Birth of a Nation

The French are drunk on history, gorged on its dark blood. Retrospection, commemoration and evocation wash over the land, leaving their sediment on it and on its people’s psyche, race relations, conversations, orientations. As with certain couples endlessly hashing over marital banalities, triumphs and disasters, French self-appraisals and reappraisals feed on themselves and keep the conversation going.

David A. Bell has interesting things to say about the French kindred and about an important aspect of their life together. “The Cult of the Nation in France” is about the way a particular kind of togetherness and a novel kind of identity were implanted, grew (and may have begun to wither) in France’s fertile soil. The nation, he argues, is no spontaneous growth but a political artifact: not organic like a tree but constructed like a city. Groups of supposedly common origins had been around for quite a while. But “nation” could apply to Bretons or Normans as well as to the French. The notion of nationhood--a sense of unity, a will to live in common--came to France only in the 18th century, and it took hard work and struggle to acclimatize it.

As part of international and then of internal conflicts, 18th century thinkers and publicists specified and polished concepts of the nation and of the fatherland. The nation had to be built, its members indoctrinated, re-formed, transformed in their allegiances, language, manners, feelings. The dust of history was stirred in search of common ancestors--Gauls, Franks--to be invoked or discarded. On another note, Bell surprises us by showing how poems and songs generated by anti-English propaganda in the wars of the 1750s and 1760s (“Aux armes, citoyens!” for example) were later cribbed for the Marseillaise.

These activities came to a head during the great Revolution, one of whose major projects would be “to form Frenchmen, and to endow the nation with its own unique physiognomy.” We know that the nation-builders succeeded, or at least their heirs in subsequent generations did; and Pierre Nora in “Rethinking France” points out that history and its teaching became principal tools for creating patriotic awareness. Briefly put, notions of unity and of a common fatherland were developed to avoid long-drawn-out civil strife and to impose the authority of a God-willed monarch. In the 1790s, royal supremacy justified by the passions of old religious strife would be replaced by the higher authority of the sovereign people justified by still more strife. And justification would not draw on the religion of God or man, but on the cult of the fatherland recognized as a “second divinity,” only to become a rival divinity in its own right.

This was the result of a long-term change in relations between the world and God: the self-assertion of a secular sphere no longer determined by God’s will but by its own acts. And it involved what Bell calls a blazing intellectual war in which opposing armies used similar weapons, tactics and strategies but claimed legitimacy from a different source. The authority of king and church rested on God. The claims of the other side were warranted by appeals to the good of the commonwealth. Painfully, sensibilities were shifted from the personal and particular (king) to the impersonal and abstract (nation).

Inclusion implied exclusion, identity implied antipathy: “[T]hat holy antipathy,” wrote Madame de Stal, “for foreign manners, customs, languages, that fortifies the national bond.” There was no room for hyphenated identities a l’Americaine. Those outside the patriotic circle were excluded, but identity was also open to adjustments, and foreigners could become “naturalized” by imbibing the national culture.

Better still, as Bell points out, traces of Catholic commitment to a universal human community minimized the connotations of exclusivity. So the French did not define themselves by “othering” foreigners. On the contrary, after 1789, the Constituent Assembly proclaimed the brotherhood of peoples in its “Declaration of Peace to the World.” That did not go far or last long but, leaving aside the chasm between rhetoric and reality, patriots dedicated to removing obstacles to national unity faced a gigantic task. Under the kings, national unity had not been an issue. Now, disunity was ferreted out so that unity of faith, mind, feeling could be asserted. Kingdom or young republic, France was a congeries of regions, estates, laws and, not least, languages. Few until the Revolution recognized that most French subjects spoke Occitan, German, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Italian, Flemish, Yiddish or a host of dialects and patois barely comprehensible to one another. Now these were targeted as a hindrance to identity, uniformity, homogeneity, concord.

How many of the republic’s 28 million spoke French properly? Perhaps 3 million or 4 million. How many could not speak it at all? Evaluations for the 1790s ranged from 3 million to 8 million. Dialects had to be eradicated and standard French established everywhere, if only so that citizens could understand the new laws of their land. This mass conversion of hearts and minds posed massive problems; not the least of these was the new state’s competition with the church, which represented not just the main antagonist of the republic, but also its main model. A would-be single nation faced an exclusive church. Revolutionaries who thought, and certainly spoke, like millenarians out to regenerate France and the world borrowed theological themes and language. At war with the Catholic Church, nationalists adopted the tactics and terminology of Catholic indoctrination, specifically of the Counter-Reformation. Altars were erected to the patrie, missions preached its cult, catechisms taught it (“the citizen is born, lives and dies for the patrie” ), teachers dubbed instituteurs were invented to institute it, countless speeches invoked it. Another war of religion followed, which has waned only in the last 20 years. But no copycat cults or mimicking missions, no pastiches of Christian piety achieved the desired unity until time and habit intervened, and modern communications came to help. Neither did patriotic pedagogy reach its goal until the last third of the 19th century.

The best agent of common identity proved to be the military service soon introduced by those who declared “peace to the world.” It was war, and the drafts of young men war evoked, that fabricated French-speaking, French-feeling Frenchmen before schoolmasters did; it was the glories of victory or the humiliations of defeat that hatched more patriots than festivals and speeches. Bell’s narrative peters out with the Revolution; but he has made his point: the basic continuity of French republican nationalism. This continuity comes to an end only in our own day: no more patriotic education, no more national indoctrination, no more missionary zeal or compulsory military service, no more collective certainties or drive to assimilate and civilize and no more conflict to energize it all. Republican nationalism flowered in conflict; it shrivels as good feelings bloom, it withers as prosperity, peace, security flourish. Unity is now alleged to lie in diversity, the nation is multiethnic, the market is global, the currency about to become supranational. To the extent that the nation, as the term indicates, is defined by birth, France has cause for concern. Today, about one-quarter of French citizens have at least one grandparent born elsewhere; and a new war of religion looms around Islamic strongholds. But that is not Bell’s concern here. He has written a book that is highly structured, dense, demanding but also informative, lucid and stylish. One doesn’t have to agree with all he says to find even the points of disagreement suggestive.

Moreover, the book can usefully be read in tandem with Nora’s “Rethinking France,” the first of four volumes of essays by diverse hands, translated from Nora’s much admired “Les Lieux de Memoire.” The seven fat volumes of that work are now world-famous, and Nora has just been elected to the French Academy--the ultimate accolade for a French intellectual. Bell describes Nora’s work as the single most important scholarly contribution published in the Mitterrand years. It also bears out many of Bell’s arguments, not least his belief that long-standing French forms of self-identification have waned and that what can be salvaged from them is largely recollections. In times when “we no longer know where we are going or where we came from,” Nora writes, remembering the pasts that helped forge the present becomes crucial. The more so because national identity is being replaced by social identity (of workers, women, Jews, Bretons, Corsicans, etc.) and national history is being transformed, “invaded, subverted and flooded” by group memories.

“Today France is its own memory,” one reads in the introduction, “or it is nothing.” Though brief, that introduction is worth the price of admission. A slightly rueful valediction to a long, often glorious existence, it charts the archipelago of national memories, inventories, the collective heritage to which the French today are heirs: books, buildings, rituals (including cuisine and the Tour de France), heroes, heroines, symbols and, not least, the state, “closely linked to the nation,” which it precedes and helps to forge before itself becoming “a major element of France’s historical identity.” As the old “unique physiognomy” fades and the republican commonwealth gives way to a new European one, it will be edifying to see mentalities adjust to a new supranational economy, currency, legislation and to Franglais , as they once did to national ones. Meanwhile we could do worse than consider whether the French experience is as exceptional as it’s cracked up to be, whether we have points in common and whether French struggles and memories hold something for us too--more than mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.