Bastiat’s work: Sophismes économiques (2005) and Pamphlets (2009).
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
195
first published in 1850, and written by the radical writer and parliamentary deputy
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin.228 Turning his back on the ‘exaggerations of anglomania’,
Ledru-Rollin asserted that England was one enormous aristocracy, ‘the aristocracy
of the crown, the aristocracy of land, the aristocracy of business’, and that England’s
famous liberties gave the people nothing. All aspects of English society came in for
this treatment, but by far the greater part of Ledru-Rollin’s text was taken up with
an account of the conditions of the working class. In a series of sketches of the lives
of the various occupational groups, he painted a heart-felt picture of the poverty
and degradation resulting from the relentless competition associated with the
industrial system. Behind the official prosperity, he argued, lay a universal misery
and imminent bankruptcy. England, in sum, was a country that had been destroyed
and enslaved by the greed of its aristocratic classes. With patriotic fervour, he thus
announced that England’s ‘half principles of civil, commercial, political and reli-
gious liberty’ had to be rejected by France, the ‘daughter of Rousseau’, and that
such a rejection would amount to nothing less than the destruction of England
itself. The two nations, he proclaimed, were ‘going in diametrically opposed
directions’. France was rushing towards ‘the future of equality’ whilst England
fortified itself ‘more than ever in the privileges of the past’. France, he therefore
proclaimed, should stay true to her particular genius and call for ‘social justice on
earth, the justice of brothers’.229
That these were widely held sentiments can be shown by referring to the Grand
Dictionnaire Universel of 1867. The so-called Dictionnaire Larousse had a substan-
tial entry on England, running to fifteen pages. It began with a largely factual
account of England’s geography, history, and culture, but at the end Larousse took
the liberty of adding an imaginary and intriguing discussion between the two
archetypal figures of France and England, Jacques Bonhomme and John Bull. To
aid his readers, Larousse kindly explained the context in which this discussion was
taking place.
‘Two entirely opposed currents of opinion about England are evident in France’,
Larousse wrote: ‘One is very sympathetic to the laws and the constitution of
England; the other, which has its source in long-standing national enmity, sees in
the Englishman only a rival, an enemy that has to be fought to the bitter end.’
Jacques Bonhomme, Larousse explained, ‘is afflicted with an incurable anglopho-
bia’. Thus, if he had Jacques Bonhomme accept that England possessed a certain
amount of power and material wealth, John Bull was quickly informed that the
English were ‘one of the most wretched people on earth; despite your hard work
you languish in poverty and abjection. . . . Your women throw themselves in their
thousands into prostitution and your men are stupefied by hard liquor.’ In no other
country was the struggle for life so hard and defeat so tragic. The causes of this
miserable existence were well-known. England’s government was a ‘veritable oli-
garchy’ and a prey to a ‘devouring aristocracy’. In the name of a respect for the law,
injustice and arbitrary government were inflicted upon the poor. Liberty existed
228 2 vols. (1850).
229 Ibid. ii. 272.
196
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
only for the upper classes. In sum, English civilization had remained impervious to
demands for the moral and physical emancipation of the lower classes. ‘The France
of 1793’, Jacques Bonhomme concluded, ‘denounced your nation to the world as
the modern Carthage and the enemy of humanity. The illusions of Montesquieu,
of the philosophes and of the constitutional school vanished at that point. From
cruel experience we had come to appreciate the lack of sincerity to be found in your
liberalism.’ A very good case could be made for arguing that, over the long term, the
rhetorical force of these sentiments was to have far more appeal than liberal calls to
commerce, moderation, and individual liberty.
5
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
I
Prévost-Paradol concluded La France nouvelle with an essay on geopolitics.1 None
of the maladies afflicting France, he ventured, were necessarily fatal but it would
take a near superhuman effort for France to retain the position of eminence she had
occupied over recent centuries. The context for this remark was Prussia’s crushing
victory over Austria at the battle of Sadowa in 1866 and France’s failure to respond
to Prussia’s imposition of its hegemony over the other members of the German
confederation.
Two aspects of Prévost-Paradol’s argument stand out. The first was the
contention that France had been mistaken in building her foreign policy around
the principle of nationalities. This principle, Prévost-Paradol explained, laid
down ‘identity of race and language and the consent of the population’ as
the conditions necessary to legitimize the annexation of a territory.2 Neither,
he argued, could serve France’s interests, but they could allow Prussia to forge
the union of a single state composed of 51 million inhabitants. In the unlikely
event of success against Prussia, he therefore suggested, it would be best for
France to put this ‘famous principle’ to one side and to base her claims simply
upon the rights of the victor. Next, Prévost-Paradol saw all too plainly what
the outcome of defeat by Prussia would be. France, he surmised, would not be
removed from the map—a general attachment to the idea of a balance of
power in Europe would ensure this—nor would she necessarily lose Alsace
and Lorraine, but she would lose ‘the means of opposing this dismemberment
on the day that our triumphant rival would judge it to be practicable and
useful to its interests, and this day would not be long in coming’.3 It was not
impossible, Prévost-Paradol wrote, that war would be avoided, but, he avowed,
France and Prussia had the look of two steam trains heading at full speed
towards each other. The image was to prove to be all too accurate.
This was only part of the gloomy scenario facing France. Beyond Europe’s
borders, Prévost-Paradol continued, ‘[t]wo rival powers, but which from the
point of view of race, language, manners and laws amount to one power, England
1 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (1869).
2 Ibid. 380.
3 Ibid. 383.
198
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
and the United States, dominate the remainder of the planet’.4 Here once more
France’ recent history had been one of woeful decline and ineptitude and it was this
that led Prévost-Paradol to predict that the dominance of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’
would only grow in the future, leaving the European powers (including a united
Germany) with a few unimportant colonial outposts. From this Prévost-Paradol
reached two important conclusions. If France were to survive in anything like a
meaningful form ‘the number of French people must increase sufficiently rapidly in
order to maintain a level of equilibrium between our power and that of the other
great nations on the earth’.5 Next, France had to make the most of ‘the supreme
opportunity’ provided by Algeria. There, he argued, was a colony that was fertile,
not too far away from ‘la mère patrie’ and easy to defend. In addition, from this base
colonization could be extended into Morocco and Tunisia so as to construct ‘a
Mediterranean Empire’ appropriate to France’s pride and stature. Only two ob-
stacles, Prévost-Paradol believed, stood in the way of this plan: France’s continuing
uncertainty about what type of regime to construct in Algeria, and ‘the Arab
people’. ‘It is time’, Prévost-Paradol responded unambiguously, ‘to establish
laws in Africa conceived with regard to the extension of French colonization . . . this
is French territory which as soon as possible must be peopled, possessed, and
cultivated by the French’.6
Within two years of these lines being written, France’s armies had been routed
by those of Prussia and the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost.
Later, and by way of compensation for her national humiliation, France duly set
out to construct her Mediterranean Empire, a strategy that was to have immense
long-term costs and consequences. After the Franco-Prussian war there could be
no denying the stark realities that Prévost-Paradol had only been able to guess at,
and in these troubled circumstances, as Prévost-Paradol had already recommended,
the validity and utility of the principle of nationalities had to be reconsidered. Just
as striking was the pessimistic tone struck by Prévost-Paradol. Where once, he
suggested, the question would have been whether France could hold her own
against the combined forces of the European states, it now seemed doubtful that
she could even stand up to Prussia alone. The ‘glorious name of old France’ seemed
but a bitter memory.
The contrast with the mood of the previous century could not have been more
marked. As Colin Jones has written, ‘[i]n many senses, the eighteenth century was
France’s century’.7 The country bounced back from the gruelling wars that had
characterized the final years of Louis XIV’s reign and was able ‘to imprint its influence
on every aspect of eighteenth-century European life’. France had the largest popula-
tion of any of the great powers and experienced long-term economic growth and
improving living standards. Paris remained at the epicentre of the intellectual world
and the eighteenth century was an age when Europe spoke French.8 It was not only
the language of international diplomacy but also the language of civilization, of the
4 Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (1869), 397.
5 Ibid. 413.
6 Ibid. 418.
7 The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: 2003), p. xiii.
8 Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait Français (2001).
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
199
arts, and of the republic of letters. To speak French, in this sense, was to be a party
to the aspirations of humanity as a whole. As Jones himself acknowledges, this did
not mean that France was a country without weaknesses. The monarchical system
did not adapt and gradually imploded, before going bankrupt. There were signifi-
cant losses of overseas territory, especially after the Seven Years War, when France
was ignominiously booted out of both India and North America by the British.
However, revenge was swiftly exacted through French support of the American
colonists. Most importantly, despite the upheaval and turmoil produced by the
Revolution, at the end of the century France had succeeded in greatly extending her
borders. In short, what in retrospect looked like Britain’s inevitable rise to become
the world’s dominant power in the nineteenth century did not look quite so certain
from the vantage point of the windmill placed on the top of the hill at Valmy at the
moment when France’s revolutionary army put to rout their Prussian opponents on
12 September 1792.
There could be no better description of the manner in which France was
constructed as a territory than that provided by Daniel Nordman.9 His is an
account that recognizes the importance of properly understanding the historic
meaning of such words as ‘frontier’ and ‘limit’ as a necessary prelude to grasping
the intricate processes through which France progressively extended her borders
and removed the foreign enclaves that existed within them. It was largely during the
reign of Louis XIV, and specifically after the Treaty of Munster in 1648, that
France’s territory became fixed. Sovereignty over Alsace was confirmed by treaty in
1648 and again by the treaty of Ryswick in 1697 (thereby establishing the Rhine as
the frontier between France and the Holy Roman Empire), over Artois and
Roussillon through the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, over the Franche-Comté
in 1678, and over Strasbourg in 1681. These extensions to French territory were
usually the outcome of successful military campaigns. The pattern of acquisition
changed significantly in the eighteenth century, when the most noteworthy addi-
tions were Lorraine in 1766 and Corsica in 1768. Through painstakingly detailed
investigation, servants of the monarchy sought to establish sovereign claim upon
often quite small areas of territory in cases where sovereignty was either indetermi-
nate or contested. Relying usually upon either legal or historic evidence, the
enterprise was carried out in a spirit of conciliation and exchange. Thus, despite
politically useful myths to the contrary, the borders of France were relatively well
defined and beyond dispute when the Revolution got under way in 1789.
Two points stand out from this analysis. The first is that, although there was a
long-standing sense of the physical limits of France—a sense that at its most
rudimentary rested upon a classical understanding of the territory of the Gauls as
covering that of present-day France, Belgium, and northern Italy—the actual
concept of ‘natural frontiers’ did not make its appearance until the early nineteenth
century. Just as significantly, the concept of ‘linguistic frontier’ did not manifest
itself until much later, probably around the time of the Second Empire. Indeed, the
9 Frontières de France: De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (1998).
200
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
language of the inhabitants was virtually absent from earlier territorial considera-
tions, and did not figure significantly during the period of the Revolution. Nor
indeed could it, as linguistic maps of Europe were at best sketchy and of little
practical, political use. So too it was only during the period of the First Empire that
systematic efforts were made to provide a linguistic map of France. The fact was,
however, that from the beginning of the nineteenth century language became
increasingly associated with nationality.
As Claude Nicolet has remarked, in a French cont
ext the word ‘Nation’ must be
placed amongst the category of ‘mots voyageurs’, words central to political dis-
course whose sense has changed significantly with passage of time.10 In the
eighteenth century it had at best an indeterminate meaning. Prior to the Revolution
of 1789 a person possessed not French nationality but ‘the quality of being French’
and this was determined not by place of birth but by the bond of parentage.11 Thus
Mirabeau, for example, could speak of ‘la nation provençale’, whilst Robespierre in
Arras could publish an appeal to ‘la nation artésienne’, thereby maintaining its use
as a term to describe a collection of individuals held together by a set of common
interests. Voltaire and Montesquieu used the term in a purely descriptive, sociolog-
ical fashion, as denoting a set of people held together by shared experiences and
customs; whilst Rousseau, once again ahead of the game, could speak of all peoples
as possessing ‘a national character’.12 For Rousseau, the existence of the nation
preceded that of the State but it would be through the State that the sense of being a
member of the nation would be strengthened and put to good use.13
It was outside the confines of discussions among the philosophes that the word
came to take definitive shape. There is much that could, and arguably should, be
said about the general manner in which over time the nation replaced God as the
source of all legitimate authority. With God, although not yet dead, now deemed to
be absent from human affairs, there was a felt-need for a new organizational
principle capable of generating loyalty among individual members of the commu-
nity and for some this dubious role fell to the nation. So much we will take as given
by way of general background to the emergence of nationalism as an ideology,
preferring rather to focus upon the specific context in which the word ‘nation’ came
to prominence in eighteenth-century France.
The first thing to note is that the monarchy itself played an important role in
fostering national sentiment. There has been a long-established view that prior to
the French Revolution wars did not arouse strong national emotions. However,
David Bell has shown that the literature of the Seven Years War, far from portraying
Revolution and the Republic Page 42
