No More Learning

From Carlton Hayes's post-World War I essay "Nationalism as a Religion" to Josep Llobera's re- cent The God of Modernity, the tendency has been not simply to connect, but to equate the two. Many prominent authors have done so in one way or another. 2 Liah Greenfeld rightly remarks that "to say that nationalism is the modern religion has become a cliche? . "3 Yet equating nationalism and religion ultimately means taking neither one seriously. It is an approach that most often reduces these two complex intellectual phenomena to
22
The National and the Sacred 23
? nothing but the symbolic practices they share: the flags, processions, and so forth. It takes for granted that the two address identical, timeless, uni- versal spiritual longings. It also assumes that the one rushes in to supplant the other, despite the fact that nationalism has so often flourished most ostentatiously precisely where religious observance has remained most intense.
Religion most often serves these writers principally as a convenient, un- complicated symbol for something else. It can stand for irrational fanati- cism and thereby express frustration at the fact that nationalism appar- ently leads modern men and women to act so blindly, so emotionally, so much like religious zealots (those writers concerned primarily with Nazi Germany lean hard in this direction). Or it can stand for spiritual comfort and certainty, and thereby express a Romantic nostalgia for older, disap- pearing forms of spiritual community. It is no coincidence that one of the first--and incomparably the most eloquent--expositions of the compari- son between nationalism and religion came not from a modern theorist but from the greatest of Romantic historians, Jules Michelet, in 1831: "My noble country, you must take the place of the God who escapes us, that you may fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there. You owe us the equivalent of the infinite. "4
In neither schema, however, does religion have much complexity or his- tory, or do much of anything except vent its sound and fury and then, as modernity dawns, be heard no more. Thus even Benedict Anderson, per- haps the most thoughtful advocate of the comparison, ultimately gives lit- tle sustained attention to the dynamics of religious history. Early on in his book Imagined Communities, he makes an important and suggestive re- mark: "What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large [religious] cultural systems that preceded it, out of which--as well as against which--it came into being. "5 Yet Anderson does not elaborate on the insight. Indeed, he never really abandons a simple functionalism which holds religion and nationalism commensurate because each, in its way, helps people cope with "the overwhelming burden of human suffering. " He, too, sees religion "ebbing" in the eighteenth century, thereby "requir- ing" something to replace it. 6 Moreover, the nationalist deus ex machina it- self arises, in Anderson's theory, thanks to a wholly secular dynamic, which he traces principally to print capitalism and early modern imperial admin- istrative practices.
Is it, then, worth pursuing the connection between religion and nation-
24 The Cult of the Nation in France
? alism? Absolutely. Nationalism in France, at least, cannot begin to be un- derstood properly without reference to religion. The way to start, however, is not to define nationalism as a religion itself. The concepts of nation and patrie did not acquire their power because the French saw them as deities taking the place of the Christian God. Rather, I will argue in this chapter, it was in large part because the French came to see the Christian God himself in a new manner. Early French nationalists certainly borrowed wholesale from Christianity's symbolic repertory, just as Rabaut de Saint-Etienne urged them to do. Indeed, one of the purposes of this chapter will be to show just how "Catholic" the French cult of the nation remained in key re- spects, particularly in comparison with its counterpart in Protestant Great Britain. But the borrowings from Catholicism cast a deceptive aura of sim- ilarity over phenomena of a fundamentally different order. The cult of the nation did not arise as a replacement for Christianity, and it did not have as its purpose to orient believers towards any sort of heavenly city. It arose as the French came to perceive a new relation between the divine and hu- man spheres, and it had as its purpose to reorder the latter, at precisely the moment when modern concepts of the "secular" came into being.
Foundational Concepts
What was the background against which the concepts of the nation and the patrie acquired their talismanic power in the eighteenth century? The most convincing accounts to date have mostly found an answer in the al- leged rise of noble opposition to royal absolutism, after the domineering Louis XIV gave way to successors who lacked a certain rigidity in the spinal column. 7 Their historical microscope has above all sought out anti-abso- lutist figures like the grumpy racialist Henri de Boulainvilliers, who rum- maged through the ancient history of the Gauls and Franks, tendentiously and inaccurately, to discover the supposedly original and still-binding rights of the French "nation" over its kings. 8 Of course, these writers in- tended the exercise of these immemorial rights to remain firmly in the hands of the noble descendants of the Frankish conquerors, or of the sov- ereign courts (parlements) which had supposedly succeeded their general assemblies. Several historians have argued that such anti-absolutist writ- ings served as the key source for the later, revolutionary "ideology" of the nation. 9
Boulainvilliers--whose ideas were shaped not only by his status as a no-
The National and the Sacred 25
? ble but by his membership in "libertine" religious circles--does have a real importance in the story of French nationalism, as we will see. Overall, however, the "anti-absolutist" approach takes writers like him out of sev- eral historical contexts. First, while these thinkers may have used the word "nation," they nonetheless had more in common with sixteenth-century constitutionalist predecessors like Franc? ois Hotman than with the French revolutionaries. 10 They did not equate the nation with the French popula- tion as a whole, or assert that it had any right to change France's ancient constitution and hierarchical, corporate social order, or grant it any right of resistance against tyranny, far less ground such a right in any notion of a social contract. If they used the phrase "the rights of the nation," they most often meant not natural rights but positive rights--rights defined by French law and history, whose use belonged not to the nation as a whole but to the modern French institutions that had inherited the authority of the nation's original assemblies, those imagined gatherings of the trium- phant Franks in their thousands on the Champ de Mars next to conquered Roman Lute`ce. 11 The actual political changes they demanded, as in the case of the earlier constitutionalists, consisted mostly of a shift in power from the crown to its traditional, corporate, noble rivals. 12 Nor did they treat the nation as a political artifact in need of construction, as the French revolu- tionaries would later do.
Second, the "anti-absolutist" approach privileges one particular political use of the terms "nation" and patrie, ignoring the fact that their efflo- rescence in the eighteenth century occurred across a wide cultural front, ranging from travel writing to literary depictions of foreigners, from trea- tises on civic duty to paeans to the reigning monarch, and to wartime propaganda. Did these other works simply follow in the anti-absolutists' awkward footsteps? Given the widely different political opinions they ex- pressed, this is unlikely. Did these other uses of the terms have no lasting significance? The evidence presented in this book will suggest they did.
It is crucial to recognize that the rise of these terms represented only a part of a larger shift in the language the French used to talk about them- selves and their community in the eighteenth century. 13 In taking a new, more prominent place in French public discourse, the words nation and patrie had a great deal of company. Half a century ago, historians noted the origins of the modern concept of "civilization" in the mid-eighteenth cen- tury. 14 More recently, others have explored the redefinition of socie? te? as what Keith Michael Baker calls "an autonomous ground of human exis-
26 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tence" in the earlier part of the century, and charted its vastly more promi- nent usage thereafter. 15 As for public and opinion publique, a virtual cottage industry has recently arisen to explore the way they came to signify a sort of supreme tribunal in matters both aesthetic and political. 16 The concepts of moeurs (very roughly translatable as "manners") and peuple underwent similar processes of redefinition, contestation, and expanding usage, while royal officials transformed the hard-to-translate concept of police (roughly, "public order") so that it came to signify the enlightened exercise of cen- tralized authority. 17 These shifts, which in turn relate to changing under- standings of politeness, urbanity, commerce, and citizenship, point to a fundamental transformation in what might be called the vocabulary of hu- man relations during this period. 18
The new or redefined concepts had much more in common than simple novelty. Five of them in particular--socie? te? , nation, patrie, civilisation, and public--stand out as being especially close and especially illuminating of the overall phenomenon. Each described an entity which did not owe its existence to any religious or political authority or indeed to any principle external to itself. If anything, each was conceived as something that existed prior to both politics and organized religion and that delineated elemen- tary forms of human relations. 19 Each could also appear, depending on the observer's perspective, as the fundamental ground against which to mea- sure all other forms of communal life (leading to disagreements among modern scholars, who have variously claimed that one or another was con- sidered most fundamental). 20 They can usefully be called "foundational concepts," and their history in this period needs to be understood as a broad shift in the way the French imagined the world around them: from a perspective in which the human terrestrial order was seen as subordinated to exterior (particularly divine) determinations, to one in which it was seen as autonomous and self-regulating. It was this shift which would, by the end of the eighteenth century, make it possible for the French to hold up the nation, rather than God or the king, as the source of all legitimate authority. It also made them see the thing being conceptualized as a prod- uct of human will, and therefore, potentially, as a malleable artifact.
A comprehensive history of nationalism must therefore deal with this general shift, which began in the decades around the year 1700. In this spirit, I would like to propose, in necessarily schematic form, a broad ex- planatory framework which draws, somewhat eclectically, on several theo- rists and historians who have helped transform our understandings of the
The National and the Sacred 27
? origins of religious and political modernity: above all Marcel Gauchet, Reinhart Koselleck, and Ju? rgen Habermas. 21 Their works are very different, indeed often at odds with each other, but they help illuminate different fac- ets of a complex process that did not obey any single logic or stem from any single cause.
Religion has a key place in this process, but it would be a mistake to at- tribute everything to this single factor. Historical change is never so simple. Rather, the process can usefully be thought of as having occurred in two distinct, if connected, realms. They can be called the realm of religious thought and the realm of material organization. 22 The first refers to the ar- ray of thinking about religion in France, on the part of official defenders of orthodoxy, influential religious dissenters such as the Jansenists, Erastian defenders of the state's religious authority, and also the philosophical skep- tics often treated as opponents of religion. By the second realm I mean the way the French imagined the physical space of France, and attempted to organize it, particularly for the purposes of administration and commerce.
The Realm of Religious Thought
In this first realm, the decades around 1700 have always been regarded as crucial. But for what reason? For one still influential school of intellectual history, exemplified by Paul Hazard's stirring work, Europe in this period witnessed nothing less than a blazing intellectual war. On the one side stood intrepid, aggressive rationalists; on the other, "ardent souls" desper- ately defending their faiths. The armies clashed, loudly and heroically, and the rationalists swept the field. In a single generation, Europeans went from "thinking like Bossuet" to "thinking like Voltaire. "23
While this interpretation of the period certainly reflects the perceptions of many contemporaries and has provided a heroic genealogy for subse- quent generations of professed secularists, it also effectively conceals the similarities between the two "armies" and obscures the way both partici- pated in a profound, long-term change in the relationship between God and the world in European thought. To grasp the contours of this overall change, it is more useful to turn to the work of the contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet. In his ambitious book The Disenchantment of the World (which uses the term "disenchantment" in a very different sense from Max Weber), Gauchet argues that the long-term historical "tra- jectory" of Christianity has consisted of a steady intensification of the per-
28 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ceived separation between the human and the divine. 24 By the end of the seventeenth century ("the point . . . where specifically Christian history comes to a halt"), at least for the most advanced Christian thinkers, God had become an absolute, wholly alien Other, entirely apart and withdrawn from the human world. 25 This vision of a "hidden God" could lead to an enormous, crushing, despairing sense of solitude--yet, paradoxically, Gauchet argues, it also offered liberation, for by virtue of the absolute sep- aration from the divine, the human world gained a form of autonomy. In early polytheistic religions, humanity had existed in "a position of absolute dependence" on a mythical, divine past. "The underlying belief is that we owe everything we have . . . to Ancestors, Heroes or Gods. All we can do is follow, imitate and repeat. "26 But by the endpoint of Christian evolution (which Gauchet considers, in a sense, the end of religion itself), the world had become a place which could be apprehended on its own terms and also, crucially, transformed on human terms, allowing mankind to de- velop new forms of knowledge, a new relationship with nature, and--es- pecially--a new politics. 27 "God's difference," Gauchet writes, "leaves the human community completely to itself," with the result that, ultimately, all power now has to derive legitimacy from that community. 28 The familiar modern distinction between "religious" and "secular" was being born.
In these reflections on God's "withdrawal" from the world, Gauchet clearly has in mind Calvinism and even more so, the current of early mod- ern Catholic thought called Jansenism, which emphasized the radical con- trast between God's infinite goodness and the corrupt, concupiscent state of humanity. 29 In its purest form, Jansenism flourished only in limited cler- ical circles, but its overall influence was vast, touching such key seven- teenth-century figures as Racine and Pascal, and leaving its mark on the eighteenth-century philosophes as well. It was arguably the most powerful force in French intellectual life in the decades around 1700, precisely the point where Gauchet locates the end of Christian history. 30 The particular originality of Gauchet's interpretation, however, is that it goes beyond any single movement and challenges the reader to consider pious Calvinists and Jansenists, on the one hand, and the great early modern natural and skeptical philosophers, on the other hand, as two sides of the same funda- mental process. In his vision, which accords with much recent scholarship on the period, Newton searching for order in the natural world, Locke de- riving the legitimacy of power from the consent of the governed, or Bayle challenging superstition and intolerance achieved as much as they did not
The National and the Sacred 29
? despite the efforts of Christian theologians, but in part because of the ef- forts of those theologians to delineate an autonomous and malleable ter- restrial sphere possessing its own knowable laws. 31
To illustrate the argument, consider one of the earliest French writings that entirely concerned itself with "love of country": the 1683 sermon by Jean Soanen, a future leader of French Jansenism. Preached in wartime, it mostly consisted of stern reminders about just how seriously the French needed to take their rendering unto Caesar, coupled with praise for France's current Caesar, Louis XIV. But on the first page, Soanen also laid out a set of remarkable reflections on the patrie in relation to things hu- man and divine:
The Lord, in creating these globes of fire that revolve over our heads; in drawing the flowers and fruits in which our eyes rejoice from the bowels of the earth; in commanding the sun to follow its course without inter- ruption; in tracing the paths which the stars and planets must follow without deviation, has wished to teach us just what order and harmony are, and to lead us to imitate such a beautiful arrangement and such a beautiful plan in our own behavior. Every creature stays in its place; every being fulfills its function. Only man troubles and disturbs the universe. Only man, carrying out only those duties which please him, raises up a chaos in his own heart, insults God himself, and disfigures society. 32
Here, beautifully and economically expressed, is a vision of a world which God has created and then left to its own devices, with natural objects obey- ing strict laws that human observation can presumably uncover. "Only man" disturbs the order God has established, and to recover this order man cannot rely on God but must establish a human equivalent to it. The first step in this direction, Soanen then proceeds to argue, is for "citizens" to de- vote themselves to their patrie. 33
Gauchet's work not only helps understand Soanen's sermon but suggests why the priest wanted his listeners to make the concept of patrie central to their lives. The intellectual achievements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by so clearly delineating the terrestrial sphere, also demanded a new vocabulary to describe it and to help human beings dis- cern and maintain order and stability in the face of the terrifying absence of God. Keith Baker, drawing on Gauchet's work, has recently made just such an argument about the transformation of the term socie? te? in the late seventeenth century. 34 I would argue, however, that socie? te? was just one of a
30 The Cult of the Nation in France
? number of potentially competing concepts which Europeans reached for to meet this need (Gauchet himself, interestingly, has elsewhere put partic- ular emphasis on the concept of "nation"). 35
Going beyond Gauchet, I would also argue that the new concern with a purely terrestrial order did not take shape in the philosophical and theo- logical arenas alone. Whatever its ultimate roots in the religious longue dure? e, in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France it also derived from a terror that was far more tangible than the idea of an absent deity: religious warfare. Throughout Europe, the memories of Protestant- Catholic conflict, and its attendant horrors, remained so burningly vivid in the eighteenth century that J. G. A. Pocock has recently ventured to de- fine the Enlightenment itself as "a series of programs for strengthening civil sovereignty and putting an end to the Wars of Religion. "36 In France, echoes of the horrific religious butchery of 1569-1594, which provoked Agrippa d'Aubigne? 's haunting lament "O France de? sole? e! O terre san- guinaire, / Non pas terre, mais cendre," resonated long after Henri IV finally brought it to an end with his famous Parisian mass. 37 In the eigh- teenth century, the wars inspired a virtual cult of Henri IV, and obsessed the philosophes. Voltaire, for instance, made the events the subject of his most ambitious epic, La Henriade, which dwelt at length on the grisly hor- rors (blood steaming in the streets of Paris, children dashed to their deaths against flagstones). He returned to them in many other works as well. 38 Diderot wrote memorably of "one half of the nation bathing itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half. "39 The wars also provided subject ma- terial for some of the most explosive stage dramas of the eighteenth cen- tury, notably Marie-Joseph Che? nier's Charles IX. 40 Political pamphleteers routinely evoked the days when "the patrie's own children tore open its en- trails," and royal ministers especially dreaded any return to the days in which two successive monarchs fell victim to assassins' knives. 41 The re- former Turgot sternly instructed the young Louis XVI about the sixteenth century's terrible spirit, "which put daggers in the hands of kings to butcher the people, and in the hands of the people to butcher kings. Here, Sire, is a great subject for reflection which princes should have constantly present in their thoughts. "42 Even in 1789, Camille Desmoulins roused the crowds at the Palais-Royal by warning about a Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of patriots. 43 In short, just as the memory of the French Revolu- tion dominated and helped structure French politics for long after 1789, so these wars remained perhaps the most basic political reference point dur- ing the last two centuries of the old regime.
The National and the Sacred 31
? From the start, French writers and statesmen drew one basic lesson from the wars: if religious passions were not excluded from all but certain care- fully delineated spheres of human activity, suicidal strife would follow. As Voltaire would later put it: "C'est la religion dont le ze`le inhumain / Met a` tous les Franc? ais les armes a` la main. "44 From Michel de l'Ho^pital in the sixteenth century to Andre? -Hercule de Fleury and Henri-Franc? ois d'Aguesseau in the eighteenth, royal officials struggled to contain such excess zeal and lived in terror of its divisive effects. 45 And as early as the six- teenth century itself, figures like de l'Ho^pital (an influential lord chancel- lor) argued that the solution to confessional strife might lie in strengthen- ing devotion to a common patrie. The period of the wars thus saw a flourishing of patriotic language in France (including the invention of the word "patriote" itself in the 1560s), accompanied by fierce denunciations of foreign enemies, especially on the part of the moderate, royalist Catholic faction known as the politiques. 46
This early enthusiasm for the patrie, however, remained limited in com- parison with the broader conceptual shift of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, when the politiques and Henri IV emerged victorious from the wars, the notion of the patrie lost something of its ne- cessity. Religious warfare no longer threatened to rip the country apart, and the French now had a popular--and Catholic--king who not only served as a focal point for allegiance in his own right, but could stand as the great link between the terrestrial and heavenly cities, binding them to- gether into what was still conceived of as one grand hierarchy. For the royal ministers of the seventeenth century, the solution to the problem of pre- venting religious warfare lay not in patriotic enthusiasm, but in conceding absolute, uncontested authority to the monarchical state as the guarantor of justice and order and the source of harmonious, polite human relations. In their view, as Reinhart Koselleck has argued, the state and the king were the axes around which the community should revolve. 47
As the wars retreated in time, many writers came to see the state itself as part of the problem. 48 Voltaire, Diderot, and Che? nier, for instance, equated religious strife less with anarchy than with fanaticism and the violation of private conscience and rejected unquestioning obedience to authority in favor of the institution of toleration. Indeed, they condemned royal power as fanaticism's handmaiden, citing such events as King Charles IX's com- plicity in the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and, more recently, King Louis XIV's revocation of toleration for Protestants. In the same vein, late- eighteenth-century stage plays like Mercier's La destruction de la ligue, and
32 The Cult of the Nation in France
? still more, Che? nier's ferocious Charles IX, directly attacked the monarchy for encouraging religious violence. By 1789, the popular poet Ecouchard Lebrun could write fiercely of Charles IX: "O Charles! Il est temps que le crime s'expie / De ce tombeau royal, sors, sors, cadavre impie! "49 To those who remembered the Wars of Religion in this manner, it now followed that the state could not provide the basic framework of terrestrial order any more than organized religion could. And so there then arose, in this con- text as well, a need for the new conceptual tools.
The Realm of Material Organization
In the sort of historical writing that seeks to understand the evolution of concepts like "nation," "society," and "civilization," explanations that in- voke social and economic factors are presently almost entirely out of fash- ion. Yet until quite recently most scholars treated the formation of national consciousness as an almost literal process of construction, involving bricks and mortar, iron track and copper wire. Uniting men and women scattered across a large territory, it was argued, demands a high degree of communi- cations and mobility, combined with a cohesive state and economy. Na- tions need roads, canals, and eventually railroads; postal services and even- tually the telegraph; widespread publishing and eventually newspapers; public schools and perhaps conscription. 50 This point of view particularly appealed to French writers, who also tended to give the story a hero: the state, maker of the nation.
The current generation of cultural and intellectual historians tends to view these accounts with deep suspicion. First, they quite correctly scold, it is a fallacy to assume any direct, automatic, relation between social and technological change and changes in consciousness. The languages in which we attribute meanings to things have their own histories and their own dynamics. These languages do not simply respond, passively, to "deeper" structural changes, like so many loose stones on the slopes of a volcano. As for the more specifically French fixation on the state as the maker of the nation, critics have pointed out that it anachronistically proj- ects the attitudes of post-revolutionary officials overtly concerned with na- tion-building back into a very different monarchical past, making of "the state" an eternal, unchanging presence in French life. 51 It has been convinc- ingly demonstrated that old regime policies supposedly aimed at forging "national" unity had more to do with concern for the majesty of the king
The National and the Sacred 33
? and the efficiency of the royal administration. 52 While the French state, in the revolutionary period, became an instrument of nation-building, it is a mistake to imagine the state as an impersonal force that has striven since the Middle Ages to forge a nation around itself.
Still, acknowledging these points should not imply relegating all that brick, wire, and track, not to mention newspapers and administrative circulars, to history's dustbin. The progress of transport and communica- tion, of administrative and commercial practices, and the dissemination of printed matter may not by themselves have led ineluctably to the develop- ment of new conceptual means of discerning and ordering the world, in- cluding the redefined concepts of "nation" and patrie. They did, however, lead contemporaries to pose questions, demand explanations, and reexam- ine concepts that were already in flux. Changes in this realm of material or- ganization had "cultural origins" of their own, of course, yet they were not simply derivative of these origins. They had their own internal dynamics and a relationship to a host of unpredictable and extraneous factors, in- cluding especially the vicissitudes of European warfare.
In the realm of material organization, the decades around the year 1700, again, proved especially significant, across a spectrum of activities that ranged from government administration to journalism to forms of volun- tary association. To begin with, by the end of the seventeenth century King Louis XIV had achieved a greater control over the use of violent force in his kingdom than did any of his predecessors. His administration, while far from the model of authoritarian efficiency described by Alexis de Tocque- ville, had nonetheless become the most powerful in French history, as shown by its success in raising unprecedentedly large armies and tax reve- nues.
53 Powerful nobles and discontented peasants no longer had the ca- pacity to throw the entire kingdom into turmoil through rebellion. At the same time, foreign warfare was beginning to take a less horrific toll on the French population, civilian and military alike. 54 The cost of warfare, how- ever, was spiraling relentlessly upwards, placing extraordinary new fiscal pressures on the monarchy. Louis may have seen himself, quite tradition- ally, as the first gentleman of the realm, but these pressures forced him to adopt new forms of taxation that overrode privilege and placed rulers and ruled into a new relationship. One historian describes the crucial cap- itation of 1695 and dixie`me of 1710 as follows: "Extending, in principle, from city to city, from southern provinces to northern ones, and from peasants to princes, these two taxes were designed to traverse the bound-
34 The Cult of the Nation in France
? aries of privilege that divided the geographic, social and legal landscape of France. "55
Even as Louis's officials carried out these innovations, they also strove for newly systematic ways of observing and measuring France, and re- ducing its complexities to a set of general propositions. In 1663 Colbert ordered royal officials to carry out a general survey of French territory, and soon afterwards he charged the new Academy of Sciences with the first comprehensive mapping of France. Somewhat later Vauban, an ad- vocate of the new forms of taxation, pioneered the collection of national economic and demographic statistics. By the late 1690s, Bishop Fe? nelon could instruct Louis XIV's heir on the knowledge needed by a model mod- ern monarch in these terms: "Do you know the number of men who com- pose your nation; how many women, how many workers, how many mer- chants . . . ? A king must know [his subjects'] principal customs, their liberties, their commerce . . . A king ignorant of these things is but half a king. "56 In response, the administration carried out an even more ambi- tious overview of the French provinces than Colbert's: the so-called Etat de la France. Critics of the state seized on the same new concepts and tech- niques. 57
While officials, driven by the ever-desperate need for increased revenues, subjected France to this new sort of gaze, changes in the circulation of printed matter were bringing the country's educated elites into closer con- tact with each other than ever before. In the 1680s, French-language news- papers from the Netherlands began to circulate in France, providing read- ers with an alternative to the official, court-centered Gazette de France. The same readers soon also had access to official periodicals devoted to the arts and the sciences, and, after 1727, to the wildly successful Jansenist under- ground paper, the Nouvelles eccle? siastiques. While the real flowering of the periodical press in France took place later, already by 1730 readers could find far more regular and varied sources of news and information than fifty years before. 58
Finally, the years around 1700 marked three milestones in the rise of what Ju? rgen Habermas, in analyzing forms of communication and associa- tion, has termed the "bourgeois public sphere. "59 In the 1690s, the first cof- fee houses opened in Paris. The 1720s saw the founding of the first French Masonic lodges. And in the same period Mme. de Tencin and the Marquise de Lambert led the way in transforming salons, which had previously func- tioned principally as schools of aristocratic manners, into serious intellec- tual forums. 60 Each of these establishments provided a place for educated,
The National and the Sacred 35
? well-off individuals to gather and exchange opinions outside the tradi- tional structures of estates and corporate bodies. Together with the period- icals, they facilitated the emergence of a new public sphere which stretched across the boundaries of privilege and even geography (lodges belonged to an international network; coffee houses aimed to provide the same urbane atmosphere regardless of location). Habermas and his commentators have argued that the development of this sphere, which lay outside the tradi- tional circuits of authority, allowed "private" individuals to subject all forms of authority to critical reason. 61
Taken individually, none of these developments in the realm of material organization deserves the description "revolutionary. " Together, however, they amounted to a striking shift in the way France's educated elites dealt with and perceived themselves and their government. The extent of this shift is particularly apparent from the perspective of provincial cities. Rob- ert Schneider's exemplary study of Toulouse shows that in the late seven- teenth and early eighteenth centuries, the concerns of the city's educated elites underwent a striking change in polarity. First, they had to sacrifice their municipal autonomy to the central state. At the same time, their own cultural interests "turned away from local concerns . . . and were focused instead on language, manners, the ways of Paris. "62 Toulousains began reading national newspapers, attending Jesuit-sponsored plays that ex- tolled the progress of French arms, and participating in Parisian-style academies. Poetry in the local Occitan dialect, which had flourished as late as the mid-seventeenth century, withered. Schneider has interpreted this shift primarily in terms of the growing rift between municipal elites and the poor. Yet the new orientation of Toulouse's elites toward national cul- tural and administrative networks is just as significant. It marks the con- solidation of France's diverse provinces, at least from the point of view of their most literate, well-off citizens, into a newly uniform and homoge- neous space. More broadly, it suggests that the traditional vocabulary of es- tates and orders, sanctioned by the king and ultimately modeled on the ce- lestial hierarchy, was becoming less and less relevant to their terrestrial experience.
God on Earth
The changes in the material and spiritual realms suggest why the French of the eighteenth century found it so attractive to describe the world around them using the new or newly redefined foundational concepts of socie? te? ,
36 The Cult of the Nation in France
? civilization, patrie, nation, and public. Each allowed them to imagine an arena of harmonious human coexistence whose principles did not ulti- mately derive from the dictates of an (increasingly absent) God--a God, moreover, whose worship had led, in recent memory, to desperately trau- matic strife. Contemporary observers perceived this turn from God quite clearly. The radical journalist Jean-Franc? ois Sobry, whose controversial 1786 book Le mode franc? ois was suppressed by the royal ministry, wrote with particular sharpness that "societies of men are founded on one of two principles: love of the patrie or attachment to an exclusive religion," and saw France moving from the latter to the former. 63 Rousseau, famously, also defined patriotism as distinct from and perhaps wholly opposed to re- ligious devotion. Defenders of the old religious order perceived the shift too, as in this comment from the Jesuit Dictionnaire de Tre? voux: "Some modern moralists dare to suggest that all man's duties emanate from the principle of society, which is to say that if we lived apart from society, we would have no duties. What a detestable doctrine. "64 In addition to remov- ing religious dependence, each of the foundational concepts referred to a form of human community free from symbolic subjection to a king who was increasingly perceived as having abetted persecution and perpetuated strife. Finally, each concept helped officials and educated elites make sense of the new administrative practices and the new forms of communication and sociability that were cutting across the traditional boundaries between estates, orders, and provinces.
These concepts were central to an even broader shift in the vocabulary of human relations, involving changing ideas of politeness, moeurs, police, and commerce. As early modern writers often suggested, following codes of polite conduct, having good moeurs, being properly "policed," and en- gaging in mutually profitable commerce all offered men and women means of avoiding destructive civil strife without resorting to a morality dependent on divine revelation. 65 In this sense, these concepts resembled the "foundational" ones just discussed. They were different, however, inso- far as they referred to the forms of human interaction and did not invoke the same sense of physical space and collectivity. Furthermore, in France, at least until the last decades of the old regime, police and politeness in par- ticular remained heavily dependent on the figure of the divine-right mon- arch, who stood as the ultimate arbiter of proper behavior.
Conversely, the foundational concepts just discussed helped lead to new concepts of citizenship which defined the condition of individual mem-
The National and the Sacred 37
? bership--especially in the nation. As Peter Sahlins has shown, it was in the 1760s that a French monarchy, consciously attempting to render the king- dom better "policed," began to create clear distinctions between French na- tionals and foreigners, even as men of letters and jurists were revivifying classical ideas of participatory citizenship. 66 In this sense, the concepts not only gave French elites new ways of understanding the world around them, but also helped them imagine new roles for themselves in it: as active agents, rather than passive subjects of divine or monarchical will. At the same time, the shift opened the way for far-reaching controversies (which, for the most part, must remain outside the scope of this book) over the limits of inclusion in such entities as the nation, the patrie, or the public.
It is tempting to interpret the emergence of these new ways of discerning and ordering the world as a process of de-Christianization--tempting, but also misleading. First of all, neither a perception of God's distance from the world nor an insistence on purely terrestrial forms of order implies any- thing about the existence of God or the continuing duty of people to wor- ship him. Historians have found evidence for the decline of formal reli- gious observance in the eighteenth century, but they have not managed to establish any corresponding decline in belief as such or a commensurate rise in atheism. 67 It seems more likely that there occurred what Bernard Groethuysen long ago called a "shrinkage or contraction of faith": a loss of belief in miracles and other manifestations of Divine Providence in the world, permitting the Christian "to confine himself in his everyday life to altogether secular attitudes . . . looking exclusively to the rules of prudence and good sense to regulate the details of his life. "68 In other words, the shift in language reflects not so much secularization as what might be called the interiorization of religious belief--its relegation to the private consciences of individual believers. 69 Rousseau evoked precisely this idea in The Social Contract, in his contrast of the "religion of man" to the "religion of the citi- zen. " He noted that the "religion of man," which he identified with the "holy, sublime and true religion" of the Gospel, had "no particular connec- tion with the body politic, leaves the laws only the force they themselves possess, adding nothing to them; and hence one of the chief bonds holding any particular society together is lacking. " Rousseau concluded, "I know nothing more contrary to the social spirit. " The passage, while purporting to describe an ancient, pristine Christianity, perfectly captured the changes in the religious sphere taking place in Rousseau's own day, and pointed to the direction in which Christianity would henceforth evolve. 70
38 The Cult of the Nation in France
? If the new and redefined concepts represented purely terrestrial ways of ordering the world, they nonetheless retained crucial similarities to their religious counterparts. The very sense of harmony they evoked inescapably recalled earlier visions of the heavenly city. Furthermore, each not only de- scribed something which supposedly existed prior to politics and to orga- nized religion, and which could be taken for a fundamental ground of human existence, but also something beyond all possible criticism and therefore, in an important sense, something sacred. It has been shown that eighteenth-century discussions of how individuals came together in socie? te? rarely failed to invoke religion, even if the theorists increasingly demoted religion to a mere adjunct and aid to supposedly natural human sociabil- ity. 71 Indeed, these writers, in praising socie? te? , frequently adopted the sort of metaphorical religious language long employed for describing France's divinely ordained kings. To give just one example, the Encyclope? die article entitled "Philosophe" declared that "socie? te? civile is, so to speak, a divinity on earth. "72
This same sense of sacrality was invested with even greater strength in the concept of patrie. The Latin noun patria had strong religious connota- tions from the start, and after the fall of Rome, it survived mostly in reli- gious usage: the Christian's true patria lay in the Kingdom of Heaven. In the high Middle Ages, secular rulers began to adopt the word for their own purposes, but "the main contents of the veneration of patria were derived from a world of thought which was religious in a broad sense. " The secu- lar kingdom was imagined on the model of the corpus mysticum of the Church, headed by Jesus. 73 French writers continued to employ the analogy in the era of Henri IV, when both the politique Lord Chancellor De Thou and the ultra-Catholic Guillaume Des Autelz could call the patrie "a sec- ond divinity" or "a second deity. "74 As for the eighteenth century, descrip- tions of the patrie as a "God," "divinity," or something "sacred," and of pa- triotism as "a vast chain linked to Divinity" or a "sacred love," were utterly commonplace. 75 During the Revolution, the 1792 Petition of Agitators to the Legislative Assembly declared that "the image of the patrie is the sole divinity it is permissible to worship. "76
It was the Calvinist, Geneva-born Rousseau who, even while exploring the consequences of the world's "disenchantment," speculated most pro- foundly upon the continuing place of the sacred in the foundation of hu- man communities. (It is tempting to conclude that Calvinism, and the sense of distance between the heavenly and terrestrial cities it instilled, may
The National and the Sacred 39
? have helped Rousseau, and later Rabaut, to imagine secular counterparts to the bonds religion instills between believers. ) Thus in The Social Contract Rousseau insisted that a properly constituted polity requires not merely the consent and participation of the people, but a Lawgiver who invokes divine authority for his laws and a "civil religion" which inspires people to love their duties. 77 He returned to the theme even more powerfully in his 1772 Considerations on the Government of Poland, in a section which turned both Jewish and Roman histories on their heads. First, he took the historical sense of national purpose and unity that the Jews themselves at- tributed to their covenant with God, and removed it from the religious context entirely. Moses "formed and executed," he wrote,
the astonishing enterprise of shaping into a national Body a swarm of unhappy fugitives, bereft of arts, weapons, talents, virtues and courage, and who, not having a single square inch of land for their own, passed for a foreign band on all the face of the earth. Moses dared turn this wander- ing and servile band into a political Body, a free people; and while it wan- dered in the wilderness without even a stone to rest on, he gave it this durable form, resistant to time, fate and conquerors, which five thou- sand years have not been able to destroy or even alter, and which even today retains all its strength, although the national Body itself no longer exists. 78
As for Rome, Rousseau argued that its real founder was not Romulus, who had merely "assembled brigands," but his successor Numa, the codifier of Roman paganism. Numa made the Romans into an "indissoluble body by transforming them into Citizens, less by laws, which their rustic poverty hardly needed yet, than by gentle institutions which attached them to each other, and to their land, by making their city sacred to them through these apparently frivolous and superstitious rites. "79
These remarkable passages, which for perhaps the first time in history clearly articulated the idea of the nation as a political construction, illus- trate better than any other text the way that nationalism arose both out of and against a religious system of belief. In his treatment of the Jews Rous- seau jarringly rewrote sacred history as a secular story of nation-building, something only conceivable in an at least partially "disenchanted" world. He replaced a transcendent vision in which human existence derived its structure and purpose from external, supernatural forces with a political vision in which this structure and purpose arose out of humanity itself. In
40 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the Roman case he injected the sacred back into a story conventionally seen as secular, emphasizing the dependence of nation-building on reli- gion--but a civil religion that oriented citizens toward the terrestrial city, not a transcendent one that turned them away from it. Rousseau therefore showed that nationalism borrows from religious practices but also funda- mentally transforms them; it is not, so to speak, communion wine poured into a new bottle.
Boundaries and Time
The emergence of these new ways of discerning and ordering the world represents only the starting point for understanding the cultural and reli- gious framework of French nationalism. Foundational concepts like patrie, nation, and socie? te? had crucial roles to play in the great constitutional and intellectual movements and conflicts of eighteenth-century France, and were themselves significantly transformed in the process. The following chapters will explore these transformations and their consequences for the emergence of nationalism itself at the time of the Revolution. First, how- ever, it is important to sketch out some of the differences and contradic- tions that existed within the new semantic field throughout the eighteenth century.
The most important distinction is that between the concepts of patrie and civilisation. To be sure, neither had a fixed and uniform meaning. 80 Voltaire himself called patrie a variable and contradictory term. Yet Vol- taire was a self-professed enemy of patriotism ("the philosophe belongs to no country") who ridiculed Joan of Arc and called his own country a "land of monkeys and tigers. "81 He had every reason to deny any fixed, intrinsic meaning to patrie. Yet for most eighteenth-century French writers, even before Rousseau seized on the word and made it central to the great debate he provoked over human progress, patrie did have one very clear set of as- sociations: with the ancient Greek and Roman republics. French writers throughout the century may have argued bitterly over the place the patrie should hold in the modern world. Many expended vast mental effort and even more ink to prove love of patrie compatible with monarchy, and from the 1750s it is possible to talk of a concerted program of "royal patrio- tism. " Yet their almost pathetic eagerness on this score itself underlined the patrie's fundamental association with a different form of government. It was Montesquieu who expressed the traditional point of view when he
The National and the Sacred 41
? identified love of the patrie with republican virtue and stated that in mon- archies the state could exist without it. 82
Insofar as it retained this association with the classical republics, patrie had two particularly distinctive characteristics within the semantic field that emerged in the early eighteenth century. First, it denoted a community that was essentially closed. Citizens belonged to the patrie, literally the land of their fathers, by birth, and owed their exclusive allegiance to it. Those outside the magic circle were excluded, deserving indifference at best and perhaps suspicion or outright hostility. Secondly, the term implied a par- ticular vision of the passage of time: a patrie did not progress but declined. It possessed a pristine past but faced a perilous future, filled with the dan- gers of corruption, of decay, of the insidious poison of self-interest leech- ing away the precious fluid of republican virtue and leaving the commu- nity vulnerable to conquest and destruction. 83 If the future of the patrie held any promise at all, it lay in the possibility of a return to its original state (at least in this sense, the patrie was considered a political construc- tion from the very beginning).
The neologism civilisation, by contrast, had almost precisely the oppo- site characteristics, which is why Rousseau's opponents embraced it so readily. 84 Civilization was, by definition, open and inclusive, ready to wel- come any "civilized" person. It stretched across many different countries, but did not necessarily include everyone within those countries. Further- more, it implied a vision of historical progress in which mankind evolved (unequally, it is true) toward civilization from earlier stages, labeled "sav- age" or "barbarian. " If the future of the patrie held innumerable perils, the future of civilization held great promise, as expressed most memorably in Condorcet's vision of steady, rational historical progress. "We have seen human reason slowly shape itself," he wrote, "through the natural progress of civilization. "85 The radical republicanism which arose at the end of the old regime and enjoyed its apotheosis in 1793-94 expressed an adoration of the patrie and an abhorrence of civilisation.
The other new and redefined concepts did not fall so easily at one end or another of the axis defined by these two, but French writers deployed them in the same debates. Thus for Voltaire and d'Holbach, the term socie? te? im- plied something that, like civilisation, stretched across political boundaries and carried with it a sense of historical progress. Other writers, however, used socie? te? as a virtual synonym for patrie, complete with its resonances of decline. 86 Similarly, for Voltaire, especially in his great historical essays,
42 The Cult of the Nation in France
? moeurs developed slowly over the centuries, turning increasingly "gentle" and refined (at least in the proper conditions). For Rousseau, however, moeurs sprang fully developed from the hands of the all-powerful Legisla- tors who founded properly constituted states, and thereafter could rot and decay as easily as the most delicate blossom.
The concept of "nation" presents the most complicated case. Like patrie, it referred to an essentially closed community, one defined by common origins (even if the occasional foreigner might join it, thereby "naturaliz- ing"--literally changing his or her nature--in the process). 87 In the eigh- teenth century, however, the word lacked the resonances of intense belong- ing and fatality associated with patrie, not to mention the exaltation of place and ethnicity and "the mystique of the language, people and com- mon origin" characteristic of nineteenth-century nationalism. 88 Nor did nation have a particular association with classical republics (dictionary and encyclopedia articles on patrie almost always invoked Greece and Rome, articles on nation hardly ever did). 89 Yet if writers did not assume that na- tions necessarily fell into decay, nonetheless, as we will see in the next chap- ter, three important groups of French writers--parlementaire, physiocratic, and republican--agreed that the French nation in particular had fallen into decay, and urgently required "regeneration. "
It was the Marquis de Mirabeau, one of the strangest and least remem- bered of major eighteenth-century French thinkers, who best expressed the tension that ran between the concepts of patrie and civilisation. 90 Mirabeau's unconventional, ungainly prose earned him derision from the gatekeepers of French prose "clarity," but also allowed him unusual free- dom to experiment with language. He adored neologisms, and among the words to which he gave currency in his masterpiece, L'ami des hommes, were both "civilization" and "regeneration," that future centerpiece of re- publican patriotic rhetoric. 91 In fact, Mirabeau's entire, large, lumbering work can be read as an attempt to reconcile classical republicanism with the ideas of civilization and historical progress, particularly in the realm of political economy. Thus he devoted a long section to love of patrie and ex- alted it in republican language worthy of Rousseau (although he argued for the compatibility of patriotism and monarchy). Yet he also defended the progress of the arts and sciences. 92 Mirabeau ultimately attempted to bring decline and progress together by devising a cyclical interpretation of history, in which "regeneration" provided a bridge between one cycle of growth and decay and the next. 93 His work's great vogue in the 1750s and
The National and the Sacred 43
? 1760s indicates that readers found his attempts at conciliation intriguing, although ultimately less convincing than Rousseau's argument that patrio- tism brooked no compromise with other loyalties.
Overall, then, not only did the use of "nation" and "patrie" develop as part of a larger shift in the language that the French used to describe forms of human coexistence; it also occupied a distinctive place within this lan- guage, pointing to a more sharply bounded type of community and a more pessimistic view of the passage of time. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that this shift in language took place against a very significant backdrop. Whatever the continuing, overwhelming presence of classical antiquity in early modern Europe, which led a young Rousseau to gorge himself on Plutarch and a generation of Revolutionaries to read Polybius and Tacitus as user's manuals for democratic politics, France of course re- mained a deeply Catholic country. Formal education remained largely in the hands of the clergy, and the Church preserved the power to censor and condemn irreligious writings. Furthermore, whatever the changes within the religious sphere that took place in France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practices and opinions of the Church hardly be- came irrelevant but continued to exert an enormous influence on the man- ner in which discussions of the nation developed. The sense of sacrality in- vested in the concept of the patrie only enhanced the Church's influence, for the French approached this terrestrial object of adoration in what can only be called a deeply Catholic manner. The extent to which this was the case can be shown most easily in a brief comparison between Catholic France and Protestant England.
Catholics and Protestants, French and English
In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years' War, Robert-Martin Lesuire pub- lished a ferocious novel about the English with the expressive title of Les sauvages de l'Europe. It is the story of a nai? ve young couple who travel to England thinking it the land of advanced philosophy, only to receive a se- ries of rude shocks worthy of Candide at the hands of the frightful inhabit- ants, including first-hand experiences of English riots, highways, hangings, kidnappings, prisons, and insane asylums, not to mention the dreadful cuisine ("English fierceness comes from the still-bloody flesh they de- vour"). 94 What seemed to bother Lesuire most about these savages, how- ever, was their lack of respect for France. Wherever his heroes turn, they
44 The Cult of the Nation in France
? stumble upon the crudest xenophobia. Passers-by exclaim "Goddamn! " on hearing French spoken, while dramatists and theatrical audiences seem to do little other than mock things Gallic. The couple see a man executed for "having shown humanity to two Frenchmen," and indeed meet only one Englishman who "heard the word French pronounced without going into convulsions. "95
Such amazed horror at the Francophobia and excessive patriotism of the English was a leitmotif in French writing about that country in the eigh- teenth century. Few portraits of the English failed to mention their "ex- cessive principles of patriotic honor," "inveterate hatred of the French," "silly idea of their own excellence," and "puerile relentlessness in mocking our fashions," not to mention their alleged tendency to label all foreigners "French dog," regardless of nationality. "They hate us and will always hate us," the Parisian lawyer Edmond Barbier wrote in his diary. 96
It would be easy to write these opinions off as mere hypocrisy, as if the French had never stooped to vilify perfidious Albion in their turn. Yet they actually point to a significant difference between French and English vari- eties of patriotic and national sentiment. In fact, vilification of national enemies and assertions of France's superiority had very narrow applica- tions under the old regime--far narrower than in the Revolution or the nineteenth century.