graced with a royal title. The purpose of the Napoleonic imperium was to serve one
nation and one person. Napoleon did not abandon all reference to national and
patriotic sentiment however. He skilfully exploited the military successes of his
army—la Grande Armée—to bolster support, but over time the vast cost in human
and physical resources engendered sentiments of sullen resistance and indifference,
especially amongst the peasantry (whose male offspring bore the brunt of the
carnage). Only briefly in 1814 was anything like a resurgence of military patriotism
witnessed. If, later, this gave rise to the mythological patriotism associated with the
figure of Nicolas Chauvin,31 the consequences of defeat could not have been
starker. By the treaty of Paris in 1814 France returned to its borders of 1792.
Following defeat at Waterloo, she returned to her borders of 1790. The restored
European order of the Holy Alliance was to rest upon the principles of legitimacy
and stability.
31 See Gérard de Puymège, ‘Le soldat Chauvin’, in Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (1997),
ii. 1699–1728.
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Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
I I
There were powerful currents of thought in France prepared to turn their backs
on the nationalist inheritance of the French Revolution. Benjamin Constant for
one saw that the doctrine of natural frontiers would be such as to condemn
Europe to permanent war. He also saw—here developing his theme of the
distinction between the liberty of the ancients and the moderns—that in a
commercial age the relationship of the individual to the patrie was undergoing
a fundamental change. In the past, he wrote, ‘the fatherland represented what
was dearest to a man; to lose his fatherland was to lose his children, his friends, all
the objects of his affection’. But now, he contended, ‘what we love in a country is
our possessions, the safety of our person and of those close to us, the careers of
our children, the progress resulting from our industry . . . in a word, the countless
forms of happiness that flow from our interests and tastes’. If our own patrie
could not provide these benefits, Constant argued, we could easily move to one
of the many ‘civilized and hospitable nations’ that surrounded us. What is more,
Constant was clear that no government should have ‘either the right or the
power’ to prevent us from doing so.32
It would be a mistake to believe that the glorification of the French nation ever
attained anything like unanimous assent. The voice of theocratic reaction had little
difficulty in dismissing the unjustified pretensions of the people to constitute the
nation. In Joseph de Maistre’s view, what characterized a nation was the ‘general
soul’ or moral unity given to it directly by God and this was not something that
could find expression through what was taken (in error) to be the popular will.
‘What is a nation?’ Maistre asked. ‘It is the sovereign and the aristocracy. One must
weigh voices, not count them.’33 Similarly, Auguste Comte, when he came to
provide a detailed specification of the political organization of the envisaged
positivist society, predicted the eventual break-up of France into ‘seventeen inde-
pendent republics’ and saw a future in which the family, the city, and humanity,
bound together by the positivist Church, would leave no place for the nation-state.
Countries the size of Tuscany, Holland, and Belgium, Comte believed, would
become the norm.34
Comte expressed these views in the early 1850s, and in doing so courted
unpopularity by being among the few to oppose the cause of Italian unification.
A decade later, the ever-controversial Pierre-Joseph Proudhon did not hesitate to
adopt the same stance, castigating Mazzini for pursuing a policy that would
threaten peace in Europe without adding to liberty. ‘Unification in Italy’, Proud-
hon contended, ‘is the same as the indivisible republic of Robespierre, no more
than the corner stone of despotism and bourgeois exploitation.’35 Attacking what
32 Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (1822–4) (2004), 149–50.
33 Joseph de Maistre, Œuvres (2007), 1234–5.
34 See Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive (1852), ii. 263–338.
35 ‘La Fédération et l’Unité en Italie’ (1862), in Du Principe Fédératif: Œuvres complètes de P-J.
Proudhon (1959), 106.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
207
he saw as the dangerous fallacies of ‘la topographie politique’,36 Proudhon not only
disputed the logic of the natural frontiers argument—nations were often built
around rather than separated by such rivers as the Rhine, for example—but went
on to characterize nation-states in general as wasteful, regressive, bureaucratic, a
threat to peace, and arbitrary in their manner of operation. ‘The Frenchman’, he
continued, ‘is a figment of the imagination: he does not exist’, France being
‘composed of at least twenty distinct nations’.37 Entities such as France, therefore,
had to be seen as ‘abstract’ and ‘artificial’ constructions designed solely to secure the
centralization of power. Proudhon’s proposed alternative thus broke with the
tradition of centuries of French state-building: France was to be split up into a
set of loose, self-governing federations. ‘In the Confederation’, he stated, ‘the units
which comprise the political bodies . . . are groups, constituted a priori by nature,
and whose average size will not be greater than that of a population drawn from a
territory of no more than several hundred square miles.’38 In the interests of peace
and ‘self-government’, the same principle was to be applied across Europe as a
whole. Proudhon also opposed the claims of Polish nationalism.
However, there were those for whom almost nothing—not even the descent into
Terror and the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte—could diminish their
preoccupation with the nation, the left bank of the Rhine, and the need to liberate
oppressed peoples everywhere. Indeed, the humiliating peace treaties imposed upon
a defeated France and the return to the throne of what was sometimes deprecatingly
referred to as the ‘royauté cosaque’ were sufficient to rekindle nationalist fervour
amongst a new generation, born with the century, and for whom the collective
trauma was not the Revolution but the collapse of the Empire.39 For these young
men, blessed with the exuberance of youth (as well as a certain gravity and high
moral tone), the desire to free France from the humiliating clutches of the Holy
Alliance was of necessity combined with the wish to see Europe’s established
monarchical order overturned.
This mood was captured in Edgar Quinet’s essay 1815 et 1840.40 As Quinet was
later to write, ‘I set myself the task of relating, from a personal point of view, the
moral history of the generation to which I belonged.’41 The moment at which the
text itself was written—the latter of the two dates—was not without significance. In
that year, Adolphe Thiers, recalled to head the government, was embroiled in a
serious diplomatic crisis with England over Egy
pt, which threatened war.42
36 ‘France et Rhin’ (1867), ibid. 558. The texts that make up this collection were probably written
between 1859 and 1861.
37 Ibid. 594.
38 ‘Du Principe Fédératif et de la Nécessité de Reconstituer le Parti de la Révolution’ (1863), ibid.
546.
39 Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 10. See also Jean-Claude
Caron, Générations Romantiques: Les Étudiants de Paris et le Quartier Latin (1991). Caron speaks of the
students of this period as being ‘more patriotic than Bonapartist’.
40 See Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes: Doctrines de l’âge romantique (1977), 454–96.
41 Edgar Quinet, Œuvres complètes de Edgar Quinet: Histoire de mes idées (1858), pp. iii–iv.
42 On 10 July 1840 Britain concluded a treaty with Russia, Prussia, and Austrian requiring France’s
protégé, the Pasha of Egypt, to withdraw from Syria. France did not learn of this treaty until 26 July,
after which there was a general outcry for war.
208
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
This itself had hastened the decision to encircle Paris with military fortifications. At
the same time the triumphal return of the Emperor Napoleon’s remains to the
French capital was being carefully orchestrated, an event only made possible as a
consequence of Napoleon’s earlier reincarnation as both romantic hero and saviour
of the patrie.43
The scene was set by a preface dated 15 November 1840.44 Quinet began by
asking the Germans to recognize that the interests, the ideas, and even the enemy of
France and Germany were the same, and thus that Germany should wish that
France should not die. Germany, he therefore argued, should turn its attention
away from the Rhine—which was to be shared with France—towards the Danube.
If not, he concluded, it would be to Russia’s advantage.45 However, what Quinet
found most difficult to forgive was that those who had governed France since the
Restoration had been more troubled by the ‘noise of the street’ than they had been
by the position and fate of France in Europe. France, in effect, has turned away
from her wounds, as was evidenced by the passion for utopian thinking. ‘[T]he
character of the greater part of the new doctrines’, Quinet commented, ‘is that of
the absence of national sentiment. Instead of France, they all embrace the human
race.’46 Everyone had become cosmopolitan out of necessity.
It was after these preliminaries that Quinet developed the substance of his
argument. The Revolution, he argued, had lasted for thirty years but it had only
been in 1815 that it had ‘handed over its sword’.47 What followed had been a
catastrophe. ‘If’, Quinet wrote, ‘the French Revolution was defeated in 1815, the
international order, based upon the treaties of Vienna, was the legal, concrete and
permanent sign of this defeat. Subjected to treaties written with the blood of
Waterloo, in the eyes of the world, we are still legally the defeated of Waterloo.’48
Worse still, since then France had been ‘complicit’ in her ruin and had appeared to
accept her ‘enslavement’. The Revolution of 1830, Quinet argued, had given hope
to some that things would change but ‘this large wounded body was only able to
raise itself to its knees’.
The result was that a country believing itself to be free was ‘enclosed in a circle of
iron’. It lived in a web of lies and hypocrisy. France assured the foreign powers that
the country was resigned to the situation, whilst she told the people that the
country had been liberated from external threat. As long as France acknowledged
this defeat, the foreign powers were prepared to extend her chains, but as soon as
France showed signs of real life and determination ‘the dependence to which she
has been reduced, and that she has accepted, was harshly felt’.49 This situation,
Quinet affirmed, could only lead France to the ‘abyss’. She therefore had to have
the courage to resist or else accept that she would cease to exist. And to resist meant
43 See Jean Tulard, ‘Le retour des cendres’, in Nora, Les Lieux, ii. 1729–52. See also Natalie
Petiteau, Napoléon: de la mythologie à l’histoire (1999), 57–105.
44 Edgar Quinet, 1815 et 1840 (1840).
45 See Quinet, De l’Allemagne et la Révolution (1832).
46 Quinet, 1815 et 1840, 25.
47 Ibid. 26.
48 Ibid. 27–8.
49 Ibid. 40.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
209
that the treaties which had followed Waterloo had to be overturned—by war if
necessary.
What was evident in this text was a deep sense of national shame and dishonour.
This was combined with a powerful resentment directed against the politicians who
appeared to have accepted the abject enslavement and humiliation imposed upon
France by the victorious powers in the wake of Waterloo. If we are to believe
Quinet, these sentiments were shared by his generation. What this text did
not explain, however, was the manner in which the architect of this disgrace—
Napoleon—was reintegrated into the patriotic vision. How was it possible that the
man who had so recklessly squandered the lives of so many Frenchmen could be
viewed as the nation’s saviour?50
Here again Quinet can act as our guide. In 1858 he published an intellectual
biography entitled Histoire de mes idées.51 Written in a tone of genuine modesty,
much of it concerned Quinet’s early years and recounted his life in a countryside
untouched by considerations of the Revolution. As a child, Quinet told his readers,
he had not known who the Girondins and the Jacobins were. Nevertheless, ‘the
events which changed the face of the world’ eventually reached his isolated village.
It was ‘by chance’, he recalled, that one of the children of his own age told him of
the burning of Moscow. Subsequently, there occurred the invasion of the Prussians
and the beginning of ‘the bereavement of France, the deep sense of her fall’. A
decisive moment in Quinet’s intellectual development, however, came with the
return of Napoleon from Elba. Prior to this ‘the legend of the Empire’ had only had
an ‘impersonal’ existence for him: henceforth it had a real physical form and was
called Napoleon. His abiding sentiment after the defeat at Waterloo was that of
‘treason’, only to be followed by a sense of shame with the second invasion of
France. From this point onwards, Quinet argued, the ‘temperament’ of France
changed, as indeed did his own character. He was, he wrote, surrounded by a
‘profound sadness’. Everything he had idolized was suddenly denied and slandered.
All that he had considered honourable and virtuous was viewed as infamy and a
crime. Moreover, this was true not only of himself but of an entire nation which
was forced to abandon its ‘past education’ and to construct ‘another nature’. Such
were the emotional and psychological outcomes of ‘the cataclysm’ of 1815.
In these dire circumstances what happened to the legend of Napoleon? ‘Like
everything else’, Quinet wrote, ‘this legend suffered a great eclipse in the first years
which followed 1815. . . . It was f
orbidden to speak of it; forced to be silent, one
found oneself forgetting.’52 It was then that Quinet felt ‘a violent interior struggle’.
How, he asked, could ‘my religion for Napoleon’ be reconciled with the ‘ferment of
liberal ideas that were coming at me from all sides and that I had firmly decided not
to give up?’53 Need he make a choice between Napoleon and liberty? At first
Quinet believed not, but little by little he thought more about liberty and less about
Napoleon. But this changed with Napoleon’s death in 1821. Napoleon came back,
50 See Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2004).
51 See Œuvres complètes de Edgar Quinet, 89–270.
52 Ibid. 210.
53 Ibid. 212.
210
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
Quinet recorded, ‘to haunt my mind, no longer as my Emperor and as my absolute
master, but as a spectre that death had almost entirely changed’.54 Quinet therefore
conjured up the final one hundred days of Napoleon’s reign as proof that at the end
Napoleon had embraced the liberal ideas that he had formerly rejected. ‘This is
how’, Quinet explained, ‘I was able to accommodate what had appeared to me to be
irreconcilable, my worship of Napoleon with my thirst for liberty. It was not we
who went to Napoleon but Napoleon who came back to us.’55
Seen from this perspective, Napoleon’s ambitions could be allied to the
struggles for national liberation and emancipation emerging right across Europe.
So also the story of his life could be retold and refashioned as one dedicated to
the cause of the French nation. And this was how Napoleon was increasingly
seen, the image of the Corsican brigand and adventurer quickly fading from
view. Following his death, intimate accounts of his final years in exile appeared in
print, each confirming the portrait of a man (and harshly treated prisoner) selflessly
dedicated to high and noble ideals. Poets and novelists continued the trend, exalting
Napoleon’s exploits and praising his almost superhuman genius. Thus romanticized,
all ordinary mortals could only suffer in comparison. By the same token, the mediocre
might be elevated by the Emperor’s presence. Louis-Philippe and the politicians of the
July Monarchy proved themselves not slow to appreciate this. In 1833 Napoleon’s
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