1789. ‘From that moment onwards’, Fustel de Coulanges argued, ‘Alsace has
followed our fortunes: she has lived our life.’ In its heart and mind Alsace was
‘one of the most French of provinces’ and of this no better proof had been given
than by the way that Alsace had bravely defended itself against Prussian aggression.
To speak of nationality in terms of race and language, therefore, was to look to the
past. ‘Our principle’, Fustel de Coulanges concluded, ‘is that a population can only
be governed by the institutions which it freely accepts and that it must only form
part of a state through its own will and consent.’160 France’s sole motive in wishing
to keep Alsace French was that this was what the people of Alsace themselves
wanted.
Fustel de Coulanges by no means had the last word on the subject. Within a
matter of a few years a doctrine that had initially bathed in the waters of national
unity, natural frontiers, and sister republics and which had consistently portrayed
France as the embodiment of a universal idea, had been subverted by the very ideas
that Fustel de Coulanges had challenged. After 1870 the talk was of ‘revenge’ and of
the recovery of the ‘lost provinces’ and with that the path was open to Vacher de
Lapouge’s measurement of human skulls to prove that ‘race and nation are
everything’ and, later, Maurice Barrès’s cult of ‘la Terre et les Morts’ and the
‘integral nationalism’ of Charles Maurras. Moreover, it was to be in this guise, as a
reactionary, anti-parliamentary, and anti-liberal doctrine, that nationalism was
largely to figure in subsequent French political thinking.
But did this trajectory represent as fundamental a change in the character of
French nationalism as this might suggest? According to Raoul Girardet, it did
not.161 If he accepts that between the nationalism of someone like Armand Carrel
and the right-wing nationalism of the late nineteenth century there existed ‘irre-
ducible oppositions of ideological motivation and historical reference’,162 Girardet
nevertheless contends that on several substantive points they were in agreement.
Each proclaimed the cult of the army and of military glory. They both articulated a
conception of national grandeur built around a vision of a glorious French past and
a providential future. Most importantly, they shared what he terms a ‘dynamic of
refusal’. ‘Under the Restoration, under the July Monarchy, and almost constantly
since 1883’, Girardet writes, ‘the spokesmen of French nationalism have not ceased
to accuse those in power of pursuing a foreign policy of weakness and fainthearted-
ness, of scorning and humiliating French pride, of betraying the overriding interests
of the homeland.’163 This was certainly true of men like Carrel and Quinet. Their
nationalism was rooted in a deep sense of the permanent humiliation and
159 Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace, est-elle Allemande ou Française? (1870), 10.
160 Ibid. 15.
161 Raoul Girardet, ‘Pour une introduction à l’histoire du nationalisme français’, Revue Française de
Science Politique, 8 (1958), 505–28, and Girardet (ed) Le Nationalisme français (1983).
162 Girardet, ‘Pour une introduction’, 515.
163 Ibid. 519.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
235
abasement of a defeated France and the need for this to be reversed by a call to arms.
Similarly, their hostility to the restored Bourbon monarchy derived from the
conviction that Louis XVIII and Charles X were the supreme symbols of that
humiliation and it was this that drew them into the ranks of the liberal opposition.
The diplomatic and military defeats of Napoleon III only served to confirm this
perspective.
Other long-term continuities can be discerned. The revolutionary tradition in
France, replete with its messianic message, made much not just of the idea of
national unity but also of the virtue of assimilation: the aspirations of the Revolu-
tion, and through it of France, were universal and could embrace not only the
entire French nation but could also be extended indefinitely to include all of
humankind. Yet, according to Bernard Manin, ‘French republican culture has
essentially been a culture of exclusion’.164 The most dramatic illustration of this
was undoubtedly the Terror but, as Manin points out, ‘an analogous vision of
exclusion can be found in the writings of Sieyès’. The members of the privileged
orders were deemed to have nothing in common with the Third Estate. Hence
the privileged orders could legitimately be excluded from all consideration and
deliberation. Their flight into exile was subsequently taken as proof of their ‘anti-
national’ credentials and was sufficient to convince the revolutionaries that they
faced a handful of foreign enemies possessing only tenuous links with the national
community.
From this was derived the mythe de l’adversaire and the vision of le peuple, united
and in harmony, pitted against les gros.165 If, initially, it was the monarchy,
aristocracy, and the Church which fell into the latter category, republican ideology
had little difficulty converting its enemies into the capitalists and the bourgeoisie,
Sieyès’s minority of 200,000 aristocrats and priests being replaced by the financial
feudalism of the ‘200 families’, the émigrés of Coblenz giving way to a bourgeoisie
apatride, a bourgeoisie antinationale.166 For their part, the nationalists of the right
had little difficulty replicating these xenophobic conspiracy theories, the targets of
their hatred being Jews, Freemasons, and Protestants. As Pierre Birnbaum has
written: ‘even if the nationalisms of the right and the left diverge upon certain
crucial points they merge together in the common defence of the French nation,
partially occupied and threatened by the foreigner’.167
In both cases this vision of the people confronting a handful of opponents
deemed by definition to be non-members of the national community was at best
an absurd caricature of French society, but in purely political terms it was a vision
that proved to be remarkably effective and enduring. Few political movements were
to prosper without recourse to the language of union nationale and rassemblement,
even though the nature and character of that coming together was subject to bitter
164 Bernard Manin, ‘Pourquoi la République?’, Intervention, 10 (1984), 10.
165 See Pierre Birnbaum, Le Peuple et les Gros: Histoire d’un mythe (1979).
166 See Alain Bergounioux and Bernard Manin, ‘L’Exclu de la nation: La Gauche française et son
mythe de l’adversaire’, Le Débat, 5 (1980), 45–53.
167 Birnbaum, Le Peuple et les Gros, 20.
236
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
dispute. Somehow or other, it was agreed, the integrity of the French people and of
France herself had to be reasserted and re-established.
In a later chapter we will return to this theme but here we might conclude
by reflecting upon two of the very different ways in which the preoccupation with
re-establishing the integrity of the French nation found its way into the broader
culture of everyday life during the Third Republic. One would
be the tour de France,
the cycle race first staged in 1903.168 Although in origin a commercial venture
designed to boost newspaper circulation, sport (and physical exercise in general)
was closely linked to the theme of national renaissance and revival. More than this,
from the outset the tour not only celebrated the history of France but self-consciously
exploited the physical beauty of France, paying particular attention to natural
frontiers and to the mountain ranges of the Alps and Pyrenees especially. Between
1906 and 1910 it even managed to penetrate into the two provinces lost to Prussia
in 1870, where, it was reported, crowds sang La Marseillaise as the cyclists passed
by. It is no idle coincidence that the longest tour of all took place in 1919. At over
5,380 kilometres it wound its way across the battlefields of northern France and
around the newly reclaimed borders of Alsace and Lorraine.169
The other example would be Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, first
published in 1877. This was the tale of two young boys forced to leave their native
Lorraine (then under Prussian occupation) and who travel the length and breadth
of France, in the process discovering both the variety and the unity of their
homeland. The author, whose identity was long hidden, was Augustine Fouillée,
wife of the philosopher Alfred Fouillée, and her work reflected the solidarist ideas
developed by her husband. Lauded, therefore, were the values of hard work,
perseverance, frugality, honesty, the home, and respect for the law as the expression
of the national will. But, above all, there was love of country and of France herself.
The happiest of countries, Augustine Fouillée’s young readers were told, was one
where people were always ready to help each other and where there was agreement
and union amongst the inhabitants. Their journey at an end, and having at last seen
the wonders of Paris (including its zoo), the text concluded with a chapter entitled
‘J’aime la France’. Amidst the ruins of war and at last reunited with their family,
the two boys set about the rebuilding of France. In ten years Le Tour de la France
par Deux Enfants sold over 3 million copies. By 1901 this figure had reached
6 million.170
168 See Georges Vigarello, ‘Le Tour de France’, in Nora, Les Lieux, iii. 3801–33.
169 See Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (London, 1981), 96–102. Graham Robb
has commented that: ‘The Tour de France gave millions of people their first true sense of the shape and
size of France, but it also proved beyond doubt that the land of a thousand little pays was still alive’: The
Discovery of France (London, 2007), 344.
170 See Jacques and Mona Ozouf, ‘Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants: Le petit livre rouge de la
République’, in Nora, Les Lieux, i. 291–321. The 2nd edn., publ. after the separation of Church and
State in 1905, was more secular in tone and concluded with a eulogy in honour of Louis Pasteur and
the wonders of industrial and technological progress.
6
History, Revolution, and Terror
I
In the first half of 1791 there took place an exchange of letters between Edmund
Burke and Claude-François de Rivarol.1 At first glance, their publication looked
unpromising, as the Parisian editor was obliged to announce that the first of
Rivarol’s letters could not be published because its author had not retained a
copy of it. However, there can be no doubt as to the interest of this brief exchange
for, if Burke was now hailed as the author of the celebrated Reflections on the
Revolution in France, Rivarol’s brother, Antoine, was unquestionably the most
brilliant and the most defamatory of all of France’s counter-revolutionary journal-
ists, as well as being the editor of the Journal national politique. Indeed Burke was
not slow to praise Antoine de Rivarol. Having indicated that his Reflections were
intended to serve the interests of ‘this kingdom and of mankind’, he next confessed
that he had read the Journal national politique too late for it to have informed his
own account. Yet, he averred, there was ‘a strong coincidence in our way of
thinking’, adding that ‘I should rather have chosen to enrich my pamphlet with
quotations from thence, than have ventured to express my thoughts in which we
agreed, in worse words of my own.’2 Rivarol’s annals, Burke continued, ‘may rank
with those of Tacitus’.
For the most part, Burke’s reply to Claude-François de Rivarol addressed
recent events in the Low Countries and the question of how the Emperor Leopold
II might set about restoring his authority. ‘A wise prince’, Burke responded,
‘studies the genius of his people’ and will not seek to contradict its mores. Nor
will he take away its privileges. He will act according to the circumstances and
for as long as he follows ‘the practical principles of a practical policy’ he will be the
happy prince of a happy people. He should ignore the chatter and rebukes voiced
by those Burke referred to, with contempt, as ‘the magpies and jays’ of philoso-
phy. These conclusions were confirmed by recent experience in France. In
general, Burke continued, a politics based upon civil discord was perilous for
the prince and fatal for his subjects. The maintenance and permanence of
1 Lettre de M. Burke sur les Affaires de France et des Pays-Bas; adressée à M. Le Vicomte de Rivarol
(1791). Burke’s letter, written in English, can be found in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed.
Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Cambridge, 1967), vi. 265–70.
2 Ibid. 265.
238
History, Revolution, and Terror
orders and a genuine understanding between all the parties that made up govern-
ment offered the best chance of peace and tranquillity. Corporations with a
permanent existence and hereditary nobles were the protectors of monarchical
succession. Yet, in post-1789 France, the monarchy alone rested upon the
hereditary principle. All other institutions were elective. And thus the monarchy
existed in blatant contradiction to all the sentiments and ideas of the people. In
brief, the intricate web of self-regulating institutions and practices, around which
ties of duty, friendship, loyalty, and reciprocity had been enacted and formed, had
been ruthlessly stripped away, leaving the hereditary monarchy exposed and ready
to fall. The monarchy of France, Burke concluded, was ‘a solitary, unsupported,
anomalous thing’.
The final aspect of Burke’s reply concerned Rivarol’s poem, Les Chartreux. Burke
did not agree with what he took to be Rivarol’s view that the only love worth its
name was that professed by Phædre and Myrrhas or by ‘ancient or modern
Eloyses’.3 ‘I do not want’, Burke announced, ‘women to pursue their lovers into
convents of Carthusiens, nor follow them in disguise to camps and slaughter-
houses.’ Beneath this plea for a moderation of the passions, however, lay a deeper
point, and one relating directly to the fate of contemporary France. It was, Burke
observed, in the nature of poets to choose subjects intended to ‘excite the high
relish arising from the mixed sensations which will arise in that anxious embarrass-
&nb
sp; ment of the mind’ found where ‘vices and virtues meet near their confines’. In Paris,
he sensed that philosophers shared the instincts of the poets, that they sought only
‘to flatter and to excite the passions’. What, Burke commented, might be allowed in
a poet could not be indulged in philosophers. Through a mixture of hatred and
scorn, they had succeeded in exploding what Burke termed ‘that class of virtues
which restrain the appetite’. In their place had been substituted a virtue called
humanity or benevolence. By this expedient, Burke observed, the morality of the
philosophers had no idea of restraint or of ‘any settled principle of any kind’.
‘When’, he concluded, ‘their disciples are thus left free, and guided only by present
feeling, they are no longer to be depended upon for good or evil. The men who
to-day snatch the worst criminals from justice will murder the most innocent
persons tomorrow.’
Rivarol largely agreed with Burke’s analysis of the best course of action to be
taken both in France and in the Low Countries. ‘The odious and disruptive sect’ of
the philosophes, he conceded, was best dealt with by ‘firm and wise’ government
than by ‘bayonets’. A sound administration of the finances—as, he admitted, had
not been the case in France—would take away the pretexts for their complaints and
deprive them of a receptive audience, leaving them with nothing better to do than
drown themselves in metaphysics and their love of the universe. The thousand-
headed hydra of democracy must not be replaced by the hydra of aristocracy intent
on devouring the people. On the moral to be drawn from the experience of the
two lovers, Rivarol reaffirmed his view that there was no merit in solitude. It was in
3 Presumably one of these was Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloise.
History, Revolution, and Terror
239
the midst of society that ‘gentle sympathy’ was nurtured and bore fruit, where
relationships and lines of affection united the human race in an ‘immense marriage’
of the heart. ‘I have also noticed’, Rivarol remarked, ‘that the most dreadful man is
the man without family, and I have also noticed that, in the national assembly, the
most criminal sedition monger was either a bachelor or a bad husband, which
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