No More Learning

In the Breton village of Ploue? nour-Trez, the local cure? preached in Breton and translated
186 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the Constitution of 1791 into this language. 92 In Flanders, priests took the lead in translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and also pub- lished a short-lived Flemish-language newspaper. 93 In Perpignan in 1791, the bishop prevented the revolutionary abbe? Cambon from preaching, so Cambon instead founded a "patriotic school" and spent every evening and holiday lecturing in Catalan on the decrees of the Assembly, and more broadly on "the double duty of Christian and citizen. "94 Other priests enthusiastic about the Revolution set themselves up as their parishioners' instructors in French. The idea of priests as language instructors runs through the writings of Gre? goire's correspondents, and fully a third of them came from the clergy. 95
Yet despite all the efforts of these patriotic clerics, in the canons of revo- lutionary demonology the figure of the patois-speaking priest most often signified something very different: hideous reaction. Despite the wide- spread use of patois by Jacobin clubs and priests favorable to the Revolu- tion, the fear that counter-revolutionaries might somehow make occult use of patois to turn ignorant peasants against the Revolution gnawed power- fully at revolutionary officials. A certain Brassard, for example, offering his services to the Justice Ministry as a translator in 1792, warned that while the local priests had done much to translate the decrees of the Assembly, they had done so for the worst of reasons: "They had mutilated or enven- omed the terms, and had thus managed to make our Constitution seem odious not only to the people in our countryside, but also to our neigh- bors, the Belgians and Flemings. "96 Many of Gre? goire's correspondents similarly raised the specter of patois-speaking priests misleading their flocks. 97 The ex-Capuchin (and future Terrorist) Franc? ois Chabot, who himself tried to conduct patois classes for the peasantry, warned that "the members of the parish tremble at the sight of a pastor, who appears in their eyes like the Sultan of Constantinople. "98
It was Bare`re who managed best (as in his speeches on England) to dis- till a general fear of conspiracy into an elixir of concentrated hyperbole. In his report to the Convention on language, the deputy from the Pyrenees excoriated German and Italian dialects because these were the languages of the foreign enemy. He cast Breton and Basque beyond the pale, however, largely because of the use priests made of them. "It is with this barbaric in- strument of their superstitious thoughts [Breton] that the priests and the intriguers hold [the people] under their sway, direct their consciences and prevent citizens from knowing the laws and loving the Republic. "99 Only
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 187 with the teaching of French, he insisted, would the "empire des pre^tres"
(dominion of the priests) come to an end. 100
The Clerical Precedents
To get an inkling as to why the "dominion of the priests" weighed so heavily in the Revolution's linguistic initiatives, one can do no better than to read a response to Gre? goire's questionnaire sent by the Jacobin club of Auch, in Gascony. The anonymous author reported that nearly everyone in the area spoke Gascon in preference to French. However, he continued, "no one writes in patois, unless it is some cure? or some missionary monk. " He mentioned that the peasants did not know of the seventeenth-century Gascon poet Jean-Ge? raud d'Astros, nor, curiously, could the literate ones even manage to decipher his verses. They could, however, make out the Gascon hymns with which Capuchin missionaries had "flooded" the coun- tryside. "Our peasants," he concluded, "have less trouble reading in their patois everything which maintains their rusticity and their false ideas on religion. "101
Behind these brief and dismissive remarks lie two centuries of history which explain a great deal about the linguistic policies of the French Revo- lution. It is true that patois stirred relatively little concern in secular circles in France before the Revolution. The same was not true, however, of reli- gious circles. In this period, as part of the great enterprise of evangelization undertaken under the auspices of the Catholic Reformation, French priests devoted enormous time and energy to learning the many languages of France, speaking them, cataloguing them, and above all using them to spread the word of God. Far more than the still-hesitant efforts of a hand- ful of late eighteenth-century savants, it was this long-standing clerical en- gagement with the languages of the common people which, for the first time in France, seriously raised the questions of whether linguistic unifor- mity could be achieved in a modern state, what it would take to achieve it, and whether or not this achievement was desirable.
The involvement of the clergy stemmed from an obvious dilemma, took inspiration from a prominent model, and followed well-established exam- ples. The dilemma lay in the fact that whereas approximate, rough-and- ready translations between French and the local languages might suffice for many ordinary transactions (including most forms of interaction with the state), they were woefully inadequate when it came to convincing peo-
? 188 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ple of sacred truths and of the need to reform their most intimate behav- ior. 102 The model was that of the Apostles, in Acts, chapter II: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . When this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. " As for the examples, at least since late antiquity, the demands of Christian evangelization had provided the most important spur for the study and systematization of non-written tongues. 103 From the age of European exploration to the present day, Chris- tian missionaries have done the most to study and systematize such lan- guages in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and to compose their first written texts: translations of the Scriptures. 104 The same Jesuit Order which took the lead in studying supposedly primitive dialects in France was, at the same time, doing much the same work in relation to the Amerindian lan- guages of New France. 105
In France itself, the work began in earnest in the late sixteenth century, with Jesuits like Julien Maunoir in Brittany. He and his colleagues had little or no interest in language for its own sake: they wanted to save souls. Un- like their contemporaries at court, however, they could not afford to ignore linguistic differences. Maunoir himself spoke Breton fluently and insisted on the same skills from his missionaries. 106 Similar attitudes prevailed in the south. A bishop of Grasse wrote of his crusading predecessor, Antoine Godeau, that "if God had given him the choice of the gift of miracles or the Provenc? al language, he would have chosen to speak this language well, so as to instruct his people more faithfully. "107 In the Vivarais, another bishop asked his clergy, "If you don't know patois, what have you come here for, fools that you are? "108
The missionaries and crusading bishops not only spoke the local lan- guages, they also influenced them in important ways. To begin with, they wrote in them and worked to replace many traditional peasant composi- tions with their own. Maunoir composed scores of hymns in Breton, which he urged the peasantry to sing in place of their old profane songs, and the southern clergy did likewise. 109 Passion plays, largely composed by Jesuits, also proliferated in several dialects, as did religious poetry and funeral ora- tions. 110 Most important, a profusion of dialectal catechisms appeared in the seventeenth century. 111 The efforts of the reforming clergy in this do- main did, however, have one important limit: the local priests rather than the peasants themselves were to read these works and then, as spiritual in-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 189
? tercessors and cultural intermediaries, transmit the words orally to their flocks. 112
Nonetheless, thanks to these efforts, most written texts in the local lan- guages between 1600 and 1789, both manuscript and printed, were reli- gious in nature. 113 Indeed, if religious observance began to decline in French culture as a whole in the eighteenth century, the same cannot be said of the remnants of those local cultures tied to non-French lan- guages. 114 If anything, these non-French cultures grew more exclusively re- ligious in character as the educated classes abandoned the local tongues, leaving great Occitan baroque poets such as Pe`ire Godolin and Guillaume Ader without audiences or secular successors. When Gre? goire asked his correspondents in 1790 to list the principal uses of patois and any exam- ples they knew of patois publications, again and again the same responses came back to him: carols and hymns, books of devotions, reports on preaching and catechizing, and references to the clerical compilers of dic- tionaries and grammars. 115
The reforming clergy also influenced the development of the local dia- lects in another way. Even priests from humble backgrounds undertook their formal education in French and Latin and lost almost all contact with local dialects once they entered clerical milieus. 116 Maunoir tellingly la- mented that even his native-Breton missionaries had "forgotten part of the vocabulary of the Breton idiom, with the result that in their Catechisms and sermons they use many French words with Breton endings, and most of their listeners do not understand. "117 Priests who came from French- speaking areas often had not the slightest inkling of their parishioners' tongues. To carry out the program of evangelization, they needed instruc- tion in the local languages based on a formal knowledge of their grammar and vocabulary. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus saw the large-scale publication, for the first time, of French-Languedocien, French- Provenc? al, and French-Breton dictionaries and grammars, ranging from small, loosely bound affairs of a hundred pages to imposing, multivolume folio sets. 118 Given the great variation in dialects, the project entailed effec- tively devising standard versions of the local languages, the first ever at- tempted. Not surprisingly, later generations have looked back to these works as early examples of regionalism, but it was the demands of the clergy that usually generated them. Fully six of the seven Breton works were written explicitly for the use of the clergy, including one by Maunoir, a native French-speaker sometimes called the father of modern Breton. 119
190 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Did these various clerical projects have any effect on actual speech pat- terns? Certainly the priests had no ambition to impose a new "standard" Breton or Gascon on their flocks. Yet to the extent that the local languages developed a new lexicon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was not the lexicon of Enlightenment or of secular politics, but rather of Tridentine Catholicism. The French-Breton and French-Occitan dictionar- ies proposed translations for such terms as grace and he? re? sie (rendered in Breton as Huguenaudage, that is, Huguenotism), even Janse? nisme (most of- ten listed as a synonym for he? re? sie), and then gave detailed definitions to help parish priests explain the new words. 120 Evidence about actual speech patterns is sparse, but Yves Castan has tantalizingly suggested that liti- gants in Languedoc tended to use Occitan religious vocabulary to translate French legal terms. As already noted, Breton and Occitan specialists have demonstrated the persistence of religious terminology in revolutionary publications. 121
In short, even as the secular status of the local languages was falling pre- cipitously, the clergy, for its own evangelical reasons, was preserving for them a measure of dignity. The words of the Toulouse priest quoted at the start of this chapter make the point movingly. 122 The efforts of teaching, catechizing, and preaching that the priest referred to, and the linguistic knowledge that went into producing the catechism itself, show clearly that the non-French-speaking areas of France had not been lingering in some linguistic state of nature from which the revolutionaries would work to re- move them after 1789. The Catholic Church had already made strong at- tempts to influence linguistic practices.
Catholics and Protestants
Overall, this story offers insight into at least part of the revolutionary en- gagement with the local languages. In 1789-90, adherents of the Revolu- tion in the French provinces found themselves confronted with an awe- some and difficult task: helping the peasant masses become good citizens of a democratic polity. The only previous enterprise that had much rele- vance was the Catholic Reformation's attempt to turn the ancestors of those same peasants into good Catholics. In both cases, the same thing was at stake: the conversion of hearts and minds. So it is hardly surprising that the revolutionaries, and particularly those trained as clergymen them- selves, took the Church's earlier efforts as a sort of template for their own.
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 191
? In the provinces, revolutionary leaders eagerly launched their own cam- paigns of catechizing, sermonizing, hectoring, and instructing, particularly in their weekly "popular sessions" held mostly on Sundays and often led by priests, but also on special occasions such as that of July 14, when Sermet delivered his sermon. 123 From their clerical predecessors they took the no- tion that "no tongue reaches further into the heart" than the maternal, and so they carried out the campaigns in patois, not in French.
The story also suggests one reason why, among all the prominent revo- lutionaries, the one who cared most about language, and saw the unfortu- nate effects of language difference everywhere at work, was Henri Gre? goire. For not only did he grow up in rural Lorraine speaking a distinct dialect of French; as a vicar and parish priest in Lorraine villages from 1776 to 1789, he himself ministered to peasants who spoke the dialect exclusively. Fur- thermore, Gre? goire saw himself as a paradigmatic "bon cure? ," bringing what he later called "enlightened piety" to his flocks. Among other things, he established a library for their use. He therefore directly confronted the problem of how to communicate complex ideas to peasants. 124
Yet Gre? goire, unlike Sermet and many others, did not believe the local languages were suited for this sort of communication. He wished to make the peasants speak standard French, and it was his view which became the official policy of the First Republic and subsequent regimes. Why? Part of the answer lies in a quirk of the priest's biography--but it is a quirk that illuminates the overall course of the revolutionary policies in a surprising manner.
Gre? goire lived in Lorraine, in eastern France, and in the 1780s this re- gion had two intellectual poles: Paris, and also, perhaps even more impor- tant, Strasbourg, the capital of neighboring Alsace. A vibrant, bilingual city, still retaining something of the glow generated by its glorious role in the German Renaissance and Reformation, Strasbourg had an active circle of bilingual men of letters, drawn particularly from the venerable univer- sity and the clergy. They gathered in such settings as the informal "table society" of Johann Daniel Saltzmann (where Goethe first met Herder), the more ambitious French-language Socie? te? des Philanthropes, and the Ger- man-speaking Gesellschaft zur Ausbildung der Deutschen Sprache (Soci- ety for the Promotion of the German Language), which helped nurture early German Romanticism. 125 The Socie? te? des Philanthropes played what one biographer calls "an essential role in Gre? goire's intellectual develop- ment. "126 The young priest also developed a close friendship with two sons
192 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of a professor at Strasbourg's German Gymnasium: Jeremias-Jakob and Johann-Friedrich Oberlin. Jeremias-Jakob, a polymathic philosopher, phi- lologist, and classicist, was one of the first scholars to give serious study to regional languages, notably in a 1775 study entitled Essai sur le patois lorrain. 127 Gre? goire wrote Jeremias in 1798 of his own inquiry into patois: "It was you who once gave me the idea by your writings. "128
Just as important was Gre? goire's relation with Johann-Friedrich, the fa- mous "enlightened pastor" for whom Oberlin College is named. In his ru- ral Lorraine parish of Waldersbach, this Oberlin worked with maniacal en- ergy to advance education, improve roads, modernize farming techniques, and develop commerce. Significantly, he also struggled to eradicate the lo- cal patois, which he barely understood. According to one historian, he "succeeded, if not in eradicating it, at least in relegating it to the interior of the family and substituting French as the public and official language. "129 Gre? goire, ten years Oberlin's junior, fell entirely under the charismatic pastor's spell and called his conduct "a lesson and a reproach to many Catholic priests. " In 1794, he would persuade the Convention to commend Oberlin for his "contributions to the universalization of the French lan- guage. "130 In sum, Gre? goire's attitude towards patois, so different from that of most Catholic clergy, derived in large part from these two men. 131
The Oberlins' attitude towards common speech, in turn, stemmed above all from their Protestant heritage. During the Reformation, Protestant cler- ics, like their Catholic counterparts, had embarked on ambitious programs of evangelizing the peasantry. Yet they quickly took a different approach to language differences, because of their insistence that the faithful read the Scriptures for themselves. While Catholic priests could render the message of the Gospel orally into the hundreds of distinct dialects that existed at the time, producing printed texts in each dialect was clearly impossible, in the first place because of the limitations of the technology, and also because faulty translations could conceivably produce theological error. The Protestants therefore strove for amalgamation and uniformization: the production of a single, standard translation that could appeal to as broad a population as possible, followed by education to bring groups initially in- capable of comprehending it into the charmed circle. Protestants also pre- ferred to standardize only the speech of the princes who stood at the head of the new churches. For instance, the High German of Luther's Saxony be- came the basis for the standard form of the language. 132 When practical difficulties proved too great, however, they could also opt for producing
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 193
? printed, standardized versions of widely spoken minority languages such as Welsh. Significantly, the two known revolutionary-era proposals for raising at least some regional languages to the level of standard languages, equal to French, came from Protestants: Jeremias-Jakob Oberlin, and the Montauban agriculturist Antoine Gautier-Sauzin. 133
The case of Protestant Great Britain, with its large non-English-speaking populations in Wales, Ireland, and Highland Scotland, provides a particu- larly useful comparison with France. Draconian legislation on language in these areas dates from long before the late eighteenth century--from the early years of the Reformation, when Henry VIII's ministers feared that the Celtic lands would provide a refuge for Catholicism. 134 Thus the 1536 Act of Union between England and Wales commanded Welsh justices and sheriffs to use only English in their proceedings. A year later, a law for Ire- land stated in its preamble that "There is nothing which doth more conteyne and keep many of [the King's] Subjects of the said Land in a cer- tain savage and wilde kind and manner of living, than the diversitie that is betwixt them in Tongue, Language, Order and Habit. "135 The first Welsh re- ligious primer appeared in 1547, but in Ireland and Scotland it was only af- ter attempts to impose English had failed miserably that efforts were made to establish standard versions of Irish and Scots Gaelic, with their own ap- proved translations of the Scriptures. 136
Had Protestantism succeeded in France, it is virtually certain that the French language would have spread far more rapidly than it did. The Protestant churches that mushroomed in the mid-sixteenth century used the French of the court and the high nobility almost exclusively, even in the south of the country. 137 The Calvinist preachers who swarmed through the Occitan-speaking regions in those years came bearing small, cheap printed books which taught literacy, the French language, and the new faith all at once. 138 The only exception occurred in the tiny remnant of the Kingdom of Navarre north of the Pyrenees, the only place where an Occitan dialect remained the official language. 139
In short, when Gre? goire proposed to abolish patois and universalize the use of French in France, he was effectively introducing a Protestant solu- tion to the problem of linguistic diversity. It was not the only possible Protestant solution. Conceivably, Gre? goire might have heeded Jeremias- Jakob Oberlin's advice and called for raising at least some local speech to the level of standard, official languages. Instead, he ended up following Johann-Friedrich and historical precedent and opted for a single standard:
194 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the language of power. Interestingly, in later years Gre? goire's ideas on lan- guage earned him abuse as a crypto-Protestant, for after the Terror one of his principal causes was the translation of the Catholic liturgy itself into French. 140
The Jacobins and the Law
The question remains, of course, why Gre? goire's "Protestant" solution should have had such great appeal in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Most obviously, one answer is the French Revolution's violent turn against Catholicism, which began in the debates over the Civil Constitution and reached a climax in the violent campaign of de-Christianization launched by the Jacobins in 1793, and later Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. Bare`re's report on language, infused as it was by violent anticlericalism, certainly reflected this rejection of the Christian God.
Another reason may have to do with the attitude taken towards language by those Catholic cousins of Calvin, the Jansenists, who had had enormous influence in eighteenth-century French political culture, and nowhere more than in the religious debates that led up to the Civil Constitution. 141 From the mid-seventeenth century, these advocates of rigorous Augustin- ianism helped produce a new French translation of the Bible and defended the legitimacy both of translation and of Bible study for all, just as Luther and Calvin had done. 142 Intriguingly, Jansenism had particular purchase in Lorraine, and after the Revolution Henri Gre? goire became an ardent de- fender of the Jansenist legacy. The extent to which he followed this reli- gious current himself as a young man remains a matter of debate, however, and there is no direct evidence to tie Jansenism to the revolutionary lan- guage projects. 143
Perhaps of greater importance to the drive for imposing French as the national language was a fundamental shift in the status of the written word in French culture during the revolutionary period. Marie-He? le`ne Huet and Sarah Maza have suggested that during the Revolution, "the traditional symbolism of power, which centered on the visible, theatricalized body of the father-king, was displaced by a competing semiotic system, which vested social authority in such linguistic abstractions as 'public opinion' or 'the Law. '"144 Carla Hesse has similarly pointed to a growing conviction on the part of revolutionary criminal authorities that written words, particu- larly in the form of private correspondence, provided the most authentic
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 195
? portrait of defendants' most intimate feelings. 145 In a society where such a shift was taking place, it follows that the full exercise of citizenship de- manded a full understanding, not simply of the principles of the Revolu- tion in general, but of the specific written laws that incarnated most au- thentically the convictions and decisions taken by the sovereign people.
Indeed, it was precisely the problem of how to teach the common people the new written law that centrally preoccupied the radicals who argued for the elimination of patois. The problems that linguistic diversity might have posed for the peasants' active participation in politics--for acting as elec- tors or elected officials, for instance--received far less attention. "The peo- ple must understand the laws to sanction and obey them," Gre? goire wrote in his report to the Convention. 146 His correspondents echoed this idea, and again and again voiced the fear that translating the written law would expose it to the danger of mistranslation, whether innocent or malevolent. Chabot cautioned that "an insidiously translated word can totally change the meaning of a law. " Fonvielhe, a cure? of Bergerac, wrote: "However well the law is explained to the people, they will interpret it badly, they will sus- pect the fidelity of the translation . . . they will stick to their own ideas, in- terpret it themselves according to their own personal interests. "147 At Aix, in 1790, certain members of the Jacobin club opposed the public explana- tion of laws in Provenc? al on the grounds that "only the legislator has the right to interpret the law . . . it can happen that the instructor without meaning to can make a mistake, or even that a well-explained decree will be poorly understood by an almost entirely illiterate audience. "148
These warnings suggest that the radical revolutionaries found them- selves in much the same situation vis-a`-vis linguistic difference as Protestant reformers who insisted that individual believers read holy Scrip- ture for themselves. If what mattered was access to a text endowed with quasi-sacred qualities, then all citizens needed to know the language in which the text was written.
(The revolutionaries assumed that a perfectly clear, rational legislation would need no particular legal expertise to be un- derstood. ) This need would have seemed particularly great at the height of the Terror. When deception and treason seemed to lurk almost behind ev- ery visage, representatives of the people like Gre? goire and Chabot could no more imagine entrusting the political salvation of the citizenry to poten- tially deceitful translators than pious Protestants could imagine entrusting the care of their souls to Catholic priests. In these circumstances, regardless of the practical difficulties facing Gre? goire's plan to eliminate patois, the
196 The Cult of the Nation in France
? Convention could hardly refuse its support or refrain from acting to dis- courage translation wherever possible.
To conclude, then, although the French revolutionary engagement with the language issue did not derive from religious precedents alone, in a real sense these precedents structured the debates and lurked behind them at every stage. The initial efforts to use patois to spread the revolutionary message followed from the evangelizing enterprises of the Counter-Refor- mation clergy (and indeed were partly carried out by a portion of that same clergy, who tried for a time to mix the old and new gospels). Later attempts to impose linguistic uniformity arose in part from suspicion that ill-intentioned priests were using patois as a sort of occult, mysterious tool to control a superstitious and ignorant peasantry. These efforts also stemmed, however, from much the same concerns about the relationship of the common people to the law as those that were first articulated by Protestants, concerns which did not lose their relevance when linguistic di- versity became a secular, rather than religious issue. The revolutionaries were seeking to seize the linguistic power of the priest for themselves, and this meant either destroying or seizing control of his occult language: pa- tois. In the Year II, they opted decisively for the former, just as Luther had done before them.
If the religious precedents dominated in this manner, they did so above all because, during the Revolution, the question of linguistic diversity was essentially a rural question, and the world of the peasant was still the world of the priest. For revolutionaries seeking to reach into the hearts and minds of the peasant masses and to effect what amounted to a mass con- version, the priests offered the only available model. At the same time, the priest himself remained the dominant cultural influence in the country- side, and had to be overcome if the Revolution were to triumph. Peasants might not have had salons and cabinets de lecture and academies struc- turing their cultural lives, the way educated city dwellers did, but, as Gre? goire's correspondents themselves readily attested, they had a curate who relayed news, told them what (if anything) to read, and possibly even made notes on their grammar and vocabulary. In a real sense, he was their salon and cabinet de lecture and "Acade? mie de Patois. " He gave a structure to their cultural lives, and the linguistic reformers knew they could not pursue their own program without either winning him over or in some way replacing him.
Until 1789, the priests carrying out their projects of evangelization in lo-
National Language and the Revolutionary Crucible 197
? cal languages operated in virtually a separate sphere from elite discussions of the nation and the patrie, but the coming of the Revolution marked the eventual doom of their work on behalf of France's many "maternal lan- guages. " Thereafter, a state newly committed to molding the diverse popu- lations of France into a single nation ran unavoidably, and at full speed, into the previous efforts of the Catholic clergy to mold them all into a sin- gle church. It was at this moment that the French state came to share the clergy's perception of France as radically multilingual, and also to interpret multilingualism as a potent barrier to the construction of a properly revo- lutionary nation. And it was at this moment, therefore, that the idea of French as a uniform national language, rather than just the language of an educated elite, acquired the powerful ideological charge which it has re- tained ever since. As a result, the regional languages have now become vir- tually extinct (with--again--the exception of Alsace, which spent much of the Third Republic under German rule). Recent reforms by the Fifth Re- public allowing them to be taught in public schools only underline how small a threat they now pose. Indeed, if Hyacinthe Sermet were to return today to Toulouse and deliver once again his July 14 sermon, he would find virtually no one capable of understanding him.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
Toward the Present Day and the End of Nationalism
We do not have to renounce the nation. France cannot live without its own identity. The French people cannot live as a people whose destiny is to melt away among others.
--lionel jospin, interviewed in le monde, january 7, 1999
? "We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians. " Historians of nation- alism delight in quoting this famous saying of the Risorgimento leader Massimo d'Azeglio, but usually only to echo his own point, namely that the formal creation of the Italian nation had little meaning to most of its new citizens. 1 Whatever their formal nationality, they remained first and foremost, in language, customs, historical traditions, and political alle- giances, inhabitants of their villages and regions: Sicilians, Piedmontese, Tuscans, Calabrians, Romans, Umbrians, Venetians; not "Italians. "
Yet the saying is important for another reason. It perfectly and concisely expresses what I have argued in this book lies at the heart of modern na- tionalism: the idea of the nation as a political artifact whose construction takes precedence over all other political tasks. This idea is today utterly fa- miliar. In the catalogue of the Library of Congress, the phrase "nation- building" itself appears in the titles of no fewer 334 books, going back as far as 1902 and dealing with subjects ranging from Estonian architecture to the Singapore police. 2 Yet this familiarity has bred a forgetfulness of ori- gins. The idea of taking a population, en masse, and transforming every- thing about it--from political allegiances to dress, manners, and daily lan- guage--so as to "build a nation" is not an eternal feature of human history, but a specifically modern phenomenon. Before 1750 or so, the idea of im- posing the same language and "the same, uniform ideas" (Rabaut's phrase) on Basque shepherds and Breton fishermen, Picard farm laborers and
198
Conclusion 199
? Lyonnais servants, Parisian lawyers and Marseilles merchants, to say noth- ing of Versailles courtiers, would have struck observers as self-evidently absurd. It was only in the later eighteenth century that it became thinkable, as Marie-Joseph Che? nier put it, "to form Frenchmen, to endow the na- tion with its own, unique physiognomy. " It was this shift which made nationalism itself possible: the shift from treating nations as organic bod- ies that grow and wither according to biological rhythms, to treating them as man-made entities that humans freely create through the exercise of political will.
I have argued that nationalism took shape in France in the eighteenth century in response to a dynamic that was primarily, although by no means exclusively, religious. Building on the work of several philosophers and social theorists, I suggested that in the decades around the year 1700, a series of religious, philosophical, political and material changes combined to produce a fundamental shift in the way educated French men and women saw the world around them. They came to perceive God as absent from the sphere of human affairs. They felt the need to exclude potentially homicidal religious passions from all but carefully delineated areas of hu- man activity. And they experienced material and political changes which made it possible for them to think of France as a uniform and homo- geneous space. These far-reaching cultural shifts allowed them to imagine forms of harmonious human coexistence whose ordering principles did not derive from any entity or authority external to the human community itself. An important part of this change was the birth or transformation of foundational concepts that allowed the French to represent these forms of coexistence, including the concepts of socie? te? , civilisation, public, and also nation and patrie.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, these concepts were devel- oped and contested in a variety of contexts. Nation and patrie were at the heart of powerful disputes over the nature of the French constitution. They were systematically deployed by the monarchy to mobilize resources for the war effort against Britain during the Seven Years' War. And they were at the heart of the "cult of great men" which had so prominent a place in French culture at the end of the old regime. As a result, by the time the French monarchy shuffled toward collapse in the 1780s, nation and patrie had emerged as the key organizing principles in French political debate, put forward loudly and insistently as justification and legitimation for nearly all political claims. Yet precisely as the regime did collapse, opening
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? up the awesome question of how to replace it, doubts arose concerning the French nation's very existence. The word nation was coming to signify not merely a particular group of people living on a particular territory, but an intense political and spiritual union of like-minded citizens--a union that manifestly remained to be built, and whose construction stood logi- cally prior to all other political tasks. The Revolution itself therefore came to embody the odd paradox at the heart of modern nationalism: claiming as justification and legitimation a nation which, as even its adherents admit, is not yet there.
What would it take to "make Frenchmen"? In 1789, the more republi- can-minded of the revolutionaries still thought of the problem in largely classical terms, essentially treating France as an ancient city-state writ large, and prescribing measures that a Pericles or Cicero would have found appropriate for stimulating patriotic, civic devotion: spectacles, in the form of festivals and theater; speeches, statuary, and inscriptions celebrat- ing the great men of the past; some form of civic religion. Rousseau, of course, had advocated precisely these measures in his political works. As I have argued, all these measures also had important Catholic precedents, although they went largely unacknowledged as such.
But the radicalization of the Revolution forever altered the terms of the debate, and, ironically, forced France's would-be nation-builders to em- brace far more directly and intensely the example of the institution they most despised: the Roman Catholic Church. For during the Revolution it became clear that building the nation was not, and could never be, the same thing as building a classical republican city-state. It was something that re- quired not only a transformation of the character of some twenty-eight million human beings spread over a large territory, but even more impor- tant, the homogenization of those twenty-eight million human beings, the reduction of their tremendous diversity to a single, national essence, and the overcoming of supposed mass ignorance. Making Frenchmen did not just entail turning a small population of sociable, elegant, pleasure-loving fops into grave, sober republican citizens. It required giving a civic educa- tion to millions of people still believed to be in thrall to the worst supersti- tions, uneducated--indeed heavily illiterate--and a great many speaking little or no French. Faced with this monumental task, the revolutionaries adopted the methods of the Reformation-era priesthood, proposing to send their own well-drilled republican versions of the Jesuits out into the countryside to teach, persuade, and indoctrinate by every possible means,
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? and to provide the diverse population with a common education, a com- mon set of allegiances, and a common language.
The radical revolutionaries did not come close to succeeding in this goal. In the midst of war against external and internal enemies alike and in the throes of economic collapse, they did not have the resources to build chains of boarding schools or to send armies of French-language teachers into the provinces. Indeed, by far the most successful instrument of na- tional integration created by the radical revolutionaries was one that was never thought of primarily in these terms, and in which patriotic educa- tion, while provided, took a back seat to more immediate and prosaic tasks: the army. Here, men drafted from the various provinces of France, kept away from home for months or years, speaking French, singing re- publican songs, and receiving the occasional patriotic lesson or group reading of Jacobin newspapers, found a unity and forged a common iden- tity that civilian institutions were as yet incapable of imparting to the gen- eral population. 3
Yet despite its failure to achieve integration, the revolutionary program remains a milestone in the history of nationalism, for it not only engen- dered the idea of building a homogeneous, unified nation in a modern, di- verse, European polity, but provided a practical plan for doing so, modeled heavily on the practical, and at least partially successful efforts of the Ref- ormation-era clergy to reshape the peasantry into a new community of be- lievers. The ideas first developed in the crucible of revolutionary conflict would resound throughout the history of France, and beyond France, down to the present day. D'Azeglio's saying about making Italians, uncon- sciously echoing Che? nier's about making Frenchmen, is itself a good piece of evidence for this diffusion. 4
During the two centuries since the Revolution, French nationalism has hardly remained static or uncontested. In the early nineteenth century, virtually all its forms took a strongly historical turn. Whereas the radical revolutionaries had briefly envisaged the construction of the nation as an entirely new process, set upon foundations swept clean of the corrupt his- torical detritus of despotism and feudalism, nineteenth-century national- ists for the most part preferred the language of "regeneration" and "recov- ery. " Like many of their eighteenth-century predecessors, they envisaged a new structure, but one lovingly put together out of hallowed, ancient material. In keeping with their counterparts across Europe, they engaged
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? in a massive effort of recuperating, preserving, and displaying what now came to be called the nation's heritage or patrimony, including folklore, artworks, music, monuments, costumes, and historical personalities such as Joan of Arc. The construction of the nation through the rediscovery of its past animated new cultural forms ranging from the museum to the sou- venir shop to the postage stamp. Of course, much of this supposed redis- covery amounted to pure invention. 5
This historical turn also helped open the door for a new, if limited, toleration of regional diversity even among committed republicans. As Gre? goire himself had believed (following Oberlin and other local savants), insofar as patois reflected the unchanging mental world of the peasant, it offered a glimpse into the remote past and thus deserved study and preser- vation. 6 Radical republicans of the late nineteenth century saw no contra- diction in advocating the universal teaching of French and also supporting the folkloric Occitan revival movement known as the Fe? librige, which treated the southern dialects not as potential languages of state, busi- ness, or education, but as living, oral museum exhibits (its leader, Fre? de? ric Mistral, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his pastoral writings in Provenc? al). When coupled with the Romantic movement's celebration of countryside and wilderness, this new attitude towards the regions fostered a widespread perception and celebration of France as a large patrie consist- ing of a mosaic of distinct, but organically linked "little patries. "7
Within this broad framework, a new variety of French nationalism emerged which defined itself in direct opposition to the republican, revo- lutionary version. This monarchical, ultra-Catholic nationalism, expressed most forcefully in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writ- ings of Charles Maurras, Maurice Barre`s, and the political platforms of the far-right Action Franc? aise, saw the national past not merely as a heritage, but as a literal destination. 8 For them, France's regional diversity in no sense constituted an obstacle to be overcome. Regional cultures were to be powerfully and consciously strengthened, not merely to be celebrated as folklore. The Third Republic's efforts to reduce France's natural variety represented, from this point of view, the true alien presence in French life. Going further, Barre`s, in his novel Les de? racine? s ("The Uprooted"), associ- ated these efforts not with the French Enlightenment or Revolution so much as with German, above all Kantian philosophy. 9 Significantly, until recent gestures in favor of the now-moribund regional languages by the Fifth Republic, the only regime in modern French history to attempt to re-
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? introduce regional speech into the school system as anything more than an aid to the teaching of French was precisely the one regime most animated by this right-wing nationalism: Vichy. In 1941, it permitted an hour and a half per week of instruction in the local dialects. 10 Needless to say, in this vision of the French nation, "Frenchness" was not something made, but something inherited, something in the blood, even if political action was still necessary to purge France of impure alien influences.
If this right-wing French nationalism was so at odds with the republi- can, revolutionary version, the reason was as much religious as political, for its advocates consciously and explicitly rejected the transformations in the religious sphere that had occurred in France since 1700--indeed, in important respects, since the end of the sixteenth century. In their writings France remained a Christian, Catholic nation, part of a great and unbro- ken chain that extended from the people through the king and the pope to God and the kingdom of heaven. In their attempts to recreate an idealized medieval world of hierarchy and deference, modern right-wing French na- tionalists asserted a role for the (ultramontane) church in French affairs that a Richelieu or Louis XIV, to say nothing of a Mirabeau or Robespierre, would have found intolerable. It was perhaps precisely because these na- tionalists considered the nation so directly and completely subject to exter- nal determinations, and so firmly a part of a larger universal scheme, that they could depict the national community itself in such limited and exclu- sive (indeed, racial) terms. Significantly, important aspects of this modern right-wing nationalism recall sixteenth-century French writings on the na- tion. In this early period, too, writers tended to put a strong emphasis on blood and descent, presented radical regional and linguistic diversity as a natural tapestry, and of course stressed the place of France in a larger, di- vinely inspired hierarchy. 11 For modern right-wing nationalists, the ulti- mate symbol of France--still the key symbol for the extreme-right Na- tional Front--was Joan of Arc, the woman who saved France in the name of God and in direct response to his command. In short, this is a national- ism which, while ultimately owing as much as any other variety to the "dis- enchantment of the world," nonetheless set itself explicitly against this dis- enchantment and denied it.
This right-wing nationalism has had great importance at certain mo- ments in modern French history (for instance, the time of the Dreyfus Af- fair). In the final analysis, however, it has belonged consistently to a minor- ity. The only regime that systematically attempted to act upon it and to
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? remake the nation according to its tenets was Vichy, which owed its exis- tence to a foreign power. Even the Restoration of 1815-30 mostly at- tempted a futile compromise between the old regime and the French Revo- lution. The July Monarchy and the two empires, not to mention the republics that have now existed for over 130 years, have all remained essen- tially loyal to the national idea as it was formulated under the First Repub- lic. Of course, the republican idea itself has hardly remained static since 1794, and the republican left fully shared in the nineteenth century's his- torical turn. One has only to consider the importance of Joan of Arc to a convinced republican like Jules Michelet to recognize this point (although Michelet would not have granted his female contemporaries the same free- dom of expression he praised in Joan--it was one thing to be a saint, an- other to be a citizen).
Thus I would argue that, in its fundamental elements, there has been a basic continuity in French republican nationalism over the past two centu- ries. The republicans, unlike their opponents on the right, distinguished between the past as heritage and the past as blueprint, and they remained true to the conviction that constructing the nation amounted to more than simply purging an idealized medieval structure of ethnic and ideological contaminants. As Michelet wrote, the era when religion still permeated French life had definitively ended, and "extinguished Christianity" had passed its torch to the republican patrie. 12 In the last pages of this book, I will speculate briefly on this continuity and on its implications for what is often called the "crisis of French national identity"--what I would in fact define as the end of nationalism in France.
The most basic element of continuity involved the conception of the na- tion as a product of political will. French republican nationalists have al- ways expressed the idea of the nation as a political construction in the most pure sense, because they have insisted that the nation can remake it- self, if not wholly as it pleases, then at least with great liberty. From this perspective, what ultimately defines the nation is less history, or race, or language, or a particular territory, although these remain important, but the common desire to join together as a nation, accepting common laws, values, institutions, and perhaps a common culture and language as well. Likewise, from this perspective the particular frontiers of France are not sacrosanct, and the status of citizen versus foreigner is defined less by birth or mother tongue than by political stance and cultural sympathies. The revolutionaries pushed these arguments to an extreme. "The only foreign-
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? ers in France are the bad citizens," Tallien famously declared in 1795, while counter-revolutionaries were frequently dismissed as "foreigners," and "barbarian" ones at that--like the English, they had willfully and per- versely written themselves out of the universal human community cen- tered on France. 13 By contrast, foreign sympathizers of the Revolution flocked to Paris, and, for a time, many easily gained French citizenship. 14 Republican nationalism was, as it is now said, assimilationist, or "inte- grationist. "15
The region which has offered the most important illustration of this conception of the nation is Alsace. Largely German in language and Lu- theran in religion, under the old regime it still possessed important ves- tiges of German imperial law and noble privileges. Indeed, such was the fluid and porous nature of early modern frontiers that many areas of the province still fell under the feudal jurisdiction of, and paid feudal dues to, lords living beyond the Rhine. The city of Strasbourg had a glorious Ger- man past as a center of German humanism and the German Reformation. Even in the 1760s, as we have seen, its influential Society for the Promotion of the German Language helped give birth to German Romanticism. 16 But none of this mattered to the deputy Merlin de Douai, who declared in 1790: "What do people of Alsace, or the French people, care about those treaties which, in the time of despotism, joined the first to the second? The Alsatian people joined the French people because it wished to; it is there- fore its will alone, and not the Peace of Westphalia, which has legitimized the union. "17 And none of these qualities mattered eighty years later, when the newly united German empire defeated France and annexed Alsace, claiming as justification its German language, history, and race. It was pre- cisely in response to these German claims that Ernest Renan delivered his famous lecture, "Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation? " ("What is a Nation? ") which summarizes better than any other single text the republican nationalist creed: "A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feel- ing of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future . . . A nation's existence is, if you will par- don the metaphor, a daily plebiscite. "18 Renan continues to be cited copi- ously in France in discussions and defense of the republican ideal of the nation, including in speeches by President Chirac. 19
Yet despite this ideal, French republican nationalism over the past two centuries has also been distinguished by something else, something that comes close to contradicting it. For despite the frequent declarations that
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? membership in the French nation depends on the will of individual citi- zens freely to embrace the elements of a common nationality, in practice French republicans have never quite trusted individuals to come to the correct decision on their own. As we have seen, in the Revolution they sought to ensure the proper result through a concerted program of what can only be called indoctrination, following on the model of the priest- hood. Recall Rabaut Saint-Etienne's words on how the French could in fact be transformed into a "new people": what was needed was "an infallible means of transmitting, constantly and immediately, to all the French at once, the same, uniform, ideas. "20 This is not quite the same thing as a "daily plebiscite," any more than adherence to correct Catholic doctrine was a matter of choice for the peasants under the old regime.
We should be careful before using this reason to label French republi- can nationalism, as an influential recent study has done, "collectivist-au- thoritarian," in contrast to a supposedly "libertarian-individualist" Anglo- American alternative. 21 Still less should we assume that this coerciveness implies any necessary relationship between French republican nationalism and the Terror. It is too often forgotten that if French republicans brought about the Terror, French republicans also ended it, and after less than two years (the Thermidorians were admittedly the least savory of deliverers, an evaluation that has significantly colored later interpretations). A total mili- tary defeat was not required to end it, nor was it necessary to wait decades for an institutionalized Terror to grow slack and corrupt and ultimately to collapse under its own weight, as was the case with the twentieth-century dictatorships sometimes described as the spiritual heirs of the French Rev- olution. In fact, since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French republican nationalism has coexisted with a succession of generally democratic and tolerant regimes, and its record as far as minorities within the nation are concerned, though far from ideal, certainly stands compar- ison with the United States or Britain. Today, critics often condemn France's Third Republic for suppressing the language and culture of Celtic Brittany, but who would trade the history of Brittany, or even that of the Vende? e, hideous as it is, for that of Ulster?
Let us remember that most modern nationalist movements, regardless of whether we choose to label them "civic," "cultural," or other, have in- sisted on some form of compulsory patriotic education to instill common values, loyalty to the nation, and perhaps also a common culture and lan- guage. French republican nationalism is no different from others in this re-
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? spect, and we should give due consideration to the centrifugal forces that nationalists have struggled against before condemning them for it. What has made French republican nationalism different has been the astonishing missionary zeal with which the goal has been pursued--with which the apostles of the nation have set out to "make Frenchmen," the way the Jesu- its set out to "make Christians" in China or the Americas.
I would go so far as to argue that French republican nationalism owed its peculiar character and extraordinary vigor, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, precisely to the extraordinary sense of mis- sion and purpose that animated its principal agents: administrators, sol- diers, and above all educators. In this sense, France's experience has dif- fered greatly from that of its neighbors. 22 Generations of teachers formed in the e? coles normales were trained to see themselves not merely as instruc- tors, but as the "black hussars of the Republic" sent out to convert the young and to form them into good republican French citizens. Further- more, French republican nationalism was genuinely universalistic, for what gave it its purpose was, in addition to building the nation, expanding it indefinitely so as to embrace as large a portion of humanity as possible.
The first large effort to fulfill this mission, under the First Republic and then under the Napoleonic Empire (which inherited some, though hardly all, of the Republic's ideas and principles), was a brief blazing triumph that quickly collapsed into an abject failure. This effort was, of course, a mili- tary one, which expanded the frontiers of France across Europe, in the pro- cess integrating areas without a shred of French tradition seamlessly into the system of French de? partements. By 1812, in theory, Schleswig-Holstein and the Adriatic coast of Croatia belonged to France every bit as much as the Arde`che or the Morbihan. The effort was a failure in part because the French soldiers and administrators proceeded with brazen hypocrisy, de- claring their new subjects the equals of French citizens while ruthlessly ex- ploiting them for the war effort. The hypocrisy was not all-pervasive; in the last years of the Empire, more than a third of Napoleon's (admittedly pow- erless) Senate came from territories well outside France's 1789 bound- aries. 23 Nonetheless, the French attitudes spurred widespread resentment and rebellion, which in turn led to the birth of new nationalist move- ments throughout Europe, all of which tended to define themselves against France and the French.
Yet after the defeat of the Empire, and particularly from 1870 to 1940, efforts to fulfill the early republican national mission met with consider-
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? ably more success, despite France's reduced military capacities and inter- national prestige. These efforts aimed at three separate and very different population groups: French peasants, inhabitants of France's colonial terri- tories, and foreign immigrants. In each case, the republican state set itself a "civilizing mission" whereby assimilation into civilization meant--as had often been the case in the eighteenth century--assimilation into the patrie.
Peasants, of course, were the original targets of the First Republic's ef- forts at national integration, from its grandiose plans for public education and the deployment of newspapers like La Feuille villageoise, to the "public sessions" of the Jacobin clubs and the language policies discussed in the last chapter. These peasants were the French citizens routinely described by their educated, urban compatriots in the nineteenth century as belonging to an alien, animalistic world. Adolphe Blanqui in 1851 could speak of "two different peoples living on the same land a life so different that they seem foreign to each other. "24 True, after the Terror, and particularly after Napoleon's rise to power, the campaign to make Frenchmen out of these country-dwellers fell into abeyance. Universal primary education, the most important means of conversion for the Jacobins, remained a distant dream until well into the nineteenth century. 25 After 1830, however, the July Mon- archy began to set up a nationwide system of public schools. The Second Republic of 1848 revived the ideals of the First, and in the 1860s Louis-Na- poleon's Ministry of Education began to formulate the problem of peasant integration in a systematic manner, notably carrying out the first truly large-scale survey of the spoken languages of France. In 1867, the reform- ing minister Victor Duruy again put forward an ambitious plan for univer- sal elementary schooling.