one of his favourite themes and again to underline what he took to be the
emancipatory and morally uplifting qualities of his own conception of the nation.
The religion of the world, Michelet proclaimed, was no longer an egoistic faith,
where salvation was secured in isolation. Our own salvation was only secured
through the salvation of everyone else, was only to be obtained through what
Michelet termed ‘the fraternal embrace of humanity by humanity’.136
I V
Michelet republished Légendes démocratiques du Nord in 1863, the year in which
Poland again unsuccessfully rose in revolt against Tsarist Russia. If anything his
distaste for the Russian ‘monster’ had only intensified over time, although this did
not prevent him from recognizing the ‘magnanimity’ of Alexander Herzen and
the ‘heroism’ of Mikhail Bakunin.137 Something had changed however. Upon this
occasion, Russian repression had formal Prussian support, Bismarck having signed
an agreement with the Tsar in February 1863 specifying that an uprising in the
Polish provinces of Prussia would be met by similar repression. The following year
Prussia went to war successfully with Denmark over the contested duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein. Two years later Prussia defeated Austria, leaving the way
open for the establishment of the North German Confederation in 1867 and
further Prussian expansion. In a few short years Bismarck had overturned the
European balance of power and France, under the incompetent and vainglorious
guidance of Napoleon III, found herself facing a politically unified and increasingly
aggressive Germany. Three years later, under the pretext of a dispute about the
succession to the Spanish throne, Prussia and France went to war. The French army
was decisively defeated; and (in an act calculated to inflict maximum humiliation)
the second German Reich was proclaimed in the hall of mirrors of the Palace of
Versailles. The latter event, the Goncourt brothers confided to their diary, marked
‘the end of the greatness of France’.138
If the loss of French pre-eminence in continental Europe dramatically over-
turned the fragile military and diplomatic equilibrium that had existed since 1815,
136 Ibid. 186.
137 Ibid. 134.
138 Pages from the Goncourt Journal (Harmondsworth, 1984), 183.
230
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
it had been an outcome long foretold by pessimists such as Prévost-Paradol. The
experience of the Second Empire had forced republicans to rethink their very idea
of the nation and to recognize that the nation could as well be embodied in an
autocrat as in the people. The military successes in the Crimea (1854–5) and Italy
(1859) allowed both Napoleon III and the army to bask in the afterglow of national
triumph. In such a bellicose atmosphere, the romantic messianism associated with
the likes of Michelet and Ledru-Rollin continued to find a voice but did so in an
atmosphere increasingly drawn towards anti-militarism and a more overt endorse-
ment of internationalism. As Napoleon III’s foreign and colonial adventures grew
in recklessness, so opponents of the regime came more and more to cast themselves
as the party of peace. Even the myth of Napoleon Bonaparte now began to lose its
appeal.
The less bellicose and overtly anti-militarist mood of the period was clearly
captured and expressed in the writings and actions of Jules Barni. From his exile in
Switzerland, Barni acted as president of the Ligue Internationale pour la Paix et la
Liberté, an organization which he helped to launch in 1867. This was no minor
interest, as the final section of La morale dans la démocratie, published the following
year,139 demonstrated. There Barni showed himself to be totally opposed to the
republican ‘just war’ tradition, preferring rather to explore how peaceful relations
among states could best be achieved.140 Accordingly, Barni was quick to reject all
the arguments then advanced in defence of war and conquest: those that justified
war in terms of the advance of civilization, the claims of nationality, and the
recognition of natural borders. Frequently contradicting each other, even when
taken together they could not absolve an ‘unjust’ act.141 ‘What’, Barni asked, ‘is a
state, a people, a nation? Not a herd of animals but an association of men, of free
beings, forming a kind of moral person. . . . We must therefore grant to states the
same rights that we grant to individuals and apply the same moral rules to them as
those which govern the relationship between persons.’142 It followed that no state
had the right to get involved in the internal affairs of another and that one of the
first rules of international morality was the ‘principle of non-intervention’. Until
such time as states moved out of the state of nature and war could definitively be
abolished, the best that could be hoped for was that we could ‘moralize and
humanize’ war. To that end Barni recommended a set of preliminary conditions
including the abolition of standing armies. The ultimate goal—as befitted a
convinced Kantian—was ‘a federation of free states designed to guarantee the rights
of each nation and to resolve the differences between them by means of binding
arbitration’.143 Underpinning all of this was Barni’s unshakable conviction that the
principal threat to peace came from the militarism and despotism he associated
with ‘Caesarism’, and therefore from the absence of free, republican systems of
139 Jules Barni, La Morale dans la démocratie (1868), 218–66.
140 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century
French Political Thought (Oxford, 2001), 246–56.
141 Barni, La Morale dans la démocratie, 220–4.
142 Ibid. 219.
143 Ibid. 255.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
231
government. ‘Let us work’, he told delegates to the 1867 Geneva congress of the
Ligue Internationale pour la Paix et la Liberté, ‘to oppose the republican spirit to
the Caesarian spirit, the civic spirit to the militaristic spirit, the spirit of federation
to the spirit of centralization, in brief, the spirit of liberty and peace to the spirit of
despotism and war’.144
The events of 1870–1 sorely tested the anti-militarism and internationalism of
men like Barni. If, as Karma Nabulsi has shown,145 there was plenty of evidence to
suggest that ‘a republican culture of war was still operating at the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian war’, it was equally the case that expressions of anti-German
patriotism were not slow to be voiced. As Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior
in the newly formed provisional government, toured the country seeking to rally a
people’s army to defend the Republic, even old cynics such as Gustave Flaubert
could not resist the occasional, heartfelt chauvinistic outburst.146 Barni himself
returned to France with the fall of the Second Empire and immediately offered his
services to the Government of National Defence.
To this powerful intellectual challenge was added the emotional trauma asso-
ciated with the establishment and subsequent violent
repression of the Paris
Commune. For seventy-three days, between 18 March and 28 May 1871, the
administration of Paris was in the hands of the people, in open defiance of the
government located in Versailles. Few, if any, writers of distinction or renown lent
their support to its cause, most showing themselves deeply troubled by the brutal
anticlericalism and artistic vandalism of the Parisian mob. Concerns about religious
freedom and the fate of the Venus de Milo were, however, dwarfed by the shock
and apprehension that accompanied the deaths of approximately 20,000 Parisians,
killed or executed by government troops as they recaptured the capital during ‘la
semaine sanglante’ that brought the Commune to an end. Thousands more were
arrested, many being deported to far-off New Caledonia. To national humiliation
was added a sense of bereavement and shame.
Following the Treaty of Frankfurt, signed on 21 May 1871, France therefore
faced not one but two questions of central importance. She again needed to decide
what form of political regime should be put in place. Secondly, France had to find a
way of responding to Prussian military supremacy whilst rehabilitating herself in
the eyes of the international community. For many, the answers to the two
questions were intimately related.
Michelet, nearing the end of his life, continued to strike a tone of hope and
defiance.147 If Prussia owed its victory not to the heroism of its troops but to
espionage and ‘the triumph of the machine’, so also it derived from the ‘rottenness’
of the Second Empire. Was Napoleon III even French? Michelet asked. Yet the
‘soul’ of France was ‘invincible’ and her ‘renaissance’ would save Europe. It was out
of the trials of military resistance, Michelet contended, that France would overcome
144 Ibid. 260.
145 Nabulsi, ‘La Guerre Sainte’, 38.
146 See Michel Winock, Les Voix de la liberté: Les Écrivains engagés au XIXe siècle (2001), 492–6.
147 See La France devant l’Europe, Œuvres complètes de Michelet, xx. 1867–1871, 601–712.
232
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
her divisions and again take her place as Europe’s leader in the fight against ‘Prusso-
Russian militarism’. With her ‘moral unity’ still intact, France would quickly
restore her ‘material unity’.
The response of Edgar Quinet was altogether more thought-provoking and
profound.148 Like Michelet, Quinet had but a few years to live and it is hard not
to be moved by the passion he brought to the task of sketching out the conditions
through which France could be regenerated. At their heart lay the necessity of
confirming the existence of the Republic and therefore the need to break with the
backward-looking, reactionary doctrines of the past. These doctrines, with ‘their
aversion to modern liberty’, represented ‘the remains and the ashes of everything
which is dead in the human spirit’.149 Thus there could be no talk of a republic
reconciled to the monarchy, of a republic without republicans. To abandon the
Republic would be for France to turn its back to the light and to descend into
chaos. In practical terms, this meant: the reform of the army and the re-establish-
ment of its links with the nation; the reorganization of the educational system with
a view to reawakening the ‘spirit of liberty’; the separation of Church and State; and
consequently the eradication of the baneful influence of theocracy. To this Quinet
added the reform of the diplomatic service (which had been blind to the rise of
Prussia), of the judiciary (which was still imprinted with the ‘decrepit spirit of the
past’), and of the education of France’s political leaders (so as to forge closer links
with the aspirations of the people). These changes, plus other measures such as the
return of the government to Paris, would, in Quinet’s opinion, lead to an artistic
and intellectual revival, and would thus allow France to escape from the ‘Prussian
spectre’. ‘It is unquestionable’, Quinet wrote, ‘that a nation, even one bowed by
defeat, can quickly raise itself, regenerate itself and surprise the world.’150
To that extent, Quinet concluded, France had to take the battle to Prussia on the
‘field of civilization’.151 All enduring victories, he argued, had had ‘the fusion of
human races’ as a consequence but this had not been so with the victory of
Prussia.152 ‘The Germans’, Quinet wrote, ‘boast of extinguishing the Latin race’
to the advantage of ‘the Teutonic race’. They thought of themselves only as
Germans and were driven by hatred and ‘the egoism of race’. It was therefore a
‘barbarous victory’ and one that was antithetical to civilization. Herein lay ‘the
superiority of France’, a country bringing together ‘many different races of men, the
Gallic, the Latin, the Iberian and the German’.153 Herein too lay the particular
offence that arose from the forced annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. An integral
part of the spirit of France—the German race—had been torn away. Behind this
however lay a deeper awareness of the strategic significance of this loss. Alsace and
Lorraine, Quinet wrote, were ‘not just two provinces; they are the two highways of
France, the two ramparts’. Annexed to Germany, it meant that France was open to
the enemy, that he was always ready and able to march on Paris, that he had ‘France
148 See Edgar Quinet, La République, conditions de la régénération de la France (1873). See also L’Esprit
Nouveau (1879; 1st publ. 1874).
149 Quinet, La République, 138.
150 Ibid. 120.
151 Ibid. 93.
152 Ibid. 248–51.
153 Ibid. 250.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
233
by the throat’. This, Quinet declared, was not peace but rather ‘permanent war
under the guise of peace’.154
Quinet was not prepared to accept that France had come to the end of her
history with the defeats at Metz and Sedan. Peoples were slow to mature and to
achieve their full greatness and by these criteria France as a nation ‘had a brilliant
future before her’. Above all, France must not become the feudal vassal of Prussia,
meekly paying her war indemnity ‘in the manner of the enslaved peoples of
antiquity’. That fate, and the further dismemberment which would follow, could
only be avoided through the Republic, the one regime that could, in Quinet’s
opinion, ‘unite all of the French into the same body’.155
Yet the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was like an open wound, a constant
affront not just to French dignity but to the very conception of France that had
been built up over the preceding eighty years or more. On this view, France was an
artificial construct and it was out of this very artificiality that had arisen her special
genius: the ability to bring different nations and cultures together into a harmoni-
ous totality that opened itself up to the noblest aspirations of humanity. It was
precisely this idea that Michelet restated in 1869 when, after a lifetime of study
spent recovering the history of France, he distanced his account from that provided
by his distinguished predecessor Augustin
Thierry with its reliance upon the
unchanging character of races. ‘France’, Michelet wrote, ‘has made France, and
the fatal element of race seems to me to be of secondary importance. She is the
product of her liberty. In human progress the essential part falls to the active force
that one calls man. Man is his own Prometheus.’156 A year later it was arguably the
ideological antithesis of this sentiment that was triumphant on the battlefield.
The task of working through the political and intellectual implications of
France’s defeat was to preoccupy French writers for decades to come. A sense of
the challenge it represented can nonetheless be glimpsed by looking at one of the
first, and also best-known, responses to the claims of German nationalism. In 1870
Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, one of the most distinguished French historians
of the second half of the nineteenth century, published a short pamphlet entitled
L’Alsace, est-elle Allemande ou Française?157 It was a direct response to the arguments
put forward to justify German annexation by Theodore Mommsen, a fellow
historian at the University of Berlin. According to Mommsen, Alsace was German
because its people spoke German and because they belonged to the German race.
Fustel de Coulanges disputed the validity of these arguments on a series of grounds,
not the least of them being that they could justify Prussian expansion into Holland,
Austria, Switzerland, and eastward into Russia. At the heart of his reply, however,
was the contention that ‘neither race nor language constituted nationality’.158
‘What distinguishes nations’, Fustel de Coulanges went on, ‘is neither race nor
language. Men feel in their heart that they belong to the same people when they
154 Ibid. 290–4.
155 Ibid. 277.
156 Michelet, ‘Préface de 1869’, Histoire de France: Le Moyen ge (1981), 17.
157 Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace, est-elle Allemande ou Française? (1870).
158 Ibid. 8.
234
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
share a common stock of ideas, of interests, of affections, of memories and of
hopes.’159 One’s homeland was the place that one loved and by this criterion
Alsace, irrespective of race and language, was French. And it had been so since
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