history of France’, he wrote, ‘begins with the French language. Language is the
principal sign of a nationality.’123 The ‘continuous infiltration’ of the French
language over the entire territory was an integral part of the overcoming of local
particularisms and of the intimate fusion of races that constituted the identity of the
nation. France, on Michelet’s view, accordingly stopped at the border between
Lorraine and Alsace. Next, Michelet was in no doubt that ‘the war of wars’ that had
opposed England and France had been of ‘immense service’ in confirming and
strengthening French nationality. It was, he wrote, ‘through seeing the English
close up that [the provinces] became conscious that they were a part of France’.124
Thirdly, Michelet did not hesitate to describe Paris as ‘the great and complete
symbol of the country’. An entity which resulted from the complete annihilation of
local and provincial sentiment, Michelet ventured, might be regarded as being
‘entirely negative’, but in the case of Paris it was precisely from the negation of
such local particularities that derived the qualities of ‘generality’ and ‘receptivity’
towards the universal that in turn denoted the ‘superiority’ of the Ile-de-France over
the regions and of France herself over Europe.125
France, according to Michelet, had therefore been able to ‘neutralize’ and
‘convert’ those parts of her territory that had been originally English, German, or
Spanish and, in so doing, she had produced an ‘intimate fusion’ of civilizations
120 ‘Tableau de France’ in Michelet, Œuvres complètes, iv. Histoire de France, 331–84.
121 Ibid. 381.
122 Ibid. 384.
123 Ibid. 331.
124 Ibid. 377.
125 Ibid. 381.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
225
and races. Hence, she was the most ‘artificial’, ‘human’, and ‘free’ of countries.
France as such existed as ‘an abstract unity’ and it was precisely because of this level
of abstraction that she could be conceived as ‘the universal patrie and as the city of
Providence’.126 Accordingly Michelet was able to begin his Introduction à l’histoire
universelle with the lavish claims that France was ‘the pilot of the vessel of
humanity’ and that his introduction to universal history might just as well have
been entitled an introduction to the history of France.127
Yet, as Michelet accepted, France had failed to live up to the promise announced
by ‘the brilliant morning of July’, and it was therefore in a mood of profound
pessimism that Michelet penned his classic essay, Le Peuple, published in 1846.
‘I see France’ he wrote in the preface dedicated to Edgar Quinet, ‘sinking hour by
hour . . . our country is disappearing.’ The central theme of Le Peuple was a
straightforward one. The text began with a long discussion of the aspirations and
sentiments of the different classes and groups which made up French society: the
peasant, the factory worker, the artisan, the manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the
government official, and the wealthy bourgeois. Michelet’s conclusion was that
each class, in its own particular way, existed in a state of bondage. For example, the
factory worker, despite his relative affluence, lived in a world of ‘fate and necessity’.
Dominated by the machine he was reduced to ‘physical weakness and mental
impotence’. Likewise, the peasant, for all that he possessed and loved his land,
was ground down by poverty and consumed by hatred of his neighbours and the
world. As alone on his property as on a desert island, Michelet wrote, he had
become ‘a savage’. The total effect of this situation of generalized bondage, Miche-
let argued, was that the French people hated and despised one another. The rich
hated and no longer knew the poor; the poor despised and did not trust the rich.
France, in sum, was afflicted by an ‘evil’, an evil which Michelet identified as ‘the
chill and paralysis of the heart’ and which, he believed, manifested itself as
‘unsociableness’.
Where was the remedy to be found? Michelet’s short answer was that, if the evil
lay in the heart, it was here also that the solution was to be found. The French had
to remember that they were ‘brothers after all’. They had difficulty doing this,
Michelet contended, because France had become overrefined, overcultivated, and,
as a consequence, the emotions of the French and their capacity for love, as well as
for action, had been dwarfed and stultified. ‘The separation of men and classes’,
Michelet wrote, ‘is due principally to the absurd opposition between instinct and
reflection that has been established in our time.’ What was needed was a return to
instincts and with that an escape from what Michelet described as ‘this bastard
hotchpotch’.
It was precisely at this point that Michelet’s prose was at its most lyrical. The best
example that he could find of man in his uncorrupted and instinctive state was in
the shape of the child. ‘The child’, he wrote, ‘is the people themselves in their native
truth before they were deformed; it is the people without vulgarity, rudeness or
126 Ibid. 384.
127 ‘Introduction à l’histoire universelle’, 227.
226
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
envy.’ The child, put simply, was the ‘interpreter of the people’, the purest
expression of what was ‘young and primitive’ in the people, an expression of ‘the
people innocent’. What of the people themselves? ‘Son of the people’, Michelet
wrote, ‘I have lived with them, I know them’, and what he knew was that, although
disfigured, their degeneration was only ‘superficial’. The foundations were intact.
This race, he told his readers, still has wine in its blood and ‘is capable of action and
is ever ready to act’. The people, in brief, maintained the virtues of innocence,
compassion, self-sacrifice, love, and faith. They possessed the qualities of simplicity,
the capacity to see what their more sophisticated fellows were blind to, an instinct
which allowed them to sympathize with life. This led to the final, curious element
of this part of Michelet’s argument. The simplicity of the people, he argued, drew
them close to ‘the man of genius’, that rare person who combined ‘the instinct of
the simple and the reflection of the wise’, the merits of both the child and adult, the
barbarian and the civilized. The people exist, Michelet contended, ‘in their highest
power only in the man of genius; in him resides their great soul’.
It is the concluding, third part of Michelet’s Le Peuple that takes us to the heart of
his nationalism. The regeneration of the French nation would not be achieved by a
return to instinct alone. A faith was also required, because only ‘a God, an altar’
could engender sacrifice. The problem was that we had lost our gods, and thus
required a new faith. This faith was to be France herself. It was to be through
France, and not as isolated individuals, that ‘the soul of the people’ was to realize its
nature. From this Michelet was able to provide a description of France, and of
France alone, as t
he inheritor of the traditions of Greece and Rome, and as the
country which had realized what Christianity had promised: brotherly equality.
France embodied ‘the salvation of the world’, whilst ‘its own interest and its own
destiny’ was identical with that of ‘humanity’. Such a conclusion, Michelet re-
marked, was ‘not fanaticism’ but a ‘short summary of a considered judgement based
upon long study’. In particular, this view rested upon Michelet’s identification of the
Revolution of 1789 with the advent of the age of Justice, Right and Fraternity.128
For Michelet it was no idle coincidence that France had proclaimed her ‘lofty
and original revelation’ at the very moment when the ‘conflicting’ Frances existing
within her bosom were being suppressed and her provincialisms were disappearing.
France was herself, and in the very instant that she proclaimed ‘the future common
rights of the entire world’ was never more distinguishable from other nations.
This in turn led to a broader conclusion: nationalities were not on the point
of disappearing. On the contrary, Michelet announced, ‘I see them every day
developing profound moral characteristics and becoming individuals instead of
collections of men.’
There were several interesting dimensions to this claim. We have seen that
Michelet accredited the long war against England with a key role in the formation
of French national self-consciousness. France came to know herself through her
enemy. In similar vein, Michelet now scorned all those who believed that France
128 Michelet’s interpretation of the Revolution will be explored in the next chapter.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
227
should copy or imitate English arts, fashion, literature, and, worse still, political
institutions. To do so, Michelet argued, was to invite France ‘to march against
her history and her nature’, to counsel that France should model herself upon
‘anti-France’.
That England explained France but by opposition was a theme very evident in
Michelet’s Introduction à l’histoire universelle, and was used not only to demonstrate
that the two nations possessed different moral characteristics but also to lend
further support to the claim that France had a special destiny. At bottom, Michelet
shared the prevailing republican view that England was a country dominated by the
aristocracy. In his particular case he stressed that ‘[t]he land of France belongs to
fifteen or twenty million peasants who cultivate it’, whilst in England it was held by
a few thousand individuals who had it farmed for them. ‘What a serious moral
difference’, he remarked. Moreover, if Michelet recognized that it had been the
‘heroism’ of the English aristocracy that had begun the long march towards
‘modern liberty’, he was unambiguously of the view that heroism was not to be
confused with liberty. ‘In England’, Michelet wrote, ‘dominated as it is by Ger-
manic and feudal elements, it is old, barbaric heroism, aristocracy, liberty through
privilege that triumphs. Liberty without equality, unjust and impious liberty, is
nothing else than the absence of sociability in society. France wants liberty through
equality. . . . Liberty in France is just and holy.’ It was around this ideal, this vision
of liberty combined with equality, that France, a country made for action and not
for conquest, would construct a future not only for herself but for the entire
‘human race’.129 France, Michelet concluded eloquently, was ‘a religion’.
Eric Hobsbawm has argued that the liberal nationalism associated with mid-
nineteenth-century Europe rested upon two important assumptions: the principle
of nationalities applied in practice only to nations of a certain geographical size and
self-determination was relevant only to nations that could be considered to be both
culturally and economically viable.130 Applied to the nationalism of Michelet, this
characterization arguably misses its mark. For Michelet, the very idea of a nation
implied not homogeneity but a plurality of different cultures living harmoniously
side by side around a common point of unity. The particular genius of the French
nation lay in its capacity to absorb and to assimilate these cultures (as well as races)
and to do so in a manner that enhanced, rather than diminished, their vitality.
Thus, the creation of the French nation had been a spontaneous and voluntary
process, and one devoid of either economic imperatives or cultural expansionism.
More than this, France was also adjudged to possess the capacity to absorb the best
of what other nations and peoples had to offer, thereby making the French nation
in aspiration the most human and universal of all nationalities. Fraternity both
within and beyond the nation was the common theme.
Accordingly, for Michelet, the worst moments of France’s history were those
characterized by bitter division, and this, it seemed, was increasingly the case under
the July Monarchy. It was therefore with immense relief and enthusiasm that
129 ‘Introduction à l’histoire universelle’, 253.
130 Nations and Nationalism since 1870 (Cambridge, 1999).
228
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
Michelet, like so many of his fellow citizens, greeted the revolution of 1848.131
Reinstated to his teaching post at the Collège de France, he again proclaimed his
faith in the ability of France to lead the other nations of Europe towards emanci-
pation and towards a future characterized by liberty and justice. He was not to be
alone.132 However, the Republic, with first Alphonse de Lamartine and later Alexis
de Tocqueville as its Minister of Foreign Affairs, showed itself to be distinctly
disinclined to carry its principles abroad by force of arms (or, for that matter, to
issue a direct challenge to the much-hated treaties of 1815), preferring rather to
affirm France’s right to defend her own territory whilst offering only moral support
to other nations seeking to pursue a similar path.133
It was in the wake of the disillusionment that followed the bloody repression of
the popular protests of the ‘June days’ and the gradual reassertion of monarchical
and counter-revolutionary power across Europe that Michelet envisaged the publi-
cation of a further volume asserting the primacy of the nation. Intended as an act of
recompense for the betrayal inflicted upon the heroic and oppressed peoples
abandoned by the Republic, the primary focus of Légendes démocratiques du Nord
fell upon the struggles for national emancipation in eastern and south-eastern
Europe.134 As with Carrel and Lamennais, the tragic fate of Poland occupied centre
stage, and again it was assumed that Poland and France were joined together by a
singular bond of shared experiences and sentiments. Michelet’s message was
unmistakable. Europe, he announced, ‘is not in any way a chance grouping, a
simple juxtaposition of peoples; it is a melodious instrument, a lyre, where each
nationality is a note and represents a key. There is nothing arbitrary about it; each
one is necessary in itself and necessary in relation to the others. To remove one
alone would be to modify the whole, to reduce this array
of nations to impossibility,
dissonance, and silence.’135 To seek to destroy one of these nations was therefore to
act against ‘the sublime harmony designed by Providence’.
It was also an act of folly. Nations, according to Michelet, were indestructible.
Despite every attempt to suppress their existence, they reappeared, reinvigorated by
their travails. And this was the lesson to be drawn from the repeated attempts of a
barbarous Russia to annihilate ‘the France of the North’. Paradoxically, Michelet
affirmed, Polish nationhood had been reaffirmed by Russian oppression, and it was
Russia itself that had been immeasurably weakened, descending ‘into degradation,
into moral asphyxia’. The truth therefore was that it was to the Polish people that
Russia would owe its own ‘resurrection’. No greater calling was bestowed upon
‘poor Poland’ than the ‘salvation’ of ‘this drunken and mad giant’.
131 See Vialleneix, Michelet, les travaux et les jours, 322–35.
132 See Darriulat, Les Patriotes, 182–92.
133 On 6 Mar. 1848 Lamartine had issued a Manifeste aux Puissances, indicating that France no
longer accepted the treaties of 1815 as binding and offering support to ‘oppressed nationalities’.
Lamartine subsequently went out of his way to assure the rival powers that France’s intentions were
pacific.
134 Œuvres complètes de Michelet, xvi. 99–323.
135 Ibid. 137.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
229
Michelet’s zeal for the cause of Poland was not without reservation. He was
troubled in particular by the desire of many Polish nationalists to ally the fate of the
Polish nation to that of the Catholic Church. In Ireland, Spain, Italy, and France
herself, Michelet contended, Catholicism had had a sterilizing and neutralizing
effect, sapping the vitality of each nation. Poland in turn had been weakened by the
intrusion of the Church (and especially by the ‘invasion’ of the Jesuits), becoming
separated from its Orthodox neighbours. In this, therefore, he did not share the
views of Lamennais. Nevertheless, Michelet did not wish to suggest that the Poles
should abjure their faith. This, he knew, was not possible. Rather, he wished only
that their faith should be extended and broadened. He was thus able to return to
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