No More Learning

As we will see in more detail in the next chapter (and as Dziembowski has exhaustively demonstrated), the campaign derived not only from the metaphorical warfare taking place in palaces and courtrooms, but from the very real Seven Years' War against England in the 1750s and 1760s. 65 Dur- ing this period, the ministry made unprecedented efforts to stimulate and publicize public expressions of patriotism, promoting plays like Belloy's, soliciting ostentatious donations to the war effort, and encouraging the publication of violently Anglophobic pamphlets and poetry. Yet even at the height of the war, officials never lost sight of the internal politi- cal stakes, and seized on the potent language of patriotism to discredit parlementaire and philosophique opponents alike. It is hardly a coincidence that they chose as their chief propagandist against Britain a man who had already proved to be their most effective writer against both domestic ene- mies: the caustic and slippery Jacob-Nicolas Moreau (he wrote the virulent anti-philosophe play Les cacouacs, as well as of some of the most important pieces of anti-parlementaire propaganda). Moreau himself recounted that
66 The Cult of the Nation in France
? the royal minister who recruited him in 1755 to write against the British lumped foreign and domestic operations together quite openly. 66 In 1759- 60, Moreau ceased publication of an anti-English broadsheet and launched his new, short-lived newspaper devoted to the praise of French patriotism and to the excoriation of parlements and philosophes: Le Moniteur franc? ois (The French Monitor). 67 The voluminous anti-Enlightenment literature of this period routinely conflated the philosophes with the national enemy across the Channel and equated cosmopolitan indifference to the patrie with treason, pure and simple. 68 "Fanaticism for the patrie is legitimate zeal," a royalist poet from 1767 strikingly declared. And he continued, in anticipation of Saint-Just: "Il faut pour la Patrie une chaleur sublime / Un amour qui soit passion; / Que l'indiffe? rence est un crime / La tie? deur une trahison" [For the Patrie, a sublime heat is needed, a love that is a passion; Here indifference is a crime, lack of enthusiasm amounts to treason]. 69
This royal patriotism, which overshadowed all other use of patriotic lan- guage in France before 1771, was a remarkable phenomenon. In one sense, it harked back to late medieval and Renaissance traditions of glorifying both France and the king, of merging the two within a single, sacred aura. 70 But in several critical ways it would have been inconceivable without the intellectual and material transformations described in the last chapter. Consider, for instance, the crown's use of print to reach "public opinion. " Organized print campaigns had precedents, of course, but now the crown was conceiving its interventions not as something exceptional, a strategy suited for moments of national crisis (such as the Wars of Religion or the Fronde), but as a normal, permanent feature of political life. Rather than just sponsor pamphlets to intervene on particular topics, the royalists now also funded periodicals such as Moreau's Moniteur franc? ois, which aimed to have a continuous and permanent effect. As Moreau himself remarked in the first issue, he saw his task less as political argument than political ed- ucation: "The instruction of men is one of the principles of all political governments. Why should it be neglected in the case of a people over whom opinion itself has so much power? "71 Secondly, in citing the extent of French patriotism as a justification for royal authority, the royal apolo- gists implicitly accepted the argument, enunciated by d'Aguesseau and others, that patriotism constituted a measure of a regime's moral worth. Just like its opponents, the crown was treating the patrie as a foundational concept, a fundamental ground against which to measure other forms of human coexistence.
The Politics of Patriotism 67
? Finally, royalist literature consistently identified "patriotism" not with a political principle, but with an emotion: the love of the French for their kings, as in Belloy's lines about the "adoration" of the king or Beausobre's equation of love for the patrie and love for one's master. In 1749, a year of bitter conflict between Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, the Acade? mie Franc? aise made "the love of the French for their kings" the subject of its annual poetry competition, and the entries sang inflated paeans to the in- tertwined figures of king and country. 72 Down to the end of the old regime, the idea that "the Patriotism of the French [is] principally founded on their love for their kings" (to cite an exemplary 1762 speech by the lawyer Basset de la Marelle) appeared incessantly, like a leitmotif. 73 As Thomas Kaiser has shown, the theme of the mutual love of king and subjects be- came a mainstay of royal ideology under Louis XIV and dominated the propaganda of his successor, who ostentatiously adopted the title "The Well-Beloved" after the demonstrative (if stage-managed) public relief at his recovery from illness in 1744. 74 Kaiser argues that royal apologists first adopted the concept to counter images of Louis XIV as a warrior king who cared more for conquest than for his subjects' welfare.
But the appeal to love needs to be situated not only in relation to the monarchy's immediate political strategies, but to the broader intellectual context of "disenchantment," philosophical skepticism, and suspicion of organized religion. In the eighteenth century, it was becoming more and more difficult to justify absolute monarchy by God's will alone, as royal apologists like Bossuet had tried to do (with an insistence that hinted at desperation). The traditional rituals and rhetoric designed to render the monarchy sacred were losing their effect. 75 Yet replacing scriptural jus- tification with one grounded in secular ideas of natural law and a social contract, even in Hobbes's absolutist version, raised the unacceptable pros- pect of the people demanding the contract's renegotiation ("would the na- tion not have the right to say that it had not entered into any contract? " mused d'Aguesseau in private reflections in 1730). 76 Until the end of the old regime, the crown firmly eschewed any resort to contract theory and natural law. A language of love, accompanied by the predictable family metaphors (the king as "father of the people"), provided a way of side- stepping this dilemma and, in a sense, potentially resacralizing the monar- chy. It presented the bond between king and subject as something that pre- ceded and transcended mere politics, as something unbreakable and above criticism: as an object, in Belloy's words, of "idolatry. " And in the mid-
68 The Cult of the Nation in France
? eighteenth century, it was a natural step for royal apologists to try and strengthen this language further by uniting it with the concept of the patrie, which had itself emerged transformed out of the same turn-of-the- century intellectual crucible and still possessed its strong religious conno- tations.
The Pre-Revolutionary Synthesis
Despite the importance of royal patriotism, until the last two decades of the old regime both patrie and nation still had distinctly limited meanings. The crown made use of these terms for the conservative purpose of de- fending the royal prerogative and silencing its critics. But even the critics invoked them principally to help restore France to an earlier and presum- ably superior state. With nation, they called for the restoration of legal ar- rangements which gave to particular institutions or legal groups a preemi- nent position within the French polity. With patrie, they called for the restoration of a moral community in which individuals worked for the common good. In each case, the practical aim was to alter the balance of power among existing political institutions. The notion that the nation might, through an act of free will, choose to dispense with these institu- tions altogether arose only in the nightmares of the absolutists. Before 1771, it was arguably the term "public opinion" which had a more radical effect in French political debate than either patrie or nation. Public opin- ion lacked the comforting classical familiarity of the one, and the associa- tions with venerable French constitutional arrangements of the other. It re- ferred instead to a new social reality that many of the French found deeply disturbing. Public opinion did not find its embodiment in the person of the king or in familiar institutions like parlements or Estates, but in the new, diffuse realm of newspapers, pamphlets, coffee houses, salons, acade- mies, and other forums which allowed the French to take part in ongoing conversation without much consideration of their formal place in the cor- porate hierarchy of the kingdom.
These equations changed, however, when Louis XV and Lord Chancellor Maupeou broke the parlements, restructuring age-old French institutions in a way that lacked any precedent in French history and law. The so-called coup of 1771 demonstrated not only to the magistrates and their support- ers, but also to a wide spectrum of French readers, that the crown itself no longer respected either the grand principles of French law or the wishes of
The Politics of Patriotism 69
? the public; neither could therefore act as an effective restraint on royal power to prevent monarchical authority from degenerating into despo- tism. From now on, opposition to the crown would have to search for dif- ferent sources of legitimization.
In the Maupeou crisis, the parlements turned to the concept of patrie as a key weapon in their conceptual armory. They began to refer to them- selves as the parti patriote and lamented, as Coyer had done, the apparent extinction of the patrie and patriotic sentiment alike at the king's hands. 77 Thus an anonymous parlementaire pamphleteer complained in 1771, echoing Coyer, that "the word patrie is scarcely known. "78 Other supporters of the high courts referred to the "misfortunes" and "suffering" of the patrie and hailed the magistrates as the "guardians," even the "guardian an- gels" of this fragile and abused entity. 79 They repeatedly emphasized their own "patriotic sentiments," taking advantage of the enormously wider cur- rency that the vocabulary had acquired as a result of the program of royal patriotism (in this sense, at least, the program can be said to have rather spectacularly backfired). 80
The rise in the use of the words "patriote" and "patriotique" was par- ticularly dramatic and significant--in the French texts available in the principal electronic database, their use increased nearly fourfold between 1765-1769 and 1770-1774. 81 Just as the birth of the adjective "revolution- ary" after 1789 signified a new conception of "revolution" itself as an active process, driven by human will, rather than as something beyond human control (the sense in which the word had formerly been used), so the use of "patriote" and "patriotique" suggested that the fatal corruption and de- cline of the patrie was not merely something to be lamented, but some- thing that could be fought against and even reversed through political ac- tion. 82 The patriotes rejected the royal claims that France already was a patrie, but, they claimed, it could still become one. And they therefore held out the prospect that this form of sacred, ideal human community, in which affective and moral ties bound individuals together into a single family, could be created on this earth. In this promise of a new birth of pa- triotism they rejected the classical republican tenet that the patrie could only decline, not progress. The patrie, always treated as a political artifact because of its close association with republics, was now also perceived as something whose reconstruction was still a possible and indeed an urgent task.
Meanwhile, in their discussions of the nation, these dissident writers be-
70 The Cult of the Nation in France
? gan to consider political options from outside their well-worn legal play- book, and some started to embrace a full-blown theory of absolute na- tional sovereignty in which the nation could indeed freely choose its form of government. "It is the nation which is sovereign," wrote the Comte de Lauragais in one of the most popular pamphlets of the crisis. "It is so by its power, and by the nature of things. "83 The anonymous L'inauguration de Pharamond (referring to a mythical king of the Franks) added that "The Nation has the right to convoke itself. "84 Even an innately conservative and consensus-seeking lawyer like Le Paige belatedly acknowledged that the parlements could not take the place of the Estates General, whose convoca- tion after more than 150 years he suddenly deemed desirable. 85 His more adventurous Jansenist colleagues Claude Mey, Gabriel-Nicolas Maultrot, and Armand-Gaston Camus started to draw on natural law as well as on classical republican ideas in their hugely influential 1772 Maximes du droit public franc? ois. 86
Going even further than these Jansenists, some particularly radical law- yers (anticipating the leading role their profession would take in 1789) started infusing the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract into the mainstream of French political discussion. In 1775, the young Parisian Jacques-Claude Martin de Mariveaux published L'ami des lois, which re- hearsed the familiar potted histories of the Franks and their successors but then went much farther. "Man is born free," declared Martin vigorously if not originally, and added for good measure that "the French Nation has a social contract" that gave it the right to choose whatever form of govern- ment it wished, without reference to any original foundation. 87 In the same year the Bordeaux lawyer Guillaume-Joseph Saige published his influential Rousseauian Cate? chisme du citoyen, which argued the point even more ex- plicitly: "For there is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will; apart from that, everything is absolutely contingent and depends, for its form as for its existence, on the supreme will of the nation. "88 While Saige also genuflected toward the Franks and ancient French institutions, his defense of absolute national sovereignty made them entirely redundant. If the nation could at any mo- ment choose to structure the political body exactly as it wished, then French history and French law had no necessary claims on it. They no longer seemed to define the essence of the nation, as they had done in the 1750s, and in the shift there lurked a terrifying question: just what, if not history and law, did make the French into a nation?
For a brief period it seemed as if the question might go unposed. In
The Politics of Patriotism 71
? 1774 Louis XV died, and his young successor, Louis XVI, recalled the old parlements, who returned in gaudy triumph to their palaces of justice. The clock seemed to be moving backwards. But while the move succeeded in its immediate purpose of generating a halo of easy popularity for the new king, there was no return to the status quo ante, and the halo soon faded. 89 Indeed, while the self-proclaimed patriotes saluted the magistrates, they no longer considered them the nation's eternal guardians but only its best available allies. For a few years an uneasy internal peace prevailed, aided by France's revenge over Britain in the War of American Independence, and the ability of Controller General Jacques Necker to disguise the cata- strophic situation of French finances. But by 1786 the French state had started on an inexorable slide toward bankruptcy and political crisis, and the old fissures quickly reopened.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, the concepts of patrie and nation emerged as the principal sources of political legitimacy invoked by nearly all political writers, while "public opinion" fell into something of an eclipse. 90 In the period 1787-1789 alone, the words "patrie" or "nation" appeared in the titles of no fewer than 520 works. 91 An enterprising publisher, reissuing a famous Huguenot diatribe against Louis XIV originally called Les soupirs de la France esclave (The Sighs of Enslaved France) retitled it, simply, Les voeux d'un patriote (Wishes of a Patriot). 92 With state authority evaporating, patrie and nation served most effectively to mobilize readers for possible political action. For a time, the traditional juridical forms of argument about the nation remained popu- lar. The Franks and Gauls did not disappear from the scene, and "patriots" and supporters of the ministry alike continued to wrestle in the archives of medieval institutions right down to the beginning of 1789, not infre- quently choking on the dust they stirred up. 93 Writers continued to use the word "nation" in a narrowly legalistic sense, although often taking the argument to new lengths (Pierre-Jean Agier's Le jurisconsulte national, for instance, urged the Estates General to reclaim full power from the king, in the name of the ancient constitution). 94 Others sought to bolster their claims with both natural and positive law, in the manner of Martin and Saige. Comte Emmanuel d'Antraigues's enormously popular 1788 Me? moire sur les Etats-ge? ne? raux, for instance, made clear that the French had "other titles to their national liberty than those covered by eight centu- ries of archival dust," but nonetheless discussed "the precious remains of our first institutions" at length. 95
Yet even as the form of argument remained familiar, the stakes grew
72 The Cult of the Nation in France
? infinitely higher. In the "pre-revolution" of 1786-1789, most "patriotic" writers no longer invoked the "patrie" and the "nation" merely in the hopes of altering the balance of power among existing institutions. With the state collapsing, they did so in order to justify the wholesale transfor- mation of the political system. 96 Significantly, some of them now tried to do away with the very label "patriot" because of its association with the parlements, which they no longer considered an essential part of the French constitution, and adopted instead the name of "national. " They did so even after Louis XVI, desperate to institute financial reforms, again at- tempted a draconian restructuring of the parlements in May 1788, provok- ing a virtual revolt on the courts' behalf. The Parisian lawyer Jacques Godard, secretary to one of the leaders of the former "patriot" party, wrote to a cousin soon after this latest "coup" that "there are now in Paris and in the whole of the Kingdom the names of three parties: that of the royalists, that of the parlementaires and that of the Nationals. These latter two have made common cause; the Nationals hope that this alliance will be long, and that at its return the parlement, instructed by this crisis, will remain at- tached to good principles. "97 In the summer the parlements again returned, and Louis XVI capitulated to the louder and more violent protests and de- clared he would finally summon the Estates General to meet. But the Parlement of Paris, instead of remaining true to what Godard considered "good principles," ruled in September that the Estates should meet "ac- cording to the forms of 1614"--that is, clergy, nobility, and commoners would each have the same number of delegates, and each estate would vote separately, condemning the great bulk of the French population to minor- ity status. At this point the patriote alliance shattered completely, and its bourgeois members, allied with a good number of liberal nobles, turned their attention away from attacking "royal despotism" to denounce a new and virulent enemy: "aristocracy," embodied first and foremost by the parlements themselves.
These decisive events opened the way for a true revolutionary move- ment claiming to act in the name of the nation. During the eight months that separated the Paris Parlement's decision about the form of the Estates from the actual opening of that body in May 1789, a pamphlet debate erupted whose volume and intellectual audacity had no precedent in French history. The king's invitation to his subjects to express themselves, which accompanied his summoning of the Estates, had been taken as a declaration of freedom of the press. At the same time, propertied men
The Politics of Patriotism 73
? came together to elect deputies and formally express their grievances and proposals for reform. In this great blooming of political expression, the party Godard called the Nationals relentlessly advanced the idea that ev- erything depended on the supreme will of the nation. Their most impor- tant manifesto was Emmanuel Sieye`s's brilliant What Is the Third Estate? , which presented the deputies to the Third Estate as the nation's true repre- sentatives. Sieye`s, more than any other author, set the terms of the early revolutionary debate, firmly establishing the nation not only as the highest authority in France, but as an authority that could act with complete free- dom through the intermediary of elected deputies. 98 The stage was now set for the first great act of the Revolution: the Third Estate's momentous arrogation of the title National Assembly, at Sieye`s's own instigation, on June 17, 1789.
But what was the nation? Could the familiar historical legal and histori- cal definitions still prevail, and if not, what could take their place? In the months before the convocation of the Estates, the questions could not be ignored. Moreover, as the French pondered them, the nation came to seem as fragile, as threatened, and as much in need of construction as the patrie. As we have seen, more and more French writers, including Sieye`s himself, started to describe the nation as something which did not yet exist.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that during these same debates, the traditional, juridical means of argument was used not only in reference to France itself, but to individual French provinces, and in a manner which called the existence of the nation itself into question from another direc- tion. In 1788-89, it was feared, widely--and as it turned out, correctly-- that the king or the Estates General might take drastic and unprecedented measures against traditional provincial liberties and privileges. In re- sponse, self-appointed spokesmen for many provinces asserted the utter inviolability of these liberties, over even the unity of France itself, and they claimed for the provinces the status not just of "nations" (a terminology that was not uncommon in the eighteenth century) but of "nations" equal to France itself. Supporters of two regional parlements had first experi- mented with these arguments during the coup of 1771, in pamphlets enti- tled Manifesto to the Normans and Manifesto to the Bretons. The first of these asserted that "we [the Norman people] are bound to France by agreements which are no more and no less authentic than . . . all other treaties between nations," while the second similarly stressed the "volun- tary" agreement by which Brittany had passed under French domination. 99
74 The Cult of the Nation in France
? In 1788-89, these pamphlets were reprinted and widely emulated. The no- bility of the Norman capital of Rouen, for instance, now referred to Nor- mandy's "national constitution. " The magistrates of Pau, in the southwest, described themselves as inhabitants of "a country [pays] foreign to France, although ruled by the same king," and talked of the Pyrenean "nations" of Navarre and Be? arn. The former mayor of Strasbourg, Johann von Tu? rck- heim, asked: "will Lower Alsace have the courage and resolution to with- draw from a French republic . . . to declare that it was subject to the French crown but not the French nation, and intends to preserve its rights and lib- erties? " Similar claims were made in Provence. 100
To a certain extent, the language is deceptive. Not only was it not un- heard of for French provinces to be called "nations"; what was at issue was not fear of losing irreducibly unique provincial identities, but specific pro- vincial legal privileges. Lest the texts be taken as examples of regional na- tionalism, consider that despite the vast differences in language, law, his- torical tradition, and social structure between France's regions at the time, no serious movement for regional independence arose either before or during the Revolution, even at the worst moments of bloody civil war in 1793-94. Even when German-speaking Alsatians were thrown out of office and threatened with mass deportation, no movement for secession arose in Alsace. 101 Yet the pre-revolutionary declarations did explicitly, if briefly, raise the specter of France literally dissolving into smaller units. Moreover, by taking the juridical mode of argument and using it to question the na- tional unity on which the parlements' original juridical critique of the crown had been premised, they arguably undercut the credibility of the juridical language in general.
At the same time, as we will see more fully in Chapter 5, French political literature was giving plentiful expression to another powerful image: that of an "exhausted France," of a corrupt, servile, and degenerate nation on its deathbed. 102 This image, whose form owed much to Rousseau's pessimism, also dated its first appearance to the "coup" of 1771, but in 1788-89 it be- came ubiquitous. "O my Nation! To what degree of abasement have you fallen," wrote the future Jacobin Je? ro^me Pe? tion in his exemplary Avis aux Franc? ois. 103 A 1789 address to the Estates General adopted a particularly despairing tone: "Is there a nation more immoral than the French? Is there one that misunderstands and violates the laws with such le? ge`rete? ? . . . When one has grown old in corruption, one can no longer be healed, and when the maladies are at their height, the sick man shudders at the sight of the
The Politics of Patriotism 75
? doctor. So, messeigneurs, abandon the present generation. " Countless other authors experimented with variations on this dismal theme. 104
There thus arrived an extraordinary moment in the history of French national sentiment: unprecedented claims on behalf of the nation together with unprecedented doubts about it, all in a context in which leaders of the nascent revolutionary movement were also loudly lamenting France's fail- ure to constitute a true patrie. It was precisely in this condition of semantic flux that the existence of the nation itself could be questioned and that France's regional diversity could come to appear, for the first time, as a sig- nificant political problem. 105 At the very moment of the nation's political apotheosis, no one seemed to know what a nation was. A certain Toussaint Guiraudet (in obvious imitation of Sieye`s), even made the question the ti- tle of a pamphlet: Qu'est-ce que la nation et qu'est-ce que la France? (What Is the Nation and What Is France? )106
And at this moment when state authority seemed to be disappearing into a vacuum, few of the French felt capable of responding to the ques- tion by opening up their creaky volumes of legal history. Childebert and Pharamond were returning to the realms of antiquarianism and myth. 107 In the early months of 1789 invocations of the national past did not disap- pear, but they now tended to come without their previous legal historical specificity. Disquisitions on the punctuation of Carolingian capitularies were increasingly superseded by Rousseauian celebrations of the centu- ries of Gaulish or medieval vigor and strength that had supposedly pre- ceded the decadence and lethargy of the absolute monarchy. The national past of antiquarians and lawyers was giving way to the national past of Ro- mantic poets and historians. But this was not to be a simple return to every aspect of the status quo ante. While the authors used words like "revival," "restoration," and "recovery," by far the most important term was "regen- eration," which implied a new, original creation out of old and degener- ate matter. 108 Regeneration was an active process of nation construction, driven by political will.
Already in early 1789, the ongoing debates gave a sense of the different ways the French revolutionaries would attempt to define and construct the nation. In some passages, which reflected the influence of the physiocrats, the process of construction seemed to resemble an engineering problem, with the nation treated as a collection of millions of individual human building blocks. 109 "By a nation," insisted the Parisian lawyer Pierre-Louis de Lacretelle, "can be understood only the sum total of citizens who belong
76 The Cult of the Nation in France
? there by permanent residence, by landed property, or through an industry which makes them necessary. " Guiraudet similarly insisted that "the nation is not a compound of Orders, but a society of approximately twenty- five million men living under laws that it has given itself . . . France is not a compound of Provinces, but a space of twenty-five thousand square leagues. " Most powerfully, Sieye`s himself argued that the deputies to the Third Estate were the true representatives of the nation because they repre- sented the vast majority of the population and the most important "social interests. "110 A conception of political representation as the election of dep- uties on behalf of mathematically delineated constituencies was beginning to challenge the older concept of representation as the embodiment of cor- porate entities. 111
Yet if the idea of constructing a nation sometimes drove authors to speak in the accents of the engineer and statistician, it more often drew from them--as it had done from the architects of "royal patriotism"--de- liberate echoes of prophecy and the realm of the sacred. The term "regen- eration" itself, which was a key word of revolutionary vocabulary from 1789 on, offers a case in point, for it had been used, until shortly before, mostly in theological contexts. Although it occasionally signified the repair of injured bodily tissue, before the mid-century it most often meant bap- tism or resurrection. It began to pass into political usage with the Marquis de Mirabeau's L'ami des hommes, and achieved wide currency in the late 1780s.
As Alyssa Sepinwall has written: "Regeneration was becoming a dis- placement of the Gospels . . . Regenerating was no longer only the province of God, but an operation which could be directed by humans"--although the process remained quasi-miraculous. 112 Similarly, to quote Jean Staro- binski: "After having made such a dark and apparently irreversible diag- nosis of their age, Rousseau and his disciples could only imagine the liber- ating change as a sort of miracle, on the religious model: the image of the resurrection, of the second coming, of regeneration, haunted them. "113 At this moment of uncertainty over the very existence of the nation and the future of the polity, French writers, accustomed to ordering the world around them without reference to God, found themselves almost instinc- tively attempting to touch their readers with words still redolent of Scrip- ture.
In sum, by the time the Estates General actually met in May 1789, the "nation" on behalf of which the deputies would imminently wage a Revo- lution had been called radically into doubt, but at the same time hopes had
The Politics of Patriotism 77
? been raised that one could still be built. In fact, in the optimistic early years of the Revolution it would be possible to believe that the construction had already, painlessly, almost miraculously taken place. Recall Chantreau's re- mark that France "really became a nation" in 1789. 114 And by the same to- ken, the early revolutionaries were now willing to admit that France had also, finally, become a true patrie. Madame Roland, in 1790, used the phrase "since we acquired a patrie," and the University of Paris, in the same year, declared that "the French have sensed that they now have a patrie. "115 The patrie, too, was the object of regeneration, promised since the 1770s and now apparently accomplished. Revolutionary radicals would soon be disabused of this easy optimism, a disappointment that led them to em- brace a far more ambitious and severe program of construction.
These shifts left room for enormous disagreement about both the patrie and the nation, particularly in regard to the position of the king within them. Throughout the Revolution, forces on what was becoming known as the right would maintain the tenets of the old regime's program of royal patriotism, insisting on the inseparability of king and patrie, and king and nation. 116 On the left, the king came to appear not only detachable from both, but positively inimical to both. Their survival required nothing less than his death. Meanwhile, the concept of regeneration was ambiguous enough to provoke far more arguments than it resolved. In sum, what had taken place before the Revolution, and particularly since Maupeou's 1771 "coup," was not the development of a single, overriding concept of the na- tion or the patrie. Rather, it was the generation of those ideological ele- ments out of which the revolutionaries would forge their own (often clash- ing) patriotic and nationalist doctrines. These doctrines would often bear more than a tint of millenarianism and would blaze so brightly across Eu- rope that Chantreau and Madame Roland (and Casanova) could be for- given for thinking that nothing like a nation or a patrie had existed in France before.
? The Cult of the Nation in France
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
CHAPTER 3
English Barbarians, French Martyrs
Aux armes, citoyens!
--denis-ponce ecouchard (lebrun), "ode aux franc? ais" (angers, 1762)
Va, pour t'entrede? truire, armer tes bataillons
Et de ton sang impur abreuver tes sillons.
[Go, to destroy yourself, arm your battalions,
And water your furrows with your impure blood].
--claude-rigobert lefebvre de beauvray, adresse a` la nation angloise (1757)
? In the early morning of May 28, 1754, in the woods of what is now south- western Pennsylvania, a killing took place. The victims, a thirty-six-year- old French-Canadian officer named Joseph Coulon de Jumonville and nine soldiers under his command, had pitched camp for the night on the way from their base at Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) to Britain's Fort Necessity, more than 40 miles to the south. Although supposedly at peace, France and Britain were each building chains of forts to support their rival claims to the great stretches of land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, in the great game of military chess familiar from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Jumonville's mission was to instruct the British to withdraw immediately from what the French considered their territory. At Fort Necessity, however, Seneca Indian scouts had not only in- formed the inexperienced, twenty-two-year-old British commander about Jumonville's approach, but persuaded him it was the prelude to a French attack (the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson, known as the Half King, had a grudge of his own against the French). The commander therefore moved to intercept the French with a detachment of soldiers, and they crept up on Jumonville's encampment at dawn. It is unclear exactly who opened
78
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 79
? fire, but after a few confused volleys, the French were quickly overcome. Jumonville, wounded but alive, died under the Seneca leader's hatchet. The Senecas took several French scalps, and the newly seasoned British officer wrote boastfully to his brother back home in Virginia: "I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound. "
This incident has long been familiar to North American historians. It marked not only the opening skirmish in what would soon turn into the Seven Years' War, but also a key moment in the career of the cocky young British officer--a man by the name of George Washington. In fact, it nearly brought Washington's career to a premature end. Scarcely a month after Jumonville's death, a large French force--led, dramatically enough, by Jumonville's brother--captured Fort Necessity in a pitched battle with Washington's forces. They then forced Washington to sign a confession that he had "assassinated" an ambassador traveling under a flag of truce. Only Washington's slippery insistence that he had not understood the French text he had signed allowed him to avoid a damaging scandal. His detractors and admirers have argued about the incident ever since. 1
Jumonville's death, for all its importance to the outbreak of hostili- ties and to Washington's career, also won a prominent place in a very dif- ferent theater of operations. During the Seven Years' War, the French and British alike made wide use of printed propaganda, and the French side used Jumonville's death as a leitmotif, a perfect illustration of the enemy's treacherous conduct. 2 Pamphlets, songs, journals, and supposedly impar- tial collections of documents stridently condemned the English and Wash- ington (sometimes misidentified as "Wemcheston"), while enshrining the dead officer as a martyr of the patrie. 3 The incident even gave rise to a sixty-page long epic poem, Antoine-Le? onard Thomas's ferociously patri- otic Jumonville. A few lines suffice to give the general flavor:
Par un plomb homicide indignement perce? ,
Aux pieds de ses bourreaux il tombe renverse? . Trois fois il souleva [sic] sa pesante paupie`re,
Trois fois son oeil e? teint se ferme a` la lumie`re.
De la France en mourant le tendre souvenir,
Vient charmer sa grande a^me a` son dernier soupir. Il meurt: foule? s aux pieds d'une troupe inhumaine Ses membres de? chire? s palpitent sur l'are`ne. [Unworthily pierced by a murderous bullet
80 The Cult of the Nation in France
? He falls at the feet of his executioners.
Three times he lifts his heavy eyelid,
Three times his dulled eye closes to the light.
In dying, the tender memory of France
Comes to delight his great soul.
He dies: trampled under the feet of an inhuman band, His torn members throb on the ground]. 4
The poem launched Thomas on a successful literary career and was singled out in a popular Swiss book on "national pride" as the nec plus ultra of French hatred of foreigners. 5 So it is no surprise that as early as 1757, the Jesuit newspaper Me? moires de Tre? voux could comment that "all the world has learned of the treatment meted out to the Sieur de Jumonville. "6 The unfortunate officer, his undistinguished life now eclipsed by his sensational leaving of it, gained such a posthumous reputation that collective biogra- phies of "great Frenchmen," published in profusion in the waning decades of the ancien re? gime, included him right alongside such icons of French military glory as Bayard and Duguesclin. 7 Some of the poetry lamenting Jumonville's death remained well known enough in 1792 for Rouget de Lisle to crib from it in writing the Marseillaise (see, for instance, the epi- graphs to this chapter). 8
To twentieth-century eyes such atrocity literature seems quite unre- markable--indeed, by our woefully jaded standards, rather tame, and so it has been largely ignored. 9 Yet it constituted another arena in which the French seized on the concepts of the nation and the patrie and put them to new uses. In this instance, they did so in response to the changing demands of warfare, and one effect was to change perceptions and representations of warfare itself. The war literature of the 1750s and 1760s, for the first time in French history, presented an international conflict neither as a duel between royal houses nor as a clash of religions, but as a battle between ir- reconcilable nations.
As in the case of the constitutional conflicts, on one level this shift illus- trates the progressive detachment of French political culture from its for- mer religious context. In contrast to the stridently anti-Catholic propa- ganda flowing from the other side of the Channel, French war literature rarely mentioned the religious differences between France and England-- despite the survival of anti-Protestant bigotry in France, and despite suspi- cions that some French Protestants may have had illicit contacts with the
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 81
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 5. Another version of the killing of French officer Jumonville by Virginia militia and their Indian auxiliaries in the Ohio Valley in 1754. Once again, the scene is illustrated allegorically by comparison to combats between Saracens and Crusaders. Antoine-Le? onard Thomas, Jumonville, Paris, 1759.
82 The Cult of the Nation in France
? English enemy. 10 The French war literature also formed part and parcel of the campaign of royal patriotism, which itself marked so striking a depar- ture from orthodox Catholic justifications of absolute monarchy. Yet just as the pamphleteers of the pre-Revolution found themselves reaching back to the quasi-religious concept of "regeneration" as part of their quest to re- build the nation, so the propagandists of the Seven Years' War broke with recent predecessors to adopt various ideas and practices from the literature of the Wars of Religion. Paradoxically, this return to the past helped lay the groundwork for the development of modern, racially based forms of nationalism.
There were two great xenophobic moments in eighteenth-century French history: the Seven Years' War that started with Jumonville's death, and the revolutionary wars that started in 1792. The second certainly dwarfed the first in intensity. At the height of the Revolution, Jacobin clubs across France were spitting forth hatred of that "enemy of the human race" William Pitt, and denouncing the English as a "race of cannibals. " Bertrand Bare`re not only called the English "a people foreign to humanity, [who] must disappear," but convinced the Convention to pass a (thankfully little obeyed) motion instructing French commanders in the field to take no English prisoners alive. 11 Yet the two moments have striking similarities. In both cases, the cosmopolitanism so often associated with eighteenth-cen- tury French culture abruptly disappeared from books and periodicals, to be replaced by snarling hostility to France's enemies. In both cases, this change occurred thanks above all to the concerted efforts of the French government, which sought to mobilize resources and public opinion be- hind the war effort. And the revolutionary literature in fact followed mod- els developed in the earlier period, sometimes quite literally, as in the case of the Marseillaise. It is impossible to say, given the available evidence, whether the Seven Years' War literature had anything like the popular reso- nance of its revolutionary counterpart, which helped shape a wave of patriotic mobilization unparalleled in European history. But at the very least--as the revolutionary borrowings themselves demonstrate--this ear- lier body of work put important ideas and motifs into broad circulation. For this reason, and to continue my exploration of the transformation of patriotism and national sentiment in the last decades of the old regime, I will concentrate here particularly on the Seven Years' War, although I will also look ahead to the Revolution.
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 83 Englishmen and Barbarians
In modern accounts, the Seven Years' War is considered important not only for the decisive realignment of European power that it brought about (especially the triumph of Britain and Prussia and the decline of France and Austria), but also because it was a new sort of war. It could almost be called the first world war, for the combatants battled each other in North America, Africa, India, and on every ocean, as well as in Europe. They spent unprecedented sums in the process, and the war hastened the devel- opment of several Western European states into vast fiscal-military ma- chines, capable of keeping hundreds of thousands of men in the field and scores of ships of the line on the high seas. 12 It has generally escaped notice, however, that the propaganda efforts (at least on the French side) also rep- resented a considerable novelty. The vilification of national enemies itself was hardly new, of course; the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of Reli- gion offered ample precedent. 13 But the Seven Years' War saw not simply the expression of national antipathies, but their employment in a sus- tained, intensive print campaign aimed at mobilizing the French nation against an enemy nation. The only precedent for this sort of campaign lay in the history of religious warfare, in such episodes as the Catholic League's frenetic efforts to mobilize its supporters against the Protestant Henri of Navarre, and before that, in the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Luther's Germany. 14
Consider, first, the sheer volume: at least 80 items per year appeared in France during the Seven Years' War, more than double the amount pro- duced during the recent wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions (the second of which ended just six years before Jumonville's death). 15 The Jour- nal encyclope? dique signaled its awareness of this change with a wry quip: "The future will scarcely believe it, but the war between the English and the French has been as lively on paper as on the high seas. "16 Not since the Wars of Religion had French printing presses churned out such quanti- ties of xenophobic polemic. Tracking its distribution is difficult, but we know that at least one item, the issue of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau's newspaper L'Observateur hollandois that recounted Jumonville's death, sold 8,000 cop- ies, an impressive figure for the period. The paper was pirated by Dutch, Italian, and German publishers and translated into several languages. 17 The burgeoning European periodical press gave considerable attention to the
? 84 The Cult of the Nation in France
? polemical works, as did the British themselves, who responded in kind. 18 As a result, not only Jumonville's death, but also other major themes of French propaganda had wide diffusion, such as the triumphant early sei- zure of Port-Mahon in Minorca from the unfortunate Admiral Byng, and the heroic death of the Chevalier d'Assas in the battle of Clostercamp. 19
The material also represented a new departure in its violence. Although unimpressive by twentieth-century standards, the language reached a level of invective not seen in French war literature since the sixteenth century-- certainly not in the thin, almost decorous productions of the recent War of the Austrian Succession. 20 The propaganda portrayed the English as "vul- tures," a "perjurious race" driven by "blind wrath" and "undying hatred," people who had removed themselves from "that universal Republic, which embraces all nations in its heart. "21 It consistently compared them to the grasping, mercantile Carthaginians, and suggested that England would soon, quite deservedly, share Carthage's hideous fate. 22
Simply taking note of the numbers and the violence, however, does not advance our understanding very far. The crucial questions are what form the material took, and what strategies the authors employed. Most impor- tantly, rather than tar the English as "heretics," the propaganda tended to stigmatize them as lawbreaking "barbarians" and to contrast them, insis- tently and unfavorably, to American Indians. Moreau was the first to use this theme. In his 1755 description of Jumonville's death in L'Observateur hollandois, he accused the English of "infamies which have distinguished peoples whom Europeans consider Barbarians," and of "this wild license which previously distinguished the northern Barbarians. "23 He also linked English "barbarism" to the long history of English civil discord and the is- landers' proven inability to refrain even from killing one another. 24
Following Moreau, Antoine-Le? onard Thomas virtually structured his epic poem Jumonville around the theme. He began it with a pointed Vir- gilian epigraph--"What race of men is this? What fatherland is so barba- rous as to allow this custom? "--and continued relentlessly in this vein. 25 The Englishman was a "new barbarian" (p. 23) who committed "a barbar- ian homicide" (p. 4) and showed "a barbarian joy" in it (p. 24). Thomas also asserted no fewer than four times that the Indians themselves, for all their qualities of "ferocity," "cruelty," and "roughness" (p. 44), were shocked and angered by Jumonville's killing (pp. ix, 22, 30, 44). Immedi- ately after the description of Jumonville's death, the poet addressed himself directly to the Indians:
English Barbarians, French Martyrs 85
? Du moins votre grossie`re et farouche droiture Suit les premie`res Loix de la simple nature. L'Anglais, nouveau barbare, a traverse? les mers Pour apporter ce crime au fonds de vos de? serts. Allez, du fer tranchant, d'une ha^che sanglante Gravez sur vos rochers cette image effrayante. [At least your crude and ferocious uprightness Follows simple nature's first laws.
The Englishman, a new barbarian, has crossed the seas To bring this crime to the heart of your wilderness. Go, and engrave on your rocks this horrifying image Of cutting steel and bloody axe] (pp. 22-23).
For Thomas, both Indians and English behave at a vast remove from Eu- ropean norms of politeness and morality, but the latter even more so. The Me? moires de Tre? voux grasped the point perfectly in its review of Jumonville: "These Englishmen on the Oyo [Ohio River] . . . were more barbarian than the Iroquois and the Hurons. They, at least, shuddered when they heard of the attack on Jumonville. "26
Other chroniclers of Jumonville's death joined in as well. The poet Lebrun echoed Moreau's words in his indignation at the "barbaric" con- queror who gave lessons in crime to Indians much less deserving of the epithet:
De la Terre et des Mers De? predateur avare,
Au Huron qu'il de? daigne, et qu'il nomme barbare
Il apprend des Forfaits.
[Greedy despoiler of land and seas,
He teaches infamies to the Huron whom he disdains
and calls barbarian]. 27
A historically minded abbe? named Se? ran de la Tour, expatiating at book length on the comparison of England to Carthage, devoted two pages to this particular instance of "English barbarism"--and three more to the Indians' horrified reaction. 28 He and others likewise stressed the "discord" that lay at the heart of the English soul. 29
The incident in the Pennsylvania woods provided the ideal illustration of the theme, but its use permeated nearly all the polemical anti-English literature of the Seven Years' War (most of which did not deal with events
86 The Cult of the Nation in France
? in North America). Again and again, French publicists decried turbulent English "barbarians" and compared them unfavorably with non-European peoples. The author of a poem on a wide range of English atrocities asked, for instance, "Dans les antres profonds de la vaste Lybie / Vit-on jamais re? gner autant de barbarie? [In the deep lairs of vast Libya, did one ever see so much barbarism reign? ]"30 Satirical verses carrying a mock approbation from a fictive Royal Academy of Barbary of Tunis put a particularly sharp speech in the mouth of Montcalm, the French general who would soon find defeat and death on the Plains of Abraham:
. . . amis, vous e^tes ne? s Franc? ais.
N'imite? z point par cet affreux ravage
La Barbarie et le ton des Anglais,
Laisse? z agir la nation sauvage . . .
Qu'un Iroquois a bien plus de cle? mence
Que ces Milords qu'on fait pour de l'argent.
. . . friends, you were born French.
Don't imitate the Barbarism and the tone of the English In this horrid depredation.
Let the savage nation act . . .
An Iroquois has far more mercy in him
Than these Milords who buy their titles]. 31
The ministerial publicist Lefebvre de Beauvray told the subjects of his 1757 poetic Adresse a` la nation angloise: "Oui c'est vous qu'on a vu^s, portant dans Votre sein / Toute la cruaute? du fe? roce Africain" [Yes it is you that we have seen, carrying in your breast / All the cruelty of the fierce African]. 32 Most insistently, Robert-Martin Lesuire devoted an entire comic novel to the theme: his Les sauvages de l'Europe. 33 "The English lie at mid-point between men and beasts," says Lesuire's hero. "All the difference I can see between the English and the Savages of Africa, is that the latter spare the fair sex.