soldiers who had achieved fame after the construc- tion of Richelieu's gallery. Most important, whereas Richelieu had de- signed his gallery as a celebration of the French state, Morvan's publisher, Le Gras, cast the new work as a celebration of the nobility (which explains the removal of Joan and the kings), and suggested, in a sycophantic dedica- tory epistle, that France's present-day nobles would find the book a source of pride and inspiration. 79 Le Gras and Morvan may indeed have had a sin- cere admiration for the nobility, but they were also shrewd marketers, who hoped to find new buyers for their work among the wealthiest order of the kingdom.
Similarly, when Jean Du Castre d'Auvigny launched his own hugely suc- cessful series thirteen years later (it would remain a going concern for three decades, and expand to 26 volumes), he soon felt the need to issue a pro- spectus explicitly distinguishing the work from those of Vulson, Perrault, and Morvan:
[There are] those who have reproached me for stealing the materials which make up the first part of my Book, and who have called it, without having read it, a compilation and collection of Histories; but the Public has certainly compared the Lives I have given it with what can be read elsewhere on the subject, with the works of Perrault, of [Morvan de] Bellegarde, with the Gallery of the Palais Royal [Heince, Bignon, and Vulson], or individual Histories . . . These Works are, for the most part,
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? nothing more than very short, badly written eulogies, long Genealogies, or cold Panegyrics, or tissues of lies, dictated by private interest, fear or baseness. 80
Du Castre d'Auvigny added many more great men, as did his successors at the helm of the project, abbe? Gabriel Pe? rau, and Turpin. By 1782, when Turpin was launching yet another collection of his own, novelty had be- come the principal selling point: "nothing has yet been written on most of the Great Men whom I have given to history. I have cleared new and uncul- tivated land. "81 As for Manuel, he implicitly made the same claim when he dipped deep into the well of obscurity to find not merely a few good men, but 365 great ones. Had many of his readers ever heard of such figures as Baron d'Espagnac, Etienne Geoffroi, or Pierre Carlet?
The collective biographies clearly belonged, then, to the dynamic com- mercial publishing sector of the French economy. 82 The expansion of this sector, I have already argued, helped teach French elites to see their nation as a single, homogeneous territory, while at the same time revising the very definition of the nation, as publishers competed to sell readers an ever larger array of novel pieces of information about their new favorite subject: the French nation, a. k. a. themselves. Even more directly than the histories and pamphlets discussed in the previous two chapters, these books repre- sented, in the visions of France they put before the public, a response to commercial and political stimuli alike.
If commercial pressures helped expand the canon, however, they did not, in and of themselves, dictate where to look for new examples of great- ness. Here again, the biographers parted company with d'Angiviller and the Acade? mie. Both these quasi-official authorities, following Perrault's example, had included artists and writers in their canons of great men but kept them in a distinct minority (a third and a quarter, respectively) among the dominant statesmen, soldiers, and prelates. Their great men also came predominantly from the relatively recent past (more than half from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and fewer than a fifth had died within half a century of their selection. In short, these canons re- mained centered firmly on the absolutist state in its heyday. 83
Among the biographical works, two--Sergent's Portraits and the anony- mous Deeds and Heroic Actions--moved back from this focus towards an imagined Age of Chivalry. They chose overwhelmingly from the ranks of kings, queens, and noble military men (roughly two-thirds in Sergent,
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 133
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 10. Bathilde, queen to France's seventh-century King Clovis II, was one of several medieval queens depicted in this expensive collection of colored engravings from Antoine-Franc? ois Sergent, Portraits des grands hommes, femmes illustres et sujets memorables de France, Paris, 1786.
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? nearly all in Deeds and Heroic Actions), and in each, more than half the fig- ures had died before, or within in a few years of, 1600. Both works, in fact, clearly belonged to the late eighteenth-century's rediscovery of the Middle Ages and medieval chivalry. 84 Both celebrated their subjects for great ac- tions rather than great inner qualities. The philosophes would have labeled these men and women illustrious, not great.
The rest of the late eighteenth-century collective biographies, those which did adopt the Enlightenment definition of "greatness," took almost precisely the opposite tack. Restout's 1771 French Gallery (started the year earlier by Jacques Gautier Dagoty) included just 12 princes, statesmen, and military leaders (and two of the latter had risen from the ranks of common soldiers). The other 26 came primarily from the world of learning, litera- ture, and the professions, and included not only painters and playwrights, but doctors, jurists, novelists, architects, and astronomers. 85 Furthermore, all the figures except King Louis XIII had lived in the late seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Turpin's 1782 French Plutarch similarly chose its 118 men overwhelmingly from these modest social groups, and again, primar- ily from the eighteenth century. In his dedication (to Catherine the Great's Lord Chamberlain), Turpin wrote: "No, Prince, nature has not been ex- hausted by the productions of the centuries which have preceded us . . . What do we have to envy the centuries of Augustus, of Leo X, of Louis XIV, when our own has produced Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu? "86
The hundreds of great men profiled in the 1779 Tablets and Manuel's 1789 French Year omnivorously included nearly all the figures selected by d'Angiviller, the Acade? mie, and the previous collective biographies. Even so, in each case more than two-thirds of the total came from outside the ranks of kings, statesmen, and soldiers, and more than two-thirds had died within the past century. Manuel included architects, bankers, merchants, and even a few artisans. "I have missed no occasion," he wrote, "to honor the hands that till the earth and weave our clothes, the farmers and arti- sans, those to whom we owe our surpluses while lacking their own necessi- ties. "87 He had a particular fondness for poor scholars like Jean-Baptiste Ludot, whom he praised for jumping into the Seine in winter to see how long the human body could stand exposure to freezing water, and philan- thropic doctors like Augustin Roux, who devoted himself entirely to the rural poor. As we have seen, he also devoted several pages to that emblem- atic martyr of the modern French nation, Jumonville. 88
Manuel heightened the effect of raising these men, many of whom had
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 135
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 11. The inclusion of the famous eighteenth-century Doctor Jean Astruc among the portraits in this collection illustrates the broadening of the canon of "great Frenchmen" in the decades before the French Revolution. Engraving from Restout, Galerie Franc? oise, ou Portraits des hommes et des femmes ce? le`bres qui ont paru en France (French Gallery, or Portraits of Famous Men and Women Who Have Lived in France), two vols. , Paris, 1771.
enjoyed little or no social recognition during their lives, to the ranks of the great by making the order of his French Year entirely random. The reader paging through late January, for instance, would come across the following sequence of men, appearing on an entirely equal footing: the geographer Guillaume de Lisle, the soldier Franc? ois de Chevert, the doctor Jean-Bap- tiste-Michel Bucquet, the clerical author Pierre Huet, the war minister Belle-Isle, and then, almost contemptuously, Charlemagne, greatest of French monarchs. 89 Given the loud criticism earlier authors had received
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? for not organizing great men by social rank, the reader would have had to be singularly obtuse not to grasp Manuel's ideological point. Clearly, the book of this journalistic hack par excellence, while not illegal, like many that came out of his milieu, nonetheless amounted to a weapon in a cul- tural battle aimed at a radical restructuring of France's historical canon. 90
Therefore, despite sharing much of the rhetoric of the Academy's e? loges--even blatantly plagiarizing them on occasion--Manuel's project in fact subverted them, as did most of the collective biographies of the last twenty years of the old regime. 91 Whereas the Academy and d'Angiviller, acting in a quasi-official capacity, presented historically distant, socially eminent subjects mostly linked to the service of the absolute monarchy, Manuel and his colleagues, acting in their own capacity and competing in a commercial marketplace, presented contemporary, ordinary civilians very much like the image the reading public of the late old regime was forming of itself: virtuous and meritorious heads of households who could offer just as great service to their patrie as any grandee. Furthermore, whereas the Academy and d'Angiviller presented a relatively stable canon, casting a shadow from the century of Louis XIV over the centuries to come, Manuel, Turpin, and the other biographers, with their claim that "nature has not been exhausted," implied, none too subtly, that true French greatness was still very much in the making. In short, whereas the cult of great men as a whole amounted to a public project of nation-forming within the symbolic space vacated by the retreat of organized religion, it nonetheless took two very different forms. For the orators of the Academy and for d'Angiviller, the nation was a project to be undertaken by the mo- narchical state under the banner of royal patriotism. For the biographers, it was a project that implicitly arose from within the public as a whole--not the entire population, to be sure, but the learned, largely middle-class pub- lic represented in their pages. In a sense, their work amounted less to a cult of great men, than to a cult of the public itself.
To the extent that the celebration of great men as a whole pointed for- ward to the Revolution, the quasi-official genres and the collective biogra- phies again did so in strikingly different ways. In this realm of national memory, as with the politics of sovereignty and with war propaganda, the Revolution marked an intensification and transfiguration of trends that had begun under the old regime. The successive authorities held up great lives as examples to the citizenry, from boy martyrs cut down in battle against counter-revolutionaries to assassinated leaders like Marat and Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau. 92 In September 1793, the National Convention
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 137
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 12. The Pantheon, Paris. The former Church of Sainte-Genevie`ve was transformed during the French Revolution into a monument to (and final resting place for) "the great men of the Patrie. "
decided to establish, as its principal vehicle of civic and patriotic education for the masses, an official periodical entitled Collection of Heroic and Civic Actions of French Republicans, to be distributed to the armies and popular societies and used as mandatory texts in primary schools. The government sent out thousands of circulars requesting that incidents of patriotic hero- ism be reported to the periodical's editor, and hundreds of responses filtered back in. Five issues of the paper appeared before the fall of Robes- pierre in 1794, with print runs ranging from 80,000 to a spectacular 150,000. 93 In an equally important move, the Revolution took the newly built, gloomy neoclassical Church of Sainte-Genevie`ve, which lowered over much of the Left Bank of Paris, and expensively transformed it into a National Pantheon on the Roman model. Several reconsecrations and deconsecrations later, it again has this function today, complete with the eighteenth-century motto over its entrance: "Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie Reconnaissante" (To the Great Men, the Grateful Patrie).
This revolutionary cult of great men exhibited an intense concern for
138 The Cult of the Nation in France
? history, in the sense that the revolutionaries saw themselves as the founders of a new history and strove anxiously to influence posterity's judgment of their achievements. 94 At the same time, they rejected the actual history of pre-1789 France almost entirely, and with few exceptions celebrated only titans and martyrs of the Revolution itself. Even the Pantheon welcomed only Voltaire and Rousseau among pre-revolutionary "great men. " The en- tire panoply of Frenchmen so rhapsodized over by old regime panegyrists, from Clovis and Charlemagne to Chevert and Jumonville, suffered a total eclipse, although the nineteenth century would again recover them for France's national memory. The doughty Franc? ois-Henri Turpin, author of more biographies than any other writer, made one last attempt in 1792 (at age 81) to publish a History of Illustrious Frenchmen from the Former Third Estate, which drew together eleven of his more humbly born historical subjects. But the book vanished without a trace. 95
As Mona Ozouf has cogently argued, the various revolutionary attempts to institute an official canon of great men, and particularly the Pantheon itself, for the most part proved crashing, embarrassing failures. The fac- tions in the successive assemblies could rarely agree on which figures de- served admittance, and even when they did, a great man interred in the crypt with great pomp one year often faced eviction the next, following some political shift that revealed him a traitor and criminal. This was the case with Mirabeau and also Marat. 96 Furthermore, from the very begin- ning of the Revolution, the radical left--led, ironically enough, by Marat himself--inveighed bitterly against the very idea of a national canon of greatness, as in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. 97 The rather mournful, and carefully choreographed ceremonies of interment at the former Sainte-Genevie`ve contrasted sharply with the wild, spontaneous outpourings on behalf of Marat after his death at the hands of Charlotte Corday. The Club des Cordeliers invented rituals for Marat involving his heart, and (somewhat grotesquely) featuring the bathtub in which he had met his death as a sort of substitute crucifix, in the most emotional and bi- zarre public expression of religious passion in the city since the cult of the convulsionaries, sixty years earlier. 98
In the old regime cult of great men, it was the collective biographies which pointed most directly towards this revolutionary future. In their emphasis on men from the recent past, in their claim that "nature is not exhausted," and in their effective devaluation not only of kings, but of the entire quasi-official canon celebrated by the academy and d'Angiviller, they
National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen 139
? anticipated the revolutionary rejection of the French past, and the ambi- tion of the revolutionaries to cast themselves as the protagonists of a new, more perfect history, in a nation that was consciously rebuilding itself. In their freewheeling celebration of whatever figures the authors thought might sell, they anticipated somewhat the spontaneity of radical revo- lutionary commemorations and the radicals' rejection of any official canon whatsoever. In their virtual canonization of men like Ludot and Jumonville, common men who sacrificed themselves for the patrie, they anticipated the revolutionary cult of martyrs and the transformation of men like Marat into virtual saints of the patrie. In sum, most of the cult of great men under the old regime, despite its distinct republican accents, re- mained constrained within a tradition which saw the nation embodied in the king, those who served him, and those whom he designated. The col- lective biographies, however, looked ahead to a revolutionary vision in which the nation was embodied, potentially, in every citizen; in which every citizen partook, potentially, of its sacred qualities.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
National Character and the Republican Imagination
CHAPTER 5
National Character and the Republican Imagination
If there were in the world a nation which had a sociable humor, an openness of heart, a joy in life, a taste, an ease in communicating its thoughts; which was lively, pleasant, playful, sometimes imprudent, often indiscreet; and which had with all that, courage, generosity, frankness, and a certain point of honor, one should avoid disturbing its manners by laws, in order not to disturb its virtues. If the charac- ter is generally good, what difference do a few faults make?
--montesquieu, the spirit of the laws
Here there arises an obstacle to be overcome, and that we cannot overcome without rigorous resolution and a vehement, continuous push forwards. This obstacle is habit . . . whose dominion in the long term shapes a national character distinctive from that of other peo- ples and other men . . . To dissolve all the ties that bind a degenerate nation to ancient usages, to ingrained passions, to vicious inclina- tions, it seems that one must, so to speak, strike oneself down, sacrificing the interests of the moment.
--jacques-nicolas billaud-varenne, principes re? ge? ne? rateurs du syste`me social (1793)
? In 1769, the novelist Jean-Louis Castilhon paid the aging magistrate Fran- c? ois-Ignace d'Espiard de la Borde the most sincere of compliments: he plagiarized d'Espiard's 1752 The Spirit of the Nations, republishing it un- der his own name and a new title. 1 The compliment was limited, how- ever, for this ambitious literary pirate systematically altered d'Espiard's work. To begin with, he trimmed and smoothed out d'Espiard's repetitive and ungainly prose--a fact that became his principal line of defense after d'Espiard caught him in the theft and started a minor if entertaining liter- ary controversy over the book's paternity. 2 More seriously, he modified d'Espiard's conclusions, especially on the subject of the French national
140
National Character and the Republican Imagination 141
? character. D'Espiard had remarked that in France "women . . . soften the pride that is natural to Reason, and oblige us, if we wish to be pleasing, to disguise Philosophy and Science. "3 Castilhon changed the passage to: "The women who, in France, exert a despotic sway over the tastes and pleasures of society, oblige the French to disguise philosophy and its science as much as is needed to please them. "4 D'Espiard had also stated that "the French character is established on a foundation of reasonable Obedience, which is never unreserved, except for the sovereign. "5 Castilhon rewrote as follows: "the French are distinguished from other Europeans by their subordina- tion, by a voluntary, enlightened, and never blind obedience, by a submis- sion which is only unlimited in the case of beloved sovereigns. "6
Finally, d'Espiard had linked the French character to a particular social class. "The lordly manner [l'air Seigneur] is the manner of the Frenchman," he wrote; by contrast, "bourgeois customs [moeurs] are the customs of the Citizen . . . But all this has been sacrificed and ridiculed by the spirit of French society. " He added that "bourgeois customs . . . are the true customs of Republics. "7 Castilhon, in his version, came close to turning this idea on its head:
It is in the depths of bourgeois customs that we must search for the true national character--a happy, solid and truly estimable character, despite the scorn expressed for it by those French who do not belong, or blush to belong, to the most numerous class in the state . . . but all these virtues have been cruelly ridiculed by the ingeniously wicked spirit of brilliant French society [the aristocracy]. The great ambition of the Frenchman in all classes other than the one I have just mentioned is to behave in a no- ble, easy-going way . . . , in a lordly manner. 8
Do the differences between the two versions of the book simply reflect the contrasting personalities of a sober, tradition-minded noble magistrate and a risk-taking middle-class hack? Castilhon's specific alterations--the horror of female influence in public life, the tepid and conditional support for the monarchy, the strong condemnation of aristocratic manners--sug- gest that something more was at work, for they all fit in with the rise of a republican sensibility. D'Espiard himself had a certain sympathy for the ancient republics, but it was more in the traditional manner of the judicial nobility as exemplified by d'Aguesseau. That is to say, it was based on a strict compartmentalization of attitudes, with admiration for the ancients kept separate from acceptance of Christian monarchy in France. Recall the
142 The Cult of the Nation in France
? fearful note in d'Espiard's original 1743 work, insisting on his utter lack of "republican sentiments. "9 Castilhon made no such disclaimers. He doubt- less did not imagine an end to the monarchy, but he hoped for the triumph of republican moeurs, with social distinctions reduced, female influence eliminated, and the king's power kept in check. His identification of French national character with implicitly republican "bourgeois customs" cer- tainly suggests as much.
In addition to confirming the growth of republican sensibilities in France, Castilhon's revisions reveal that the people who held such senti- ments believed that the greatest obstacle to their ambitions was the French "national character" itself. To an extent that has not been recognized, in the decades after 1750 French writers devoted enormous time and energy to analyzing the general phenomenon of "national character" or "national spirit. " Works by the major philosophes form only the most visible part of a huge mass of writing on the subject, including books specifically devoted to it, articles in periodicals, and long discussions in history and travel liter- ature. 10 The results of these inquiries generally suggested that the French were incapable of becoming good republican citizens. Even Castilhon, who had more confidence than most in a French population he chose to see as essentially "bourgeois," recognized that the seductions of "brilliant society" posed a perhaps insuperable obstacle to the advance of good republican moeurs. The republicanism that emerged during the last decades of the old regime and triumphed during the Revolution therefore saw no more fun- damental task than changing the national character.
These issues lay at the very heart of the discussion of nation-building that began in France at the end of the old regime. As we have seen, nation- building was proposed as a response to two separate problems, both of which seemed to call the very existence of the nation into question: France's regional diversity, and its supposedly corrupt moral condition. The first problem was initially posed as one of juridical diversity--the par- ticular legal rights and privileges of France's historic provinces--and then, after the Revolution eliminated these rights and privileges, primarily as one of linguistic diversity. Here, the issue of national character did not arise directly. But it did in discussions of the second problem, for if France was "the most immoral nation" in Europe, where did the fault lie if not in the collective national character? The republicans' diagnosis of France's moral ills and the program for curing them that the Jacobin regime devel- oped in 1792-1794 were predicated on the study of national character as it had evolved during the Enlightenment. It has often been remarked that
National Character and the Republican Imagination 143
? the idea of the "new man" was, in Mona Ozouf's phrase, the "central dream of the French Revolution. "11 Yet the revolutionaries spoke just as of- ten of a "new people," a collective entity, and they had very specific views, grounded in decades of investigations and polemics, as to the nature of the "old" people they hoped to toss on the scrapheap of history. 12
This chapter will first explore eighteenth-century French understand- ings of national character, proceed to the republican critique of it, and finally consider Jacobin republican efforts to reshape it. These efforts were, in theory, wholly secular, representing the logical culmination of attempts to reshape the terrestrial order without reference to the dictates of God or a divinely-ordained king. But the means which republican reformers adopted again reveals how deeply indebted they remained, in their proj- ect of building a nation, to the older, Catholic project of rebuilding the Church. Not only did they seize upon the originally theological concept of "regeneration" to express their hopes and ambitions; when they found themselves in a position actually to realize these ambitions, they proceeded in a manner that derived directly from clerical examples and that amounted to a literal campaign of conversion.
National Character Investigated
It hardly needs saying that national stereotypes, usually based on the attri- bution of exaggerated individual characteristics to an entire people, long predate the eighteenth century and remain ubiquitous in our own day. They may or may not have a basis in fact, but they have certainly provided a simple and comforting way for people to come to terms with the array of human diversity. 13 Medieval literature overflowed with them. "The peoples of Spain are very light-hearted," one typical thirteenth-century poem be- gan. "The French seem valiant knights . . . The English are handsome and false-hearted / The Lombards greedy and the Germans perfidious. "14 As far back as Aristotle, natural philosophers sought what we would now call scientific explanations for differences in national character. In the late sixteenth century Jean Bodin renewed and popularized this tradition in France, and it continued through such writers as Franc? ois La Mothe le Vayer, Charles Saint-Evremond, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and d'Espiard. 15 La Mothe notably composed a "Discourse on the Opposition of Humors be- tween Certain Nations," which attributed to the French and Spanish "as perfect an antipathy as there is in nature. "16
In the eighteenth century, the literature on national differences and na-
144 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tional character grew to massive and unprecedented dimensions, ranging from learned treatises to the crude propaganda of the Seven Years' War. The authors wrote for different purposes and in wildly varying styles. Nonetheless, they generally saw national character determined by three broad factors: climate, political action, and historical evolution. Moeurs, manners, and religion, all of which they also frequently invoked, generally depended in their schemes on politics or evolution, while the phrase "moral causes," which appears frequently in their works, usually amounted to a conflation of the two. 17
French authors generally did not ascribe "national character" to the en- tire population of a nation. Until 1789, as we have seen, few authors even acknowledged the enormous demographic, social, and cultural diversity of France's 28 million inhabitants. But in any case, most authors elided the problem altogether by straightforwardly associating the true national char- acter with a particular slice of the population. Thus Voltaire wrote that "the spirit of a nation always resides with the small number who put the large number to work, are fed by it, and govern it. " Charles Pinot-Duclos put things even more simply: "It is in Paris that you have to consider the Frenchman, because there he is more French than elsewhere. " Rousseau, by contrast, in a vision pregnant with implications for later, Romantic nation- alism, found the "genius" and moeurs of a nation in the "most distant provinces. " "It is the countryside that makes the country [pays], and the people of the countryside who make the nation. "18
Of climate, political action, and historical evolution, it was the first which perhaps most completely seduced the French of the eighteenth cen- tury. "Climate is, for a Nation, the fundamental cause . . . the principal cause presiding over the genius of peoples" wrote d'Espiard, the most un- compromising advocate of this point of view. 19 Temperature, humidity, wind, the quality of the soil: all of these shaped a person's body and behav- ior, with the result that national characters varied from one climate to the next. His work almost certainly influenced Montesquieu, who would soon make the importance of climate to national character a piece of utterly conventional wisdom. 20 In some of the most famous chapters of The Spirit of the Laws, he pursued the idea with rigor, describing how, for instance, thanks to the influence of cold weather on "surface fibers" and "tufts of nerves" (something he claimed to have verified by freezing a sheep's tongue), northern peoples were stronger, less sensitive to pain and love, and ultimately more suitable to liberty than southern ones. 21 Eighteenth-
National Character and the Republican Imagination 145
? century wits quipped that where Malebranche had seen everything in God, Montesquieu saw everything in climate. 22 Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, and Helve? tius all embraced theories of climate enthusiastically as well. 23
None of these authors, however, truly saw climate as all-determining. "Many things govern men," Montesquieu wrote: "climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, moeurs, and man- ners; a general spirit [of the nation] is formed as a result. "24 Other than cli- mate, laws and maxims were the most important. And on this subject, if he did not exactly create a piece of conventional wisdom, he certainly helped to popularize it. Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century, French au- thors routinely expressed their confidence in the ability of political action to affect national character. To quote just a few examples: "republican gov- ernment produces a particular character, and monarchical government produces another"; "it is princes who form the national character"; "the character [of the French] is a soft and flexible clay, out of which the Men in place can make vessels of glory or vessels of ignominy. "25 Above all, the idea ran like a bright thread through the political works of Rousseau, who claimed in his Confessions to have seen early on that "everything funda- mentally depended on politics . . . and that no people would ever be any- thing other than what its Government made of it. "26 Only "national insti- tutions," Rousseau admonished his readers, could shape the character, tastes, and mores of a people, distinguishing it from others and stimulating the ardent patriotism conducive to proper social relations. 27
Yet even Rousseau, along with the classical republicans he resembled in so many ways, acknowledged another crucial factor in the shaping of na- tional character. For his ideal legislators fought against a powerful enemy: time itself, which slowly and insidiously leeched virtue away and infected the healthiest body politic with the bacillus of self-interest. To Rousseau, time was a purely negative factor, which reduced well-defined, particular national characters to a common human sludge. Other authors, however, treated time far more favorably. They discerned in the history of the world a slow, irregular, but nonetheless visible evolution from savagery to civili- zation. For them, the character of a nation therefore depended in large part on how far it had scaled this chronological ladder.
French authors applied this historical theory most insistently to their own past, emphasizing France's evolution away from cruder standards of behavior. "Nearly all of us started out as sorts of savages, shut away in for- ests under a gloomy sky," wrote Antoine-Le? onard Thomas in his history
146 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of eloquence, while the playwright P. J. B. Chaussard even put the idea in verse: "Ces ge? ne? reux Franc? ais n'e? taient a` leur berceau / Qu'une horde stupide: un servile troupeau" [In the cradle these generous French were nothing / But a stupid horde, a servile flock]. 28 More systematically, the Marquis de Mirabeau likened the process to the course of nature itself and warned in L'ami des hommes, in the accents of biblical lyricism, that it could not continue indefinitely: "There is a circle prescribed to all nature, moral as well as physical, of birth, growth, fullness, decline and death. Thus are the days from morning to night, the years in their solar revolution, the life of man from cradle to tomb, and that of states from their foundation to their fall. "29 Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, provided the fullest exposi- tion of the theory, attempting to trace the progress of nearly every nation on earth. While bemoaning the capacity of stupidity, greed, intolerance, and sheer accident to block or even reverse progress, he nonetheless con- cluded that European nations, at least, had overall moved in the proper direction. 30
To the extent that French authors believed that political action and his- torical evolution determined national character, they also generally saw these two factors working through a particular intermediary: women. For if national character was heavily shaped by that elusive product of politics and history called moeurs, moeurs themselves were the province of women, both because of their general influence on social interactions and their specific role in educating the young. "Women," d'Espiard wrote, "are the essential part of moeurs. " The military reformer Guibert agreed with him. "Men make laws," but "women make moeurs, there lies their true empire. "31 Montesquieu, in his warning against altering a good national character (see the epigraph to this chapter), could envision only one way of actually doing so: "One could constrain [the] women, make laws to correct their moeurs, and limit their luxury. "32 Not coincidentally, these very measures, which Montesquieu himself hesitated to apply, formed the heart of Rous- seau's misogynistic prescription for preserving the moeurs of Geneva in his famous Letter to d'Alembert. 33 Women, in short, constituted at once a measure of a nation's civilization and the key to the preservation of its character.
A Bearable Lightness of Being
Armed with these conceptual tools, eighteenth-century French authors went eagerly about investigating national characters, and particularly the
National Character and the Republican Imagination 147
? one they saw reflected in the mirror. They were not always consistent, to say the least. At different times Voltaire described the French as "the most sociable and polite people on earth" (the preface to a stage play in the 1730s), "a people of heroes . . . a gentle and terrible people" (a war poem from the 1740s), and "monkeys and tigers" (his bitter exile in the 1760s). 34 Still, outside of wartime literature, which predictably saw a Bayard or Jumonville in every French male, the French national character was still, most generally, associated with a relatively well-defined and consistent constellation of closely related traits. 35 To be French was to be particularly social, particularly refined and polite, and particularly cheerful or flighty (le? ger, implying a mix of vivaciousness, inconstancy, and perhaps also superficiality). Sometimes these traits were invoked all at once, as in d'Hol- bach's umbrella comment that "the general character of the French nation is gaiety, activity, politeness, sociabilite? . "36 Yet if the traits themselves pro- voked few disagreements, their desirability provoked many: the same term that served as a warm commendation in one context could become a sting- ing criticism in another, even from the same author. Certain authors were consistently critical, and it was they who shaped the emerging republican critique of French national character.
Of the traits, "social" or "sociable" attracted attention from nearly all the major philosophes, eager as always to encompass a given subject in a single, overarching abstraction. 37 Thus Montesquieu had a character remark, with characteristic bite, in Persian Letters: "It is said that man is a sociable being. On this score it seems to me that a Frenchman is more human than anyone else. " Diderot similarly wrote that "there is no nation that is more like a single family. A Frenchman swarms about in his town more than ten Eng- lishmen, fifty Dutchmen, or a hundred Moslems do in theirs. "38 Beyond the ranks of the philosophes, many other writers adopted the same motif-- notably patriotic authors who wished to contrast the cheerful, sociable French to the gloomy, unsociable English. 39 As Bernardin de Saint-Pierre commented, "most of our writers brag about our nation's spirit of socie? te? "40 (emphasis mine).
Le? ge`rete? and related terms had equal popularity. To quote the Ency- clope? die: "It is a sort of proverb to say, le? ger like a Frenchman . . . "41 D'Espiard repeatedly stresssed this aspect of the French character, as did the elder Mirabeau, who called the French the most fickle, vivacious, and le? ger of nations, and the radical journalist Louis-Se? bastien Mercier, who cited their "extreme penchant" for le? ge`rete? . 42 The term often carried a criti- cal bite and easily elided into frivolity, luxury, and superficiality. Republi-
148 The Cult of the Nation in France
? can-minded critics routinely used it as a term of abuse, and probably for this reason many adopted "gay" (gai) as a substitute (they contrasted le? ger and gay to "heavy," "gloomy" and "pedantic"--again, characteristics often associated with the English). The Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Cerutti wrote a twenty-page essay on "French gaiety," which he attributed in turn to the nation's sociability. Laughter, he wrote, is the distinctive quality of the French nation. 43 Yet le? ge`rete? did have its defenders. Jean-Franc? ois Sobry, in his survey of French characteristics and institutions, said that "if [the Frenchman] has le? ge`rete? , it is not at all of the sort which is fickle and superficial, but rather that le? ge`rete? which recoils from heaviness and mo- notony. The Athenians were also le? ger, and they were the foremost people in the world. " The novelist Jacques-Antoine Perrin likewise commented: "Our neighbors may well call us le? ger, frivolous, inconsequential.
