"Climate is, for a Nation, the
fundamental
cause .
Cult of the Nation in France
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
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. But this lightness, this frivolity is the source of our amusements and our pleasures; it is to delicacy and even gallantry that we owe our happiness, they are vir- tues for us. "44
Politeness and refinement, meanwhile, went almost without saying. It was a commonplace to remark, as Voltaire did, that the French were not simply polite, but the most polite, as well as the most sociable of nations. 45 D'Holbach, Servan, Thomas, d'Espiard, Sobry, and Turgot all echoed the claim. 46 Eighteenth-century French understandings of politeness were complex, but in the discussions of national character the complexities faded somewhat, and such disparate concepts as urbanity, honne^tete? , deli- cacy, and civility blended together to signify simply an elaborate attention to form and style in personal interactions. 47
The sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness of the French were all easily ex- plained by reference to climate, political action, and history. France, pos- sessed as it was of a perfectly temperate climate, had succeeded, so it was claimed, in avoiding the solitude, seriousness, and moroseness of northern peoples, and the weakness, indolence, and debauchery of southern ones. 48 An innate moderation allowed the French to seek out pleasure and to de- light in polite human interaction without necessarily corrupting and en- slaving each other (although also without seeking true freedom). In addi- tion to climate, the French character reflected the country's monarchical government and aristocratic social system, in which les grands set the tone and everyone else scrambled to imitate them. Thus the same traits that foreigners associated with the French in general, the French themselves as- sociated particularly with the royal court and the high aristocracy. As d'Espiard had said, the Frenchman's manner was the lordly manner.
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? Above all, if the French were said to maintain a degree of polite so- cial interaction unknown elsewhere and to devote themselves to endless rounds of pleasure, it was because they stood at the end point of that long historical evolution which had taken them away from their "savage" or "barbarian" origins and rendered them steadily more "polite," "policed," or "civilized. " Sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness were all closely linked to the concept of "civilization," which took shape in the mid-eighteenth century and depended on a vision of historical progress and cosmopolitan ex- change between civilized people. As we saw in Chapter 1, "civilization," one of the key foundational concepts in eighteenth-century culture, stood in stark opposition to "patrie" and "republic. " Thus to the extent that eigh- teenth-century authors saw the French national character in terms of so- ciability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness, and approved of it, they were defining France less as a classical patrie and more as the center and apogee of a uni- versal civilization.
For most French authors, the civilized traits of sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness reflected the extraordinary influence of women. D'Espiard and Montesquieu agreed that women, to whom vivaciousness and love of soci- ety came naturally, ruled French moeurs, obliging men to strive to please them. 49 Se? bastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigne? , author of a histori- cal essay on the "principal absurdities of different nations," attributed the politeness and sociability of the French particularly to the "company of women. "50 Many observers considered the position of women the main difference between France and nations which restricted women to what Rivarol called "the domestic tribunal. "51 D'Espiard stressed that "society cannot exist without women," and nations like the Chinese "have de- stroyed Society by this eternal imprisonment of women, which is the least philosophical and most unjust thing in the world. "52 An anonymous au- thor similarly suggested that if the English stopped banishing women from the table after dinner, the nation would grow less misanthropic. "The Frenchman," he remarked, "owes the amiable qualities which distinguish him from other peoples to interchange with women. "53
The Degenerate, Effeminate French
Yet it was precisely over the position of women that French students of na- tional character also revealed their greatest anxieties. D'Espiard, for all his solicitude where Chinese women were concerned, had also commented that "foreigners say that in France, men are not men enough, and women
150 The Cult of the Nation in France
? are not women enough. "54 Gazon-Dourxigne? added a similarly caution- ary note to his celebratory history of the French character: "Some women were reproached for taking on the character of men, and many men for too closely resembling women. "55 Rivarol noted severely that "it is from women's vices and ours, the politeness of men and the coquetry of women, that was born this gallantry of the two sexes which corrupts both in turn. "56 These remarks recall Rousseau's remark in the Letter to d'Alembert that the two sexes should "live separated ordinarily," and that "no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women. "57
These men nonetheless had ambiguous attitudes towards the reform of the French character, because they thought that thanks to a favorable cli- mate, beneficial historical evolution, and a political system they would not dream of challenging, this character was generally acceptable. They agreed with Montesquieu that trying to alter it might prove dangerous. But in the final decades of the old regime, in the context of political collapse and mil- itary challenges, moderate assumptions of this sort increasingly came into question. More observers adopted a caustic, Rousseauian view of history, held up the ideal of the patrie over that of civilization, and started to think of impaired national virility as an urgent problem in need of a solution. In 1762, for instance, a Discours sur le patriotisme, read in the Academy of Lyon, warned that the French had developed a tendency to become "syba- rites, plunged into a voluptuous stupor, breathing and thinking only for pleasure, deaf to the voice of the patrie. " The speaker added sternly that "if fashion, modes and frivolity take the place of moeurs and reason . . . then a nation is done for. "58 Castilhon similarly called for the authentic bourgeois character of the French to reassert itself in the face of corrupting female aristocratic influences. In 1787, an entrant in the Academy of Cha^lons-sur- Marne's essay competition on patriotism called the French "too le? ger and too dissipated" and warned they might perish unless they grew more civic- minded. 59 Even the ardent patriot Antoine-Le? onard Thomas could turn scathing on the subject of the French character. France, he wrote in his his- tory of eloquence, was a "le? ger and impetuous nation, ardent for pleasures, concerned always with the present, soon forgetting the past, talking of everything and caring about nothing. "60
Almost without exception, as Antoine de Baecque has stressed, these cri- tiques associated supposedly typical French traits with the corporeal fail- ings of lethargy, sickness, physical corruption, and old age. 61 "The French
National Character and the Republican Imagination 151
? nation has changed . . . We are no longer as robust, as strong, as the ancient Gauls from whom we descend. "62 The French nation had become "indo- lent, apathetic, carefree," in a modern period described as "a long lethargy" or "a coating of rust. " The French were "an immense people grown old in despotism," "a degraded, debased people," "a society grown old in slavery and sensual pleasure and corrupted by the habit of vice. "63 In the diagnosis of a flawed national character, political writers were questioning the future existence of the nation and calling, in the accents of classical republican- ism, for immediate reform.
But would such a reform necessarily entail wiping the slate clean and imprinting an entirely new character on the population? Until the first years of the Revolution, republican-minded observers rarely went this far. Instead, they generally suggested that modern French traits reflected the perversion and corruption of a older, authentic Frenchness, which needed somehow to be restored. As Rabaut de Saint-Etienne remarked, following Rousseau, in modern times the true national character had simply been "erased. "64 Blame for this corruption was attributed to historical evolution in general, which had leeched away the original, pristine virtues of the French, and on the form of government--namely, absolute monarchy and "feudalism. " Abbe? Charles Chaisneau wrote in 1792 that although France's temperate climate had endowed its inhabitants with an innate love of vir- tue, "despotism ruined everything with its impure breath; this monster in- fected the truest feelings at the source. " Many echoed him. 65 France's re- gional diversity, which came to be perceived as an urgent problem at the time of the Revolution, was similarly interpreted, in the manner of the Physiocrats, not as a natural state of affairs, but as a historical aberration caused by the nefarious effects of the feudal system. 66 Overcoming divi- sions of privilege and region, and bringing the French back to a state of original, authentic homogeneity, therefore demanded not simply a reversal of the historical clock--the typically republican promise of a return to the pristine past--but an end to despotism and a check on the powers of the king.
Republican-minded critics of the national character were hardly origi- nal in their call for a return to an idealized past. From a different angle, no- ble and parlementaire opponents of the crown under the old regime did very little other than assert the claims of the distant past upon the present. Occasionally, they invoked the subject of national character to support their point, as when Boulainvilliers wrote grandiloquently of "the French,
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? born free and independent . . . who fell prey to the conquest, not of a for- eign nation, but of a single family. "67 But national character mattered far less to them than specific constitutional arrangements and the specific his- toric rights they claimed for their own institutions and groups. In contrast, the later republican texts increasingly eschewed any consideration of an ancient French constitution which, no matter how favorably presented, still could not match up to the Roman republican one. They preferred more historically vague, although often lushly evocative, invocations of the earlier, unspoiled national personality.
How far one had to go into the past to find the golden age of Frenchness was a question open to discussion. Republican critics of the national char- acter in the 1770s and 1780s most often located it either in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The earlier era had experienced something of a vogue in the late eighteenth century, spurred in particular by the meticulous historical researches of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, which fed a colorful, proto-Romantic celebration of chivalry and the Troubadours. "O happy times! O forever lamented days! " wrote the poet Pierre-Laurent Be? renger in one typical effusion. "Brilliant and fortunate nation! .
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,
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? [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
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? 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
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? 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
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? 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. But this lightness, this frivolity is the source of our amusements and our pleasures; it is to delicacy and even gallantry that we owe our happiness, they are vir- tues for us. "44
Politeness and refinement, meanwhile, went almost without saying. It was a commonplace to remark, as Voltaire did, that the French were not simply polite, but the most polite, as well as the most sociable of nations. 45 D'Holbach, Servan, Thomas, d'Espiard, Sobry, and Turgot all echoed the claim. 46 Eighteenth-century French understandings of politeness were complex, but in the discussions of national character the complexities faded somewhat, and such disparate concepts as urbanity, honne^tete? , deli- cacy, and civility blended together to signify simply an elaborate attention to form and style in personal interactions. 47
The sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness of the French were all easily ex- plained by reference to climate, political action, and history. France, pos- sessed as it was of a perfectly temperate climate, had succeeded, so it was claimed, in avoiding the solitude, seriousness, and moroseness of northern peoples, and the weakness, indolence, and debauchery of southern ones. 48 An innate moderation allowed the French to seek out pleasure and to de- light in polite human interaction without necessarily corrupting and en- slaving each other (although also without seeking true freedom). In addi- tion to climate, the French character reflected the country's monarchical government and aristocratic social system, in which les grands set the tone and everyone else scrambled to imitate them. Thus the same traits that foreigners associated with the French in general, the French themselves as- sociated particularly with the royal court and the high aristocracy. As d'Espiard had said, the Frenchman's manner was the lordly manner.
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? Above all, if the French were said to maintain a degree of polite so- cial interaction unknown elsewhere and to devote themselves to endless rounds of pleasure, it was because they stood at the end point of that long historical evolution which had taken them away from their "savage" or "barbarian" origins and rendered them steadily more "polite," "policed," or "civilized. " Sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness were all closely linked to the concept of "civilization," which took shape in the mid-eighteenth century and depended on a vision of historical progress and cosmopolitan ex- change between civilized people. As we saw in Chapter 1, "civilization," one of the key foundational concepts in eighteenth-century culture, stood in stark opposition to "patrie" and "republic. " Thus to the extent that eigh- teenth-century authors saw the French national character in terms of so- ciability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness, and approved of it, they were defining France less as a classical patrie and more as the center and apogee of a uni- versal civilization.
For most French authors, the civilized traits of sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness reflected the extraordinary influence of women. D'Espiard and Montesquieu agreed that women, to whom vivaciousness and love of soci- ety came naturally, ruled French moeurs, obliging men to strive to please them. 49 Se? bastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigne? , author of a histori- cal essay on the "principal absurdities of different nations," attributed the politeness and sociability of the French particularly to the "company of women. "50 Many observers considered the position of women the main difference between France and nations which restricted women to what Rivarol called "the domestic tribunal. "51 D'Espiard stressed that "society cannot exist without women," and nations like the Chinese "have de- stroyed Society by this eternal imprisonment of women, which is the least philosophical and most unjust thing in the world. "52 An anonymous au- thor similarly suggested that if the English stopped banishing women from the table after dinner, the nation would grow less misanthropic. "The Frenchman," he remarked, "owes the amiable qualities which distinguish him from other peoples to interchange with women. "53
The Degenerate, Effeminate French
Yet it was precisely over the position of women that French students of na- tional character also revealed their greatest anxieties. D'Espiard, for all his solicitude where Chinese women were concerned, had also commented that "foreigners say that in France, men are not men enough, and women
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? are not women enough. "54 Gazon-Dourxigne? added a similarly caution- ary note to his celebratory history of the French character: "Some women were reproached for taking on the character of men, and many men for too closely resembling women. "55 Rivarol noted severely that "it is from women's vices and ours, the politeness of men and the coquetry of women, that was born this gallantry of the two sexes which corrupts both in turn. "56 These remarks recall Rousseau's remark in the Letter to d'Alembert that the two sexes should "live separated ordinarily," and that "no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women. "57
These men nonetheless had ambiguous attitudes towards the reform of the French character, because they thought that thanks to a favorable cli- mate, beneficial historical evolution, and a political system they would not dream of challenging, this character was generally acceptable. They agreed with Montesquieu that trying to alter it might prove dangerous. But in the final decades of the old regime, in the context of political collapse and mil- itary challenges, moderate assumptions of this sort increasingly came into question. More observers adopted a caustic, Rousseauian view of history, held up the ideal of the patrie over that of civilization, and started to think of impaired national virility as an urgent problem in need of a solution. In 1762, for instance, a Discours sur le patriotisme, read in the Academy of Lyon, warned that the French had developed a tendency to become "syba- rites, plunged into a voluptuous stupor, breathing and thinking only for pleasure, deaf to the voice of the patrie. " The speaker added sternly that "if fashion, modes and frivolity take the place of moeurs and reason . . . then a nation is done for. "58 Castilhon similarly called for the authentic bourgeois character of the French to reassert itself in the face of corrupting female aristocratic influences. In 1787, an entrant in the Academy of Cha^lons-sur- Marne's essay competition on patriotism called the French "too le? ger and too dissipated" and warned they might perish unless they grew more civic- minded. 59 Even the ardent patriot Antoine-Le? onard Thomas could turn scathing on the subject of the French character. France, he wrote in his his- tory of eloquence, was a "le? ger and impetuous nation, ardent for pleasures, concerned always with the present, soon forgetting the past, talking of everything and caring about nothing. "60
Almost without exception, as Antoine de Baecque has stressed, these cri- tiques associated supposedly typical French traits with the corporeal fail- ings of lethargy, sickness, physical corruption, and old age. 61 "The French
National Character and the Republican Imagination 151
? nation has changed . . . We are no longer as robust, as strong, as the ancient Gauls from whom we descend. "62 The French nation had become "indo- lent, apathetic, carefree," in a modern period described as "a long lethargy" or "a coating of rust. " The French were "an immense people grown old in despotism," "a degraded, debased people," "a society grown old in slavery and sensual pleasure and corrupted by the habit of vice. "63 In the diagnosis of a flawed national character, political writers were questioning the future existence of the nation and calling, in the accents of classical republican- ism, for immediate reform.
But would such a reform necessarily entail wiping the slate clean and imprinting an entirely new character on the population? Until the first years of the Revolution, republican-minded observers rarely went this far. Instead, they generally suggested that modern French traits reflected the perversion and corruption of a older, authentic Frenchness, which needed somehow to be restored. As Rabaut de Saint-Etienne remarked, following Rousseau, in modern times the true national character had simply been "erased. "64 Blame for this corruption was attributed to historical evolution in general, which had leeched away the original, pristine virtues of the French, and on the form of government--namely, absolute monarchy and "feudalism. " Abbe? Charles Chaisneau wrote in 1792 that although France's temperate climate had endowed its inhabitants with an innate love of vir- tue, "despotism ruined everything with its impure breath; this monster in- fected the truest feelings at the source. " Many echoed him. 65 France's re- gional diversity, which came to be perceived as an urgent problem at the time of the Revolution, was similarly interpreted, in the manner of the Physiocrats, not as a natural state of affairs, but as a historical aberration caused by the nefarious effects of the feudal system. 66 Overcoming divi- sions of privilege and region, and bringing the French back to a state of original, authentic homogeneity, therefore demanded not simply a reversal of the historical clock--the typically republican promise of a return to the pristine past--but an end to despotism and a check on the powers of the king.
Republican-minded critics of the national character were hardly origi- nal in their call for a return to an idealized past. From a different angle, no- ble and parlementaire opponents of the crown under the old regime did very little other than assert the claims of the distant past upon the present. Occasionally, they invoked the subject of national character to support their point, as when Boulainvilliers wrote grandiloquently of "the French,
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? born free and independent . . . who fell prey to the conquest, not of a for- eign nation, but of a single family. "67 But national character mattered far less to them than specific constitutional arrangements and the specific his- toric rights they claimed for their own institutions and groups. In contrast, the later republican texts increasingly eschewed any consideration of an ancient French constitution which, no matter how favorably presented, still could not match up to the Roman republican one. They preferred more historically vague, although often lushly evocative, invocations of the earlier, unspoiled national personality.
How far one had to go into the past to find the golden age of Frenchness was a question open to discussion. Republican critics of the national char- acter in the 1770s and 1780s most often located it either in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The earlier era had experienced something of a vogue in the late eighteenth century, spurred in particular by the meticulous historical researches of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, which fed a colorful, proto-Romantic celebration of chivalry and the Troubadours. "O happy times! O forever lamented days! " wrote the poet Pierre-Laurent Be? renger in one typical effusion. "Brilliant and fortunate nation! .
