onard Thomas could turn
scathing
on the subject of the French character.
Cult of the Nation in France
Even Castilhon, who had more confidence than most in a French population he chose to see as essentially "bourgeois," recognized that the seductions of "brilliant society" posed a perhaps insuperable obstacle to the advance of good republican moeurs.
The republicanism that emerged during the last decades of the old regime and triumphed during the Revolution therefore saw no more fun- damental task than changing the national character.
These issues lay at the very heart of the discussion of nation-building that began in France at the end of the old regime. As we have seen, nation- building was proposed as a response to two separate problems, both of which seemed to call the very existence of the nation into question: France's regional diversity, and its supposedly corrupt moral condition. The first problem was initially posed as one of juridical diversity--the par- ticular legal rights and privileges of France's historic provinces--and then, after the Revolution eliminated these rights and privileges, primarily as one of linguistic diversity. Here, the issue of national character did not arise directly. But it did in discussions of the second problem, for if France was "the most immoral nation" in Europe, where did the fault lie if not in the collective national character? The republicans' diagnosis of France's moral ills and the program for curing them that the Jacobin regime devel- oped in 1792-1794 were predicated on the study of national character as it had evolved during the Enlightenment. It has often been remarked that
National Character and the Republican Imagination 143
? the idea of the "new man" was, in Mona Ozouf's phrase, the "central dream of the French Revolution. "11 Yet the revolutionaries spoke just as of- ten of a "new people," a collective entity, and they had very specific views, grounded in decades of investigations and polemics, as to the nature of the "old" people they hoped to toss on the scrapheap of history. 12
This chapter will first explore eighteenth-century French understand- ings of national character, proceed to the republican critique of it, and finally consider Jacobin republican efforts to reshape it. These efforts were, in theory, wholly secular, representing the logical culmination of attempts to reshape the terrestrial order without reference to the dictates of God or a divinely-ordained king. But the means which republican reformers adopted again reveals how deeply indebted they remained, in their proj- ect of building a nation, to the older, Catholic project of rebuilding the Church. Not only did they seize upon the originally theological concept of "regeneration" to express their hopes and ambitions; when they found themselves in a position actually to realize these ambitions, they proceeded in a manner that derived directly from clerical examples and that amounted to a literal campaign of conversion.
National Character Investigated
It hardly needs saying that national stereotypes, usually based on the attri- bution of exaggerated individual characteristics to an entire people, long predate the eighteenth century and remain ubiquitous in our own day. They may or may not have a basis in fact, but they have certainly provided a simple and comforting way for people to come to terms with the array of human diversity. 13 Medieval literature overflowed with them. "The peoples of Spain are very light-hearted," one typical thirteenth-century poem be- gan. "The French seem valiant knights . . . The English are handsome and false-hearted / The Lombards greedy and the Germans perfidious. "14 As far back as Aristotle, natural philosophers sought what we would now call scientific explanations for differences in national character. In the late sixteenth century Jean Bodin renewed and popularized this tradition in France, and it continued through such writers as Franc? ois La Mothe le Vayer, Charles Saint-Evremond, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and d'Espiard. 15 La Mothe notably composed a "Discourse on the Opposition of Humors be- tween Certain Nations," which attributed to the French and Spanish "as perfect an antipathy as there is in nature. "16
In the eighteenth century, the literature on national differences and na-
144 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tional character grew to massive and unprecedented dimensions, ranging from learned treatises to the crude propaganda of the Seven Years' War. The authors wrote for different purposes and in wildly varying styles. Nonetheless, they generally saw national character determined by three broad factors: climate, political action, and historical evolution. Moeurs, manners, and religion, all of which they also frequently invoked, generally depended in their schemes on politics or evolution, while the phrase "moral causes," which appears frequently in their works, usually amounted to a conflation of the two. 17
French authors generally did not ascribe "national character" to the en- tire population of a nation. Until 1789, as we have seen, few authors even acknowledged the enormous demographic, social, and cultural diversity of France's 28 million inhabitants. But in any case, most authors elided the problem altogether by straightforwardly associating the true national char- acter with a particular slice of the population. Thus Voltaire wrote that "the spirit of a nation always resides with the small number who put the large number to work, are fed by it, and govern it. " Charles Pinot-Duclos put things even more simply: "It is in Paris that you have to consider the Frenchman, because there he is more French than elsewhere. " Rousseau, by contrast, in a vision pregnant with implications for later, Romantic nation- alism, found the "genius" and moeurs of a nation in the "most distant provinces. " "It is the countryside that makes the country [pays], and the people of the countryside who make the nation. "18
Of climate, political action, and historical evolution, it was the first which perhaps most completely seduced the French of the eighteenth cen- tury. "Climate is, for a Nation, the fundamental cause . . . the principal cause presiding over the genius of peoples" wrote d'Espiard, the most un- compromising advocate of this point of view. 19 Temperature, humidity, wind, the quality of the soil: all of these shaped a person's body and behav- ior, with the result that national characters varied from one climate to the next. His work almost certainly influenced Montesquieu, who would soon make the importance of climate to national character a piece of utterly conventional wisdom. 20 In some of the most famous chapters of The Spirit of the Laws, he pursued the idea with rigor, describing how, for instance, thanks to the influence of cold weather on "surface fibers" and "tufts of nerves" (something he claimed to have verified by freezing a sheep's tongue), northern peoples were stronger, less sensitive to pain and love, and ultimately more suitable to liberty than southern ones. 21 Eighteenth-
National Character and the Republican Imagination 145
? century wits quipped that where Malebranche had seen everything in God, Montesquieu saw everything in climate. 22 Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, and Helve? tius all embraced theories of climate enthusiastically as well. 23
None of these authors, however, truly saw climate as all-determining. "Many things govern men," Montesquieu wrote: "climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, moeurs, and man- ners; a general spirit [of the nation] is formed as a result. "24 Other than cli- mate, laws and maxims were the most important. And on this subject, if he did not exactly create a piece of conventional wisdom, he certainly helped to popularize it. Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century, French au- thors routinely expressed their confidence in the ability of political action to affect national character. To quote just a few examples: "republican gov- ernment produces a particular character, and monarchical government produces another"; "it is princes who form the national character"; "the character [of the French] is a soft and flexible clay, out of which the Men in place can make vessels of glory or vessels of ignominy. "25 Above all, the idea ran like a bright thread through the political works of Rousseau, who claimed in his Confessions to have seen early on that "everything funda- mentally depended on politics . . . and that no people would ever be any- thing other than what its Government made of it. "26 Only "national insti- tutions," Rousseau admonished his readers, could shape the character, tastes, and mores of a people, distinguishing it from others and stimulating the ardent patriotism conducive to proper social relations. 27
Yet even Rousseau, along with the classical republicans he resembled in so many ways, acknowledged another crucial factor in the shaping of na- tional character. For his ideal legislators fought against a powerful enemy: time itself, which slowly and insidiously leeched virtue away and infected the healthiest body politic with the bacillus of self-interest. To Rousseau, time was a purely negative factor, which reduced well-defined, particular national characters to a common human sludge. Other authors, however, treated time far more favorably. They discerned in the history of the world a slow, irregular, but nonetheless visible evolution from savagery to civili- zation. For them, the character of a nation therefore depended in large part on how far it had scaled this chronological ladder.
French authors applied this historical theory most insistently to their own past, emphasizing France's evolution away from cruder standards of behavior. "Nearly all of us started out as sorts of savages, shut away in for- ests under a gloomy sky," wrote Antoine-Le? onard Thomas in his history
146 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of eloquence, while the playwright P. J. B. Chaussard even put the idea in verse: "Ces ge? ne? reux Franc? ais n'e? taient a` leur berceau / Qu'une horde stupide: un servile troupeau" [In the cradle these generous French were nothing / But a stupid horde, a servile flock]. 28 More systematically, the Marquis de Mirabeau likened the process to the course of nature itself and warned in L'ami des hommes, in the accents of biblical lyricism, that it could not continue indefinitely: "There is a circle prescribed to all nature, moral as well as physical, of birth, growth, fullness, decline and death. Thus are the days from morning to night, the years in their solar revolution, the life of man from cradle to tomb, and that of states from their foundation to their fall. "29 Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, provided the fullest exposi- tion of the theory, attempting to trace the progress of nearly every nation on earth. While bemoaning the capacity of stupidity, greed, intolerance, and sheer accident to block or even reverse progress, he nonetheless con- cluded that European nations, at least, had overall moved in the proper direction. 30
To the extent that French authors believed that political action and his- torical evolution determined national character, they also generally saw these two factors working through a particular intermediary: women. For if national character was heavily shaped by that elusive product of politics and history called moeurs, moeurs themselves were the province of women, both because of their general influence on social interactions and their specific role in educating the young. "Women," d'Espiard wrote, "are the essential part of moeurs. " The military reformer Guibert agreed with him. "Men make laws," but "women make moeurs, there lies their true empire. "31 Montesquieu, in his warning against altering a good national character (see the epigraph to this chapter), could envision only one way of actually doing so: "One could constrain [the] women, make laws to correct their moeurs, and limit their luxury. "32 Not coincidentally, these very measures, which Montesquieu himself hesitated to apply, formed the heart of Rous- seau's misogynistic prescription for preserving the moeurs of Geneva in his famous Letter to d'Alembert. 33 Women, in short, constituted at once a measure of a nation's civilization and the key to the preservation of its character.
A Bearable Lightness of Being
Armed with these conceptual tools, eighteenth-century French authors went eagerly about investigating national characters, and particularly the
National Character and the Republican Imagination 147
? one they saw reflected in the mirror. They were not always consistent, to say the least. At different times Voltaire described the French as "the most sociable and polite people on earth" (the preface to a stage play in the 1730s), "a people of heroes . . . a gentle and terrible people" (a war poem from the 1740s), and "monkeys and tigers" (his bitter exile in the 1760s). 34 Still, outside of wartime literature, which predictably saw a Bayard or Jumonville in every French male, the French national character was still, most generally, associated with a relatively well-defined and consistent constellation of closely related traits. 35 To be French was to be particularly social, particularly refined and polite, and particularly cheerful or flighty (le? ger, implying a mix of vivaciousness, inconstancy, and perhaps also superficiality). Sometimes these traits were invoked all at once, as in d'Hol- bach's umbrella comment that "the general character of the French nation is gaiety, activity, politeness, sociabilite? . "36 Yet if the traits themselves pro- voked few disagreements, their desirability provoked many: the same term that served as a warm commendation in one context could become a sting- ing criticism in another, even from the same author. Certain authors were consistently critical, and it was they who shaped the emerging republican critique of French national character.
Of the traits, "social" or "sociable" attracted attention from nearly all the major philosophes, eager as always to encompass a given subject in a single, overarching abstraction. 37 Thus Montesquieu had a character remark, with characteristic bite, in Persian Letters: "It is said that man is a sociable being. On this score it seems to me that a Frenchman is more human than anyone else. " Diderot similarly wrote that "there is no nation that is more like a single family. A Frenchman swarms about in his town more than ten Eng- lishmen, fifty Dutchmen, or a hundred Moslems do in theirs. "38 Beyond the ranks of the philosophes, many other writers adopted the same motif-- notably patriotic authors who wished to contrast the cheerful, sociable French to the gloomy, unsociable English. 39 As Bernardin de Saint-Pierre commented, "most of our writers brag about our nation's spirit of socie? te? "40 (emphasis mine).
Le? ge`rete? and related terms had equal popularity. To quote the Ency- clope? die: "It is a sort of proverb to say, le? ger like a Frenchman . . . "41 D'Espiard repeatedly stresssed this aspect of the French character, as did the elder Mirabeau, who called the French the most fickle, vivacious, and le? ger of nations, and the radical journalist Louis-Se? bastien Mercier, who cited their "extreme penchant" for le? ge`rete? . 42 The term often carried a criti- cal bite and easily elided into frivolity, luxury, and superficiality. Republi-
148 The Cult of the Nation in France
? can-minded critics routinely used it as a term of abuse, and probably for this reason many adopted "gay" (gai) as a substitute (they contrasted le? ger and gay to "heavy," "gloomy" and "pedantic"--again, characteristics often associated with the English). The Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Cerutti wrote a twenty-page essay on "French gaiety," which he attributed in turn to the nation's sociability. Laughter, he wrote, is the distinctive quality of the French nation. 43 Yet le? ge`rete? did have its defenders. Jean-Franc? ois Sobry, in his survey of French characteristics and institutions, said that "if [the Frenchman] has le? ge`rete? , it is not at all of the sort which is fickle and superficial, but rather that le? ge`rete? which recoils from heaviness and mo- notony. The Athenians were also le? ger, and they were the foremost people in the world. " The novelist Jacques-Antoine Perrin likewise commented: "Our neighbors may well call us le? ger, frivolous, inconsequential. But this lightness, this frivolity is the source of our amusements and our pleasures; it is to delicacy and even gallantry that we owe our happiness, they are vir- tues for us. "44
Politeness and refinement, meanwhile, went almost without saying. It was a commonplace to remark, as Voltaire did, that the French were not simply polite, but the most polite, as well as the most sociable of nations. 45 D'Holbach, Servan, Thomas, d'Espiard, Sobry, and Turgot all echoed the claim. 46 Eighteenth-century French understandings of politeness were complex, but in the discussions of national character the complexities faded somewhat, and such disparate concepts as urbanity, honne^tete? , deli- cacy, and civility blended together to signify simply an elaborate attention to form and style in personal interactions. 47
The sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness of the French were all easily ex- plained by reference to climate, political action, and history. France, pos- sessed as it was of a perfectly temperate climate, had succeeded, so it was claimed, in avoiding the solitude, seriousness, and moroseness of northern peoples, and the weakness, indolence, and debauchery of southern ones. 48 An innate moderation allowed the French to seek out pleasure and to de- light in polite human interaction without necessarily corrupting and en- slaving each other (although also without seeking true freedom). In addi- tion to climate, the French character reflected the country's monarchical government and aristocratic social system, in which les grands set the tone and everyone else scrambled to imitate them. Thus the same traits that foreigners associated with the French in general, the French themselves as- sociated particularly with the royal court and the high aristocracy. As d'Espiard had said, the Frenchman's manner was the lordly manner.
National Character and the Republican Imagination 149
? Above all, if the French were said to maintain a degree of polite so- cial interaction unknown elsewhere and to devote themselves to endless rounds of pleasure, it was because they stood at the end point of that long historical evolution which had taken them away from their "savage" or "barbarian" origins and rendered them steadily more "polite," "policed," or "civilized. " Sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness were all closely linked to the concept of "civilization," which took shape in the mid-eighteenth century and depended on a vision of historical progress and cosmopolitan ex- change between civilized people. As we saw in Chapter 1, "civilization," one of the key foundational concepts in eighteenth-century culture, stood in stark opposition to "patrie" and "republic. " Thus to the extent that eigh- teenth-century authors saw the French national character in terms of so- ciability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness, and approved of it, they were defining France less as a classical patrie and more as the center and apogee of a uni- versal civilization.
For most French authors, the civilized traits of sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness reflected the extraordinary influence of women. D'Espiard and Montesquieu agreed that women, to whom vivaciousness and love of soci- ety came naturally, ruled French moeurs, obliging men to strive to please them. 49 Se? bastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigne? , author of a histori- cal essay on the "principal absurdities of different nations," attributed the politeness and sociability of the French particularly to the "company of women. "50 Many observers considered the position of women the main difference between France and nations which restricted women to what Rivarol called "the domestic tribunal. "51 D'Espiard stressed that "society cannot exist without women," and nations like the Chinese "have de- stroyed Society by this eternal imprisonment of women, which is the least philosophical and most unjust thing in the world. "52 An anonymous au- thor similarly suggested that if the English stopped banishing women from the table after dinner, the nation would grow less misanthropic. "The Frenchman," he remarked, "owes the amiable qualities which distinguish him from other peoples to interchange with women. "53
The Degenerate, Effeminate French
Yet it was precisely over the position of women that French students of na- tional character also revealed their greatest anxieties. D'Espiard, for all his solicitude where Chinese women were concerned, had also commented that "foreigners say that in France, men are not men enough, and women
150 The Cult of the Nation in France
? are not women enough. "54 Gazon-Dourxigne? added a similarly caution- ary note to his celebratory history of the French character: "Some women were reproached for taking on the character of men, and many men for too closely resembling women. "55 Rivarol noted severely that "it is from women's vices and ours, the politeness of men and the coquetry of women, that was born this gallantry of the two sexes which corrupts both in turn. "56 These remarks recall Rousseau's remark in the Letter to d'Alembert that the two sexes should "live separated ordinarily," and that "no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women. "57
These men nonetheless had ambiguous attitudes towards the reform of the French character, because they thought that thanks to a favorable cli- mate, beneficial historical evolution, and a political system they would not dream of challenging, this character was generally acceptable. They agreed with Montesquieu that trying to alter it might prove dangerous. But in the final decades of the old regime, in the context of political collapse and mil- itary challenges, moderate assumptions of this sort increasingly came into question. More observers adopted a caustic, Rousseauian view of history, held up the ideal of the patrie over that of civilization, and started to think of impaired national virility as an urgent problem in need of a solution. In 1762, for instance, a Discours sur le patriotisme, read in the Academy of Lyon, warned that the French had developed a tendency to become "syba- rites, plunged into a voluptuous stupor, breathing and thinking only for pleasure, deaf to the voice of the patrie. " The speaker added sternly that "if fashion, modes and frivolity take the place of moeurs and reason . . . then a nation is done for. "58 Castilhon similarly called for the authentic bourgeois character of the French to reassert itself in the face of corrupting female aristocratic influences. In 1787, an entrant in the Academy of Cha^lons-sur- Marne's essay competition on patriotism called the French "too le? ger and too dissipated" and warned they might perish unless they grew more civic- minded. 59 Even the ardent patriot Antoine-Le?
onard Thomas could turn scathing on the subject of the French character. France, he wrote in his his- tory of eloquence, was a "le? ger and impetuous nation, ardent for pleasures, concerned always with the present, soon forgetting the past, talking of everything and caring about nothing. "60
Almost without exception, as Antoine de Baecque has stressed, these cri- tiques associated supposedly typical French traits with the corporeal fail- ings of lethargy, sickness, physical corruption, and old age. 61 "The French
National Character and the Republican Imagination 151
? nation has changed . . . We are no longer as robust, as strong, as the ancient Gauls from whom we descend. "62 The French nation had become "indo- lent, apathetic, carefree," in a modern period described as "a long lethargy" or "a coating of rust. " The French were "an immense people grown old in despotism," "a degraded, debased people," "a society grown old in slavery and sensual pleasure and corrupted by the habit of vice. "63 In the diagnosis of a flawed national character, political writers were questioning the future existence of the nation and calling, in the accents of classical republican- ism, for immediate reform.
But would such a reform necessarily entail wiping the slate clean and imprinting an entirely new character on the population? Until the first years of the Revolution, republican-minded observers rarely went this far. Instead, they generally suggested that modern French traits reflected the perversion and corruption of a older, authentic Frenchness, which needed somehow to be restored. As Rabaut de Saint-Etienne remarked, following Rousseau, in modern times the true national character had simply been "erased. "64 Blame for this corruption was attributed to historical evolution in general, which had leeched away the original, pristine virtues of the French, and on the form of government--namely, absolute monarchy and "feudalism. " Abbe? Charles Chaisneau wrote in 1792 that although France's temperate climate had endowed its inhabitants with an innate love of vir- tue, "despotism ruined everything with its impure breath; this monster in- fected the truest feelings at the source. " Many echoed him. 65 France's re- gional diversity, which came to be perceived as an urgent problem at the time of the Revolution, was similarly interpreted, in the manner of the Physiocrats, not as a natural state of affairs, but as a historical aberration caused by the nefarious effects of the feudal system. 66 Overcoming divi- sions of privilege and region, and bringing the French back to a state of original, authentic homogeneity, therefore demanded not simply a reversal of the historical clock--the typically republican promise of a return to the pristine past--but an end to despotism and a check on the powers of the king.
Republican-minded critics of the national character were hardly origi- nal in their call for a return to an idealized past. From a different angle, no- ble and parlementaire opponents of the crown under the old regime did very little other than assert the claims of the distant past upon the present. Occasionally, they invoked the subject of national character to support their point, as when Boulainvilliers wrote grandiloquently of "the French,
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? born free and independent . . . who fell prey to the conquest, not of a for- eign nation, but of a single family. "67 But national character mattered far less to them than specific constitutional arrangements and the specific his- toric rights they claimed for their own institutions and groups. In contrast, the later republican texts increasingly eschewed any consideration of an ancient French constitution which, no matter how favorably presented, still could not match up to the Roman republican one. They preferred more historically vague, although often lushly evocative, invocations of the earlier, unspoiled national personality.
How far one had to go into the past to find the golden age of Frenchness was a question open to discussion. Republican critics of the national char- acter in the 1770s and 1780s most often located it either in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The earlier era had experienced something of a vogue in the late eighteenth century, spurred in particular by the meticulous historical researches of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, which fed a colorful, proto-Romantic celebration of chivalry and the Troubadours. "O happy times! O forever lamented days! " wrote the poet Pierre-Laurent Be? renger in one typical effusion. "Brilliant and fortunate nation! . . . Egoism, that poison which destroys all sensitivity, had not yet attacked the patrie, soci- ety, nature itself . . . In those days the Nation had a character that was sim- ple, and, if I dare say so, poetic and full of grandeur. "68 Historical works such as Claude de Sacy's twelve-volume study of L'honneur franc? ois chroni- cled the history of chivalry in detail, while, as we have seen, in the 1780s devotees of the cult of great Frenchmen put new emphasis on medieval heroes. 69 As for the Renaissance, it was not only the age of great Frenchmen like Bayard, but also of the paradigmatic good king, Henri IV. When Louis XVI inherited the throne in 1774, hopeful Parisian graffiti artists painted the word "Resurrexit" ("he has arisen") on the statue of Henri IV on Paris's Pont Neuf, and Renaissance-style clothing enjoyed a brief vogue at Ver- sailles. 70 A 1789 pamphlet referred to Henri's famous culinary pledge to the poor in predicting that with the Revolution, the French, "regaining the gaiety and vigor of our fathers, . . . will dance, sing, and rejoice in the shade of those ancient oaks under which they used to gather to eat chicken in the pot. "71
During the Revolution, the association of chivalry with the nobility and of even Henri IV with royal "despotism" made these particular allusions politically incorrect, and so the search for a usable pristine past proceeded further back in time, to the era of the Franks or even the Gauls. Pithou's Le
National Character and the Republican Imagination 153
? triomphe des parisiens, published after the fall of the Bastille, proclaimed: "Frenchmen, you have reconquered your liberty, that liberty of which the first Franks, your ancestors, were jealous; you will again become like them, strong and healthy; like them you will let your beards grow, and you will wear the long hair that they favored. "72 Other pamphlets identified the con- querors of the Bastille with the "sturdy Gauls," while Bare`re, in August of 1793, asked his listeners in the Convention to emulate the Gauls who had once conquered Rome. 73 A particularly curious revolutionary pam- phlet demanded that the country reject the name of France and call itself Gaul once again. 74 Even the National Convention's choice of a giant Hercu- les as the emblem of the Republic, in 1793, conformed to this revived Celtophilia. For in French iconography the mighty Hercules had a particu- lar association with the Gauls, whom he had brought out of barbarism. The emblem therefore managed simultaneously to invoke the classical mythology so beloved of the revolutionaries, and also a more specifically national past. 75
Even when invocations of national character did not refer to any partic- ular era in the French past, the authors almost reflexively used the language of recovery, awakening, rebirth, and regeneration. "Century eighteen! Re- turn to France all its energy, return to it all its virtues," the future Girondin Pe? tion wrote in a 1789 pamphlet. "People, awaken! Break your chains! Rise once again to your initial grandeur," chimed in an anonymous poet. At the end of 1789, Mercier hailed "the year which has brought equality, liberty and justice back to Gaul . . . which ended the abasement of the people; which ennobled it, in revealing to it titles which had been lost. "76 Such opinions were ubiquitous.
Yet how could a fatally sick and corrupt nation possibly accomplish such an act of revival? By 1789 it had become commonplace to take images of indolence and corruption to an extreme, with France described as a nation on its deathbed. Many authors therefore implied that it could only rise up again through a sort of miracle, similar to cures brought about by saints, or even the resurrection of Jesus. The popular concept of regeneration per- fectly expressed this belief. Certain authors went even further, however, and couched images of national recovery in language taken blatantly from the Gospels. Pamphlets appeared with titles such as La Dies Irae, ou les trois ordres au jugement dernier ("The Day of Wrath, or the Three Orders at the Last Judgment"), and La Passion, la mort, et la resurrection du peuple ("The Passion, Death and Resurrection of the People"), which recounted that the
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? French body politic had lain on its deathbed until the God of Mercy had finally stepped in save it. Priests favorable to the Revolution, not surpris- ingly, used such language with particular fervor and frequency. 77 Such writing usually came in the form of parables; few went so far as to claim that God literally stood on the side of the Revolution. But the religious lan- guage nonetheless suggests that when it came to addressing the problem of how a nation and its national character might actually be transformed, French republicans still instinctively reached for religious models.
Man and Citizen
While the idea of recovering an earlier, more authentic, and more natural national character may have prevailed under the old regime and the start of the Revolution, it was not the only form that the republican critique took. Particularly during the Terror, another, more radical approach to the subject of national character also took shape: instead of a return to nature and an original French national character, the call went out for a complete and utter break with both.
This approach rested above all on an opposition between the abstract categories of "man" and "citizen," that is, between the human being as found in nature, complete with natural instincts and feelings, and the hu- man being as found in the patrie, conditioned to heed the call of civic duty. Under the old regime, Christian writers generally tried to deny the opposi- tion, lest it lead to the Machiavellian conclusion that a good Christian could not be a good citizen of the patrie. Thus the Jansenist orator Soanen, in his 1683 sermon on patriotism, affirmed that "it is impossible to be truly a man without being a good citizen, and it is similarly impossible to be a good Christian without cherishing one's country. "78 The notion that people might turn away from their natural feelings in favor of their patri- otic duty was often actively condemned and associated with countries other than France. "The Patrie," wrote a pamphleteer of the Seven Years War, "is the idol to which the English sacrifice all the feelings which the voice of nature tells them to have for their fellow men. Their love for it has dried them up entirely. "79 The Jesuit and future revolutionary, Joseph- Antoine-Joachim Cerutti, sought more neutrally to associate such behav- ior with the ancient republics: "In Man, the Romans and Athenians sought only to fashion the Citizen. "80
It was Rousseau who sketched out the opposition in the strongest terms.
National Character and the Republican Imagination 155
? Indeed, it underlies much of his work. His Discourse on the Origins of In- equality famously portrayed man in the state of nature and in the interme- diary stage of contented savagery, before concluding that in modern times the insidious enticements of amour propre had led humans fatally astray, with the only salvation lying in the adoption of a new, wholly civic nature. The Social Contract then continued the story, suggesting how this new nature might be created through politics. "The passing from the state of nature to the civil society," Rousseau emphasized, "produces a very re- markable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they had previously lacked. "81 In Emile, Rousseau proposed a different possible course, that of sheltering men from the nefarious effects of corrupt social institutions so as to preserve their natural instincts. He admitted, however, that a man sheltered in this manner would not grow up into a dutiful patriotic citizen. "Forced to fight nature or social institutions," he wrote, "we must choose between making a man or making a citizen; we cannot do both. "82 Diderot likewise lamented that mankind had never managed to unify the three cat- egories of "man, citizen and religious person. "83
Like Soanen, the French revolutionaries for the most part initially at- tempted to deny the need for Rousseau's choice. How else could they have named the single most important document of 1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? Clerical revolutionaries seeking to put the Church under the tricolor and the Revolution under the cross, such as Adrien Lamourette, Henri Gre? goire, and Hyancinthe Sermet, argued zeal- ously that the Revolution might yet achieve a precious union between the demands of citizenship and human nature. 84
But even as these men fought to reconcile (Christian) man and (revo- lutionary) citizen, other, more radical voices were restating Rousseau's formulation and insistently severing the two categories again. As early as 1788, an anonymous pamphlet entitled Discours sur le patriotisme re- sponded to the Academy of Cha^lons-sur-Marne's essay question about whether patriotism could exist under monarchies with this explanation of the word's meaning:
What is Patriotism? Patriotism is the continual practice of all the political virtues. . . . It is the sacrifice of one's goods, one's relatives, one's family: it is contempt for life itself, when the safety of the City is at stake. What is Patriotism? Patriotism is the forgetting of the man, to be nothing other than
156 The Cult of the Nation in France
? a citizen [my emphasis]. In the heart of the true Patriot, personal interest constantly cedes to the general interest. He generously sacrifices all his passions to the passion for the Patrie. So what, finally, is Patriotism? Pa- triotism is the total abnegation of all feelings which are not directed to- wards the happiness of the City. 85
The passage reads like pure classical republicanism, yet in his conclusion to the pamphlet the author retreated somewhat. Adapting (without attribu- tion) the passage from Montesquieu with which this chapter opens, he asked a number of similar questions, beginning with: "[What] if there were a people who possessed to the highest point the social virtues; who were gentle, human, generous, charitable; whose general character was gai- ety, vanity, inconsistency . . . ? "86 He concluded that if such a people existed, it could not be patriotic. Again in echo of Montesquieu, he insisted that "if ever Patriotism took root in the heart of this people, it would no longer be the same, its constitution would have changed. "87 Unlike Montesquieu, however, he did not suggest that this change would be a bad thing.
Within a few years, the pamphleteer's suggestion had become, for oth- ers, a manifesto. If the Revolution began, in 1789, with the rejection of spe- cifically French constitutional precedents, it quickly proceeded to a rejec- tion of French history altogether. "It is France's salvation you must consult, not its archives," Cerutti instructed the deputies to the Estates General, while Rabaut de Saint-Etienne made his famous comment about France being fit not to follow examples, but only to give them. 88 Bare`re grandilo- quently asserted that "all must be new in France; we wish to date only from today," while Boissy d'Anglas borrowed from the Bible to swoop even higher in his rhetoric: "To set the destinies of the world, you have but to will it. You are the creators of a new world. Say let there be light, and light will be. "89 Robespierre made the same point more darkly: "Considering the depths to which the human race has been degraded by the vices of our for- mer social system, I am convinced of the need to effect a complete regener- ation, and, if I may so express it, to create a new people. "90 From this point, it was only a short step to a rejection of nature itself in favor of the de- mands of the patrie. Thus Danton could famously tell the Convention that children belong to the Republic before belonging to their parents, and the legislator Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau could propose (in a plan en- dorsed by Robespierre) to remove all French children from their families and send them to state-run boarding schools for periods of six years or
National Character and the Republican Imagination 157
? longer. 91 Thus Saint-Just could proclaim to the Convention that "there is something terrible in the sacred love of the patrie. It is so exclusive that it sacrifices everything without pity, without fear, without human respect, to the public interest. "92
The call to reject nature came with particular persistence in the arts. Already in 1789, Jacques-Louis David's neoclassical masterpiece, Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, celebrated the Roman hero who or- dered his own sons killed as a punishment for treason. The painting bril- liantly contrasted the still, unfeeling Brutus, staring straight ahead without visible emotion on one side of the tableau, to his wife and daughters weep- ing hysterically on the other. Under the Terror, revolutionary theater re- peatedly returned to such themes, with a series of plays celebrating the same sort of chillingly stern and unforgiving heroes, drawn mostly from the history of republican Rome. In Joseph Lavalle? e's 1794 Manlius Tor- quatus, ou la discipline romaine, for instance, a Roman father, in the man- ner of Brutus, kills his son for disobedience. The son pleads repeatedly with his father, but the stern Roman responds only with the words "la patrie! " Finally, he adds this explanation:
To save unhappy morals from chains,
Let us break, burst the chains of paternal affection;
And whether they finally call me just or barbaric,
Let me be the father of the people, and not the father of a man. 93
Similarly, in Antoine-Vincent Arnault's Quintus Cincinnatus, also from 1794, a Roman learns that his father-in-law has committed treason, where- upon his wife warns him not to let family sentiment soften his reaction:
Stifle the murmur of protesting blood,
Conquer yourself; enslave nature to the patrie, Feeling to laws, and the man to the citizen;
This is the effort worthy of your heart and mine. 94
From Soanen's reconciling of "man" and "citizen," to Rousseau's injunction to choose between them, to the 1789 pamphleteer's suggestion to forget the first in favor of the second, the French had finally arrived at the ulti- mate stage of the republican critique: demanding the enslavement of man, and nature itself, to the patrie.
From this perspective, of course, any national character shaped by cli- mate, historical evolution, and monarchy was nothing other than an ob-
158 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 13. Jacques-Louis David, Les licteurs rapportent a` Brutus les corps de ses fils (Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons), 1789. David's stern, neoclassical masterpiece depicts a famous incident from the Roman Republic, in which Junius Brutus ordered the execution of his own sons for treason.
stacle to be overcome, which is precisely how the Jacobin and Terrorist Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne described it in his 1793 work, Principes re? ge? ne? rateurs du syste`me social, in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. In Manlius Torquatus, Lavalle? e drew a contrast between the Ro- man and Latin peoples whose conflict lay at the heart of his story, stressing that even though they were neighbors sharing a common history, climate, and language, the thirst for liberty had changed the Roman character unal- terably. Robespierre expressed the same sentiment when he strikingly as- serted, in a report to the Convention on religious ideas and national festi- vals, that the Revolution had put the French two thousand years ahead of the rest of the human race, so that "one is tempted to see them . . . ] as a different species. "95 If France was to have a national character, it should have an entirely new one, reflecting its newly republican constitution. As we have seen, the playwright Che? nier told the National Convention that the state should take as its purpose "to make Frenchmen, to give the nation a physiognomy of its own. "96
The single most sustained exposition of this point of view came a few years after the Terror, in a remarkable short book called De l'influence
National Character and the Republican Imagination 159
? de la Re? volution franc? aise sur le caracte`re national ("On the Influence of the French Revolution on the National Character") by Jacobin magistrate Gilles Boucher-Laricharderie. Composed at a time when the achievements of the republican revolution seemed ever more precarious, Boucher hoped to encourage the left by sounding a tone of revolutionary optimism and confidence, declaring that the national character had changed, positively, completely, and irreversibly, since 1789. Before that date, he argued in a fa- miliar manner, despotism had caused the French to lose whatever national character they might once have possessed. Therefore, to consolidate itself, the Revolution needed to entirely recast that character. "This is what it be- gan to do," he continued, "with a success that even the most penetrating minds could not have predicted. "97 In keeping with earlier diagnoses of na- tional character, Boucher devoted the heart of the book to the role of women. Quoting Rousseau, he argued that before 1789 French women had taken advantage of the deference shown them by men to make themselves the true sources of power "in all conditions and ranks," right up to the royal court. But, he continued sententiously: "This strange domination ex- pired on July 14, 1789. " Since then, women's dominion had been restricted to the "interior of their families" and "the exercise of domestic virtues," with beneficial results for France in general. 98 Boucher did admit that the French possessed a natural gaiety which had suffered under the Terror. But he also insisted that the "frivolity" and le? ge`rete? which had accompanied this gaiety had disappeared, replaced by "decency, gravity, . . . simplicity. "99 The French had acquired a "new character," a martial, conquering disposi- tion that allowed their armies to march through Europe in triumph. And Boucher concluded, in echo of a thousand revolutionary speeches: "Thus the love of liberty has made of the French an entirely new people. "100 Al- though issued in the twilight of the First Republic, it was the perfect re- publican vision of a France transformed.
The Means of Conversion
It was one thing to pontificate about the weaknesses of the French national character. It was quite another to do something about it. And over the course of the Revolution, the task came to seem steadily more daunting, as the bounds of the political nation expanded. In the spring of 1789, with the French still divided into their three traditional estates and with voting rights strictly circumscribed by property requirements, it was still possi-
160 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ble--just--to follow Voltaire or Duclos and restrict the problem of the na- tional character to a small, influential, easily describable minority. But by the fall of 1792, when the National Convention had extended the suffrage, in theory, to nearly all adult males, the problems of the larger nation could no longer be overlooked, and the biblical and classical examples of nation- building cited by Rousseau in the Considerations on the Government of Po- land came to seem less and less relevant. For eighteenth-century France was not a small desert tribe knit together by painfully tight bonds of kin- ship and obedience, nor was it a walled classical city-state in which slaves supported the leisure of free citizens. Shaping the character of a population that numbered in the millions, most of whom had little formal education, many of whom could not read or understand any but rudimentary French, and who varied enormously in everything from language and folklore to village organization and forms of agriculture, was a project without any real secular precedent.
How was the task to be accomplished?
These issues lay at the very heart of the discussion of nation-building that began in France at the end of the old regime. As we have seen, nation- building was proposed as a response to two separate problems, both of which seemed to call the very existence of the nation into question: France's regional diversity, and its supposedly corrupt moral condition. The first problem was initially posed as one of juridical diversity--the par- ticular legal rights and privileges of France's historic provinces--and then, after the Revolution eliminated these rights and privileges, primarily as one of linguistic diversity. Here, the issue of national character did not arise directly. But it did in discussions of the second problem, for if France was "the most immoral nation" in Europe, where did the fault lie if not in the collective national character? The republicans' diagnosis of France's moral ills and the program for curing them that the Jacobin regime devel- oped in 1792-1794 were predicated on the study of national character as it had evolved during the Enlightenment. It has often been remarked that
National Character and the Republican Imagination 143
? the idea of the "new man" was, in Mona Ozouf's phrase, the "central dream of the French Revolution. "11 Yet the revolutionaries spoke just as of- ten of a "new people," a collective entity, and they had very specific views, grounded in decades of investigations and polemics, as to the nature of the "old" people they hoped to toss on the scrapheap of history. 12
This chapter will first explore eighteenth-century French understand- ings of national character, proceed to the republican critique of it, and finally consider Jacobin republican efforts to reshape it. These efforts were, in theory, wholly secular, representing the logical culmination of attempts to reshape the terrestrial order without reference to the dictates of God or a divinely-ordained king. But the means which republican reformers adopted again reveals how deeply indebted they remained, in their proj- ect of building a nation, to the older, Catholic project of rebuilding the Church. Not only did they seize upon the originally theological concept of "regeneration" to express their hopes and ambitions; when they found themselves in a position actually to realize these ambitions, they proceeded in a manner that derived directly from clerical examples and that amounted to a literal campaign of conversion.
National Character Investigated
It hardly needs saying that national stereotypes, usually based on the attri- bution of exaggerated individual characteristics to an entire people, long predate the eighteenth century and remain ubiquitous in our own day. They may or may not have a basis in fact, but they have certainly provided a simple and comforting way for people to come to terms with the array of human diversity. 13 Medieval literature overflowed with them. "The peoples of Spain are very light-hearted," one typical thirteenth-century poem be- gan. "The French seem valiant knights . . . The English are handsome and false-hearted / The Lombards greedy and the Germans perfidious. "14 As far back as Aristotle, natural philosophers sought what we would now call scientific explanations for differences in national character. In the late sixteenth century Jean Bodin renewed and popularized this tradition in France, and it continued through such writers as Franc? ois La Mothe le Vayer, Charles Saint-Evremond, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and d'Espiard. 15 La Mothe notably composed a "Discourse on the Opposition of Humors be- tween Certain Nations," which attributed to the French and Spanish "as perfect an antipathy as there is in nature. "16
In the eighteenth century, the literature on national differences and na-
144 The Cult of the Nation in France
? tional character grew to massive and unprecedented dimensions, ranging from learned treatises to the crude propaganda of the Seven Years' War. The authors wrote for different purposes and in wildly varying styles. Nonetheless, they generally saw national character determined by three broad factors: climate, political action, and historical evolution. Moeurs, manners, and religion, all of which they also frequently invoked, generally depended in their schemes on politics or evolution, while the phrase "moral causes," which appears frequently in their works, usually amounted to a conflation of the two. 17
French authors generally did not ascribe "national character" to the en- tire population of a nation. Until 1789, as we have seen, few authors even acknowledged the enormous demographic, social, and cultural diversity of France's 28 million inhabitants. But in any case, most authors elided the problem altogether by straightforwardly associating the true national char- acter with a particular slice of the population. Thus Voltaire wrote that "the spirit of a nation always resides with the small number who put the large number to work, are fed by it, and govern it. " Charles Pinot-Duclos put things even more simply: "It is in Paris that you have to consider the Frenchman, because there he is more French than elsewhere. " Rousseau, by contrast, in a vision pregnant with implications for later, Romantic nation- alism, found the "genius" and moeurs of a nation in the "most distant provinces. " "It is the countryside that makes the country [pays], and the people of the countryside who make the nation. "18
Of climate, political action, and historical evolution, it was the first which perhaps most completely seduced the French of the eighteenth cen- tury. "Climate is, for a Nation, the fundamental cause . . . the principal cause presiding over the genius of peoples" wrote d'Espiard, the most un- compromising advocate of this point of view. 19 Temperature, humidity, wind, the quality of the soil: all of these shaped a person's body and behav- ior, with the result that national characters varied from one climate to the next. His work almost certainly influenced Montesquieu, who would soon make the importance of climate to national character a piece of utterly conventional wisdom. 20 In some of the most famous chapters of The Spirit of the Laws, he pursued the idea with rigor, describing how, for instance, thanks to the influence of cold weather on "surface fibers" and "tufts of nerves" (something he claimed to have verified by freezing a sheep's tongue), northern peoples were stronger, less sensitive to pain and love, and ultimately more suitable to liberty than southern ones. 21 Eighteenth-
National Character and the Republican Imagination 145
? century wits quipped that where Malebranche had seen everything in God, Montesquieu saw everything in climate. 22 Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, and Helve? tius all embraced theories of climate enthusiastically as well. 23
None of these authors, however, truly saw climate as all-determining. "Many things govern men," Montesquieu wrote: "climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, moeurs, and man- ners; a general spirit [of the nation] is formed as a result. "24 Other than cli- mate, laws and maxims were the most important. And on this subject, if he did not exactly create a piece of conventional wisdom, he certainly helped to popularize it. Throughout the rest of the eighteenth century, French au- thors routinely expressed their confidence in the ability of political action to affect national character. To quote just a few examples: "republican gov- ernment produces a particular character, and monarchical government produces another"; "it is princes who form the national character"; "the character [of the French] is a soft and flexible clay, out of which the Men in place can make vessels of glory or vessels of ignominy. "25 Above all, the idea ran like a bright thread through the political works of Rousseau, who claimed in his Confessions to have seen early on that "everything funda- mentally depended on politics . . . and that no people would ever be any- thing other than what its Government made of it. "26 Only "national insti- tutions," Rousseau admonished his readers, could shape the character, tastes, and mores of a people, distinguishing it from others and stimulating the ardent patriotism conducive to proper social relations. 27
Yet even Rousseau, along with the classical republicans he resembled in so many ways, acknowledged another crucial factor in the shaping of na- tional character. For his ideal legislators fought against a powerful enemy: time itself, which slowly and insidiously leeched virtue away and infected the healthiest body politic with the bacillus of self-interest. To Rousseau, time was a purely negative factor, which reduced well-defined, particular national characters to a common human sludge. Other authors, however, treated time far more favorably. They discerned in the history of the world a slow, irregular, but nonetheless visible evolution from savagery to civili- zation. For them, the character of a nation therefore depended in large part on how far it had scaled this chronological ladder.
French authors applied this historical theory most insistently to their own past, emphasizing France's evolution away from cruder standards of behavior. "Nearly all of us started out as sorts of savages, shut away in for- ests under a gloomy sky," wrote Antoine-Le? onard Thomas in his history
146 The Cult of the Nation in France
? of eloquence, while the playwright P. J. B. Chaussard even put the idea in verse: "Ces ge? ne? reux Franc? ais n'e? taient a` leur berceau / Qu'une horde stupide: un servile troupeau" [In the cradle these generous French were nothing / But a stupid horde, a servile flock]. 28 More systematically, the Marquis de Mirabeau likened the process to the course of nature itself and warned in L'ami des hommes, in the accents of biblical lyricism, that it could not continue indefinitely: "There is a circle prescribed to all nature, moral as well as physical, of birth, growth, fullness, decline and death. Thus are the days from morning to night, the years in their solar revolution, the life of man from cradle to tomb, and that of states from their foundation to their fall. "29 Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, provided the fullest exposi- tion of the theory, attempting to trace the progress of nearly every nation on earth. While bemoaning the capacity of stupidity, greed, intolerance, and sheer accident to block or even reverse progress, he nonetheless con- cluded that European nations, at least, had overall moved in the proper direction. 30
To the extent that French authors believed that political action and his- torical evolution determined national character, they also generally saw these two factors working through a particular intermediary: women. For if national character was heavily shaped by that elusive product of politics and history called moeurs, moeurs themselves were the province of women, both because of their general influence on social interactions and their specific role in educating the young. "Women," d'Espiard wrote, "are the essential part of moeurs. " The military reformer Guibert agreed with him. "Men make laws," but "women make moeurs, there lies their true empire. "31 Montesquieu, in his warning against altering a good national character (see the epigraph to this chapter), could envision only one way of actually doing so: "One could constrain [the] women, make laws to correct their moeurs, and limit their luxury. "32 Not coincidentally, these very measures, which Montesquieu himself hesitated to apply, formed the heart of Rous- seau's misogynistic prescription for preserving the moeurs of Geneva in his famous Letter to d'Alembert. 33 Women, in short, constituted at once a measure of a nation's civilization and the key to the preservation of its character.
A Bearable Lightness of Being
Armed with these conceptual tools, eighteenth-century French authors went eagerly about investigating national characters, and particularly the
National Character and the Republican Imagination 147
? one they saw reflected in the mirror. They were not always consistent, to say the least. At different times Voltaire described the French as "the most sociable and polite people on earth" (the preface to a stage play in the 1730s), "a people of heroes . . . a gentle and terrible people" (a war poem from the 1740s), and "monkeys and tigers" (his bitter exile in the 1760s). 34 Still, outside of wartime literature, which predictably saw a Bayard or Jumonville in every French male, the French national character was still, most generally, associated with a relatively well-defined and consistent constellation of closely related traits. 35 To be French was to be particularly social, particularly refined and polite, and particularly cheerful or flighty (le? ger, implying a mix of vivaciousness, inconstancy, and perhaps also superficiality). Sometimes these traits were invoked all at once, as in d'Hol- bach's umbrella comment that "the general character of the French nation is gaiety, activity, politeness, sociabilite? . "36 Yet if the traits themselves pro- voked few disagreements, their desirability provoked many: the same term that served as a warm commendation in one context could become a sting- ing criticism in another, even from the same author. Certain authors were consistently critical, and it was they who shaped the emerging republican critique of French national character.
Of the traits, "social" or "sociable" attracted attention from nearly all the major philosophes, eager as always to encompass a given subject in a single, overarching abstraction. 37 Thus Montesquieu had a character remark, with characteristic bite, in Persian Letters: "It is said that man is a sociable being. On this score it seems to me that a Frenchman is more human than anyone else. " Diderot similarly wrote that "there is no nation that is more like a single family. A Frenchman swarms about in his town more than ten Eng- lishmen, fifty Dutchmen, or a hundred Moslems do in theirs. "38 Beyond the ranks of the philosophes, many other writers adopted the same motif-- notably patriotic authors who wished to contrast the cheerful, sociable French to the gloomy, unsociable English. 39 As Bernardin de Saint-Pierre commented, "most of our writers brag about our nation's spirit of socie? te? "40 (emphasis mine).
Le? ge`rete? and related terms had equal popularity. To quote the Ency- clope? die: "It is a sort of proverb to say, le? ger like a Frenchman . . . "41 D'Espiard repeatedly stresssed this aspect of the French character, as did the elder Mirabeau, who called the French the most fickle, vivacious, and le? ger of nations, and the radical journalist Louis-Se? bastien Mercier, who cited their "extreme penchant" for le? ge`rete? . 42 The term often carried a criti- cal bite and easily elided into frivolity, luxury, and superficiality. Republi-
148 The Cult of the Nation in France
? can-minded critics routinely used it as a term of abuse, and probably for this reason many adopted "gay" (gai) as a substitute (they contrasted le? ger and gay to "heavy," "gloomy" and "pedantic"--again, characteristics often associated with the English). The Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Cerutti wrote a twenty-page essay on "French gaiety," which he attributed in turn to the nation's sociability. Laughter, he wrote, is the distinctive quality of the French nation. 43 Yet le? ge`rete? did have its defenders. Jean-Franc? ois Sobry, in his survey of French characteristics and institutions, said that "if [the Frenchman] has le? ge`rete? , it is not at all of the sort which is fickle and superficial, but rather that le? ge`rete? which recoils from heaviness and mo- notony. The Athenians were also le? ger, and they were the foremost people in the world. " The novelist Jacques-Antoine Perrin likewise commented: "Our neighbors may well call us le? ger, frivolous, inconsequential. But this lightness, this frivolity is the source of our amusements and our pleasures; it is to delicacy and even gallantry that we owe our happiness, they are vir- tues for us. "44
Politeness and refinement, meanwhile, went almost without saying. It was a commonplace to remark, as Voltaire did, that the French were not simply polite, but the most polite, as well as the most sociable of nations. 45 D'Holbach, Servan, Thomas, d'Espiard, Sobry, and Turgot all echoed the claim. 46 Eighteenth-century French understandings of politeness were complex, but in the discussions of national character the complexities faded somewhat, and such disparate concepts as urbanity, honne^tete? , deli- cacy, and civility blended together to signify simply an elaborate attention to form and style in personal interactions. 47
The sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness of the French were all easily ex- plained by reference to climate, political action, and history. France, pos- sessed as it was of a perfectly temperate climate, had succeeded, so it was claimed, in avoiding the solitude, seriousness, and moroseness of northern peoples, and the weakness, indolence, and debauchery of southern ones. 48 An innate moderation allowed the French to seek out pleasure and to de- light in polite human interaction without necessarily corrupting and en- slaving each other (although also without seeking true freedom). In addi- tion to climate, the French character reflected the country's monarchical government and aristocratic social system, in which les grands set the tone and everyone else scrambled to imitate them. Thus the same traits that foreigners associated with the French in general, the French themselves as- sociated particularly with the royal court and the high aristocracy. As d'Espiard had said, the Frenchman's manner was the lordly manner.
National Character and the Republican Imagination 149
? Above all, if the French were said to maintain a degree of polite so- cial interaction unknown elsewhere and to devote themselves to endless rounds of pleasure, it was because they stood at the end point of that long historical evolution which had taken them away from their "savage" or "barbarian" origins and rendered them steadily more "polite," "policed," or "civilized. " Sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness were all closely linked to the concept of "civilization," which took shape in the mid-eighteenth century and depended on a vision of historical progress and cosmopolitan ex- change between civilized people. As we saw in Chapter 1, "civilization," one of the key foundational concepts in eighteenth-century culture, stood in stark opposition to "patrie" and "republic. " Thus to the extent that eigh- teenth-century authors saw the French national character in terms of so- ciability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness, and approved of it, they were defining France less as a classical patrie and more as the center and apogee of a uni- versal civilization.
For most French authors, the civilized traits of sociability, le? ge`rete? , and politeness reflected the extraordinary influence of women. D'Espiard and Montesquieu agreed that women, to whom vivaciousness and love of soci- ety came naturally, ruled French moeurs, obliging men to strive to please them. 49 Se? bastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigne? , author of a histori- cal essay on the "principal absurdities of different nations," attributed the politeness and sociability of the French particularly to the "company of women. "50 Many observers considered the position of women the main difference between France and nations which restricted women to what Rivarol called "the domestic tribunal. "51 D'Espiard stressed that "society cannot exist without women," and nations like the Chinese "have de- stroyed Society by this eternal imprisonment of women, which is the least philosophical and most unjust thing in the world. "52 An anonymous au- thor similarly suggested that if the English stopped banishing women from the table after dinner, the nation would grow less misanthropic. "The Frenchman," he remarked, "owes the amiable qualities which distinguish him from other peoples to interchange with women. "53
The Degenerate, Effeminate French
Yet it was precisely over the position of women that French students of na- tional character also revealed their greatest anxieties. D'Espiard, for all his solicitude where Chinese women were concerned, had also commented that "foreigners say that in France, men are not men enough, and women
150 The Cult of the Nation in France
? are not women enough. "54 Gazon-Dourxigne? added a similarly caution- ary note to his celebratory history of the French character: "Some women were reproached for taking on the character of men, and many men for too closely resembling women. "55 Rivarol noted severely that "it is from women's vices and ours, the politeness of men and the coquetry of women, that was born this gallantry of the two sexes which corrupts both in turn. "56 These remarks recall Rousseau's remark in the Letter to d'Alembert that the two sexes should "live separated ordinarily," and that "no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women. "57
These men nonetheless had ambiguous attitudes towards the reform of the French character, because they thought that thanks to a favorable cli- mate, beneficial historical evolution, and a political system they would not dream of challenging, this character was generally acceptable. They agreed with Montesquieu that trying to alter it might prove dangerous. But in the final decades of the old regime, in the context of political collapse and mil- itary challenges, moderate assumptions of this sort increasingly came into question. More observers adopted a caustic, Rousseauian view of history, held up the ideal of the patrie over that of civilization, and started to think of impaired national virility as an urgent problem in need of a solution. In 1762, for instance, a Discours sur le patriotisme, read in the Academy of Lyon, warned that the French had developed a tendency to become "syba- rites, plunged into a voluptuous stupor, breathing and thinking only for pleasure, deaf to the voice of the patrie. " The speaker added sternly that "if fashion, modes and frivolity take the place of moeurs and reason . . . then a nation is done for. "58 Castilhon similarly called for the authentic bourgeois character of the French to reassert itself in the face of corrupting female aristocratic influences. In 1787, an entrant in the Academy of Cha^lons-sur- Marne's essay competition on patriotism called the French "too le? ger and too dissipated" and warned they might perish unless they grew more civic- minded. 59 Even the ardent patriot Antoine-Le?
onard Thomas could turn scathing on the subject of the French character. France, he wrote in his his- tory of eloquence, was a "le? ger and impetuous nation, ardent for pleasures, concerned always with the present, soon forgetting the past, talking of everything and caring about nothing. "60
Almost without exception, as Antoine de Baecque has stressed, these cri- tiques associated supposedly typical French traits with the corporeal fail- ings of lethargy, sickness, physical corruption, and old age. 61 "The French
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? nation has changed . . . We are no longer as robust, as strong, as the ancient Gauls from whom we descend. "62 The French nation had become "indo- lent, apathetic, carefree," in a modern period described as "a long lethargy" or "a coating of rust. " The French were "an immense people grown old in despotism," "a degraded, debased people," "a society grown old in slavery and sensual pleasure and corrupted by the habit of vice. "63 In the diagnosis of a flawed national character, political writers were questioning the future existence of the nation and calling, in the accents of classical republican- ism, for immediate reform.
But would such a reform necessarily entail wiping the slate clean and imprinting an entirely new character on the population? Until the first years of the Revolution, republican-minded observers rarely went this far. Instead, they generally suggested that modern French traits reflected the perversion and corruption of a older, authentic Frenchness, which needed somehow to be restored. As Rabaut de Saint-Etienne remarked, following Rousseau, in modern times the true national character had simply been "erased. "64 Blame for this corruption was attributed to historical evolution in general, which had leeched away the original, pristine virtues of the French, and on the form of government--namely, absolute monarchy and "feudalism. " Abbe? Charles Chaisneau wrote in 1792 that although France's temperate climate had endowed its inhabitants with an innate love of vir- tue, "despotism ruined everything with its impure breath; this monster in- fected the truest feelings at the source. " Many echoed him. 65 France's re- gional diversity, which came to be perceived as an urgent problem at the time of the Revolution, was similarly interpreted, in the manner of the Physiocrats, not as a natural state of affairs, but as a historical aberration caused by the nefarious effects of the feudal system. 66 Overcoming divi- sions of privilege and region, and bringing the French back to a state of original, authentic homogeneity, therefore demanded not simply a reversal of the historical clock--the typically republican promise of a return to the pristine past--but an end to despotism and a check on the powers of the king.
Republican-minded critics of the national character were hardly origi- nal in their call for a return to an idealized past. From a different angle, no- ble and parlementaire opponents of the crown under the old regime did very little other than assert the claims of the distant past upon the present. Occasionally, they invoked the subject of national character to support their point, as when Boulainvilliers wrote grandiloquently of "the French,
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? born free and independent . . . who fell prey to the conquest, not of a for- eign nation, but of a single family. "67 But national character mattered far less to them than specific constitutional arrangements and the specific his- toric rights they claimed for their own institutions and groups. In contrast, the later republican texts increasingly eschewed any consideration of an ancient French constitution which, no matter how favorably presented, still could not match up to the Roman republican one. They preferred more historically vague, although often lushly evocative, invocations of the earlier, unspoiled national personality.
How far one had to go into the past to find the golden age of Frenchness was a question open to discussion. Republican critics of the national char- acter in the 1770s and 1780s most often located it either in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. The earlier era had experienced something of a vogue in the late eighteenth century, spurred in particular by the meticulous historical researches of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, which fed a colorful, proto-Romantic celebration of chivalry and the Troubadours. "O happy times! O forever lamented days! " wrote the poet Pierre-Laurent Be? renger in one typical effusion. "Brilliant and fortunate nation! . . . Egoism, that poison which destroys all sensitivity, had not yet attacked the patrie, soci- ety, nature itself . . . In those days the Nation had a character that was sim- ple, and, if I dare say so, poetic and full of grandeur. "68 Historical works such as Claude de Sacy's twelve-volume study of L'honneur franc? ois chroni- cled the history of chivalry in detail, while, as we have seen, in the 1780s devotees of the cult of great Frenchmen put new emphasis on medieval heroes. 69 As for the Renaissance, it was not only the age of great Frenchmen like Bayard, but also of the paradigmatic good king, Henri IV. When Louis XVI inherited the throne in 1774, hopeful Parisian graffiti artists painted the word "Resurrexit" ("he has arisen") on the statue of Henri IV on Paris's Pont Neuf, and Renaissance-style clothing enjoyed a brief vogue at Ver- sailles. 70 A 1789 pamphlet referred to Henri's famous culinary pledge to the poor in predicting that with the Revolution, the French, "regaining the gaiety and vigor of our fathers, . . . will dance, sing, and rejoice in the shade of those ancient oaks under which they used to gather to eat chicken in the pot. "71
During the Revolution, the association of chivalry with the nobility and of even Henri IV with royal "despotism" made these particular allusions politically incorrect, and so the search for a usable pristine past proceeded further back in time, to the era of the Franks or even the Gauls. Pithou's Le
National Character and the Republican Imagination 153
? triomphe des parisiens, published after the fall of the Bastille, proclaimed: "Frenchmen, you have reconquered your liberty, that liberty of which the first Franks, your ancestors, were jealous; you will again become like them, strong and healthy; like them you will let your beards grow, and you will wear the long hair that they favored. "72 Other pamphlets identified the con- querors of the Bastille with the "sturdy Gauls," while Bare`re, in August of 1793, asked his listeners in the Convention to emulate the Gauls who had once conquered Rome. 73 A particularly curious revolutionary pam- phlet demanded that the country reject the name of France and call itself Gaul once again. 74 Even the National Convention's choice of a giant Hercu- les as the emblem of the Republic, in 1793, conformed to this revived Celtophilia. For in French iconography the mighty Hercules had a particu- lar association with the Gauls, whom he had brought out of barbarism. The emblem therefore managed simultaneously to invoke the classical mythology so beloved of the revolutionaries, and also a more specifically national past. 75
Even when invocations of national character did not refer to any partic- ular era in the French past, the authors almost reflexively used the language of recovery, awakening, rebirth, and regeneration. "Century eighteen! Re- turn to France all its energy, return to it all its virtues," the future Girondin Pe? tion wrote in a 1789 pamphlet. "People, awaken! Break your chains! Rise once again to your initial grandeur," chimed in an anonymous poet. At the end of 1789, Mercier hailed "the year which has brought equality, liberty and justice back to Gaul . . . which ended the abasement of the people; which ennobled it, in revealing to it titles which had been lost. "76 Such opinions were ubiquitous.
Yet how could a fatally sick and corrupt nation possibly accomplish such an act of revival? By 1789 it had become commonplace to take images of indolence and corruption to an extreme, with France described as a nation on its deathbed. Many authors therefore implied that it could only rise up again through a sort of miracle, similar to cures brought about by saints, or even the resurrection of Jesus. The popular concept of regeneration per- fectly expressed this belief. Certain authors went even further, however, and couched images of national recovery in language taken blatantly from the Gospels. Pamphlets appeared with titles such as La Dies Irae, ou les trois ordres au jugement dernier ("The Day of Wrath, or the Three Orders at the Last Judgment"), and La Passion, la mort, et la resurrection du peuple ("The Passion, Death and Resurrection of the People"), which recounted that the
154 The Cult of the Nation in France
? French body politic had lain on its deathbed until the God of Mercy had finally stepped in save it. Priests favorable to the Revolution, not surpris- ingly, used such language with particular fervor and frequency. 77 Such writing usually came in the form of parables; few went so far as to claim that God literally stood on the side of the Revolution. But the religious lan- guage nonetheless suggests that when it came to addressing the problem of how a nation and its national character might actually be transformed, French republicans still instinctively reached for religious models.
Man and Citizen
While the idea of recovering an earlier, more authentic, and more natural national character may have prevailed under the old regime and the start of the Revolution, it was not the only form that the republican critique took. Particularly during the Terror, another, more radical approach to the subject of national character also took shape: instead of a return to nature and an original French national character, the call went out for a complete and utter break with both.
This approach rested above all on an opposition between the abstract categories of "man" and "citizen," that is, between the human being as found in nature, complete with natural instincts and feelings, and the hu- man being as found in the patrie, conditioned to heed the call of civic duty. Under the old regime, Christian writers generally tried to deny the opposi- tion, lest it lead to the Machiavellian conclusion that a good Christian could not be a good citizen of the patrie. Thus the Jansenist orator Soanen, in his 1683 sermon on patriotism, affirmed that "it is impossible to be truly a man without being a good citizen, and it is similarly impossible to be a good Christian without cherishing one's country. "78 The notion that people might turn away from their natural feelings in favor of their patri- otic duty was often actively condemned and associated with countries other than France. "The Patrie," wrote a pamphleteer of the Seven Years War, "is the idol to which the English sacrifice all the feelings which the voice of nature tells them to have for their fellow men. Their love for it has dried them up entirely. "79 The Jesuit and future revolutionary, Joseph- Antoine-Joachim Cerutti, sought more neutrally to associate such behav- ior with the ancient republics: "In Man, the Romans and Athenians sought only to fashion the Citizen. "80
It was Rousseau who sketched out the opposition in the strongest terms.
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? Indeed, it underlies much of his work. His Discourse on the Origins of In- equality famously portrayed man in the state of nature and in the interme- diary stage of contented savagery, before concluding that in modern times the insidious enticements of amour propre had led humans fatally astray, with the only salvation lying in the adoption of a new, wholly civic nature. The Social Contract then continued the story, suggesting how this new nature might be created through politics. "The passing from the state of nature to the civil society," Rousseau emphasized, "produces a very re- markable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they had previously lacked. "81 In Emile, Rousseau proposed a different possible course, that of sheltering men from the nefarious effects of corrupt social institutions so as to preserve their natural instincts. He admitted, however, that a man sheltered in this manner would not grow up into a dutiful patriotic citizen. "Forced to fight nature or social institutions," he wrote, "we must choose between making a man or making a citizen; we cannot do both. "82 Diderot likewise lamented that mankind had never managed to unify the three cat- egories of "man, citizen and religious person. "83
Like Soanen, the French revolutionaries for the most part initially at- tempted to deny the need for Rousseau's choice. How else could they have named the single most important document of 1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? Clerical revolutionaries seeking to put the Church under the tricolor and the Revolution under the cross, such as Adrien Lamourette, Henri Gre? goire, and Hyancinthe Sermet, argued zeal- ously that the Revolution might yet achieve a precious union between the demands of citizenship and human nature. 84
But even as these men fought to reconcile (Christian) man and (revo- lutionary) citizen, other, more radical voices were restating Rousseau's formulation and insistently severing the two categories again. As early as 1788, an anonymous pamphlet entitled Discours sur le patriotisme re- sponded to the Academy of Cha^lons-sur-Marne's essay question about whether patriotism could exist under monarchies with this explanation of the word's meaning:
What is Patriotism? Patriotism is the continual practice of all the political virtues. . . . It is the sacrifice of one's goods, one's relatives, one's family: it is contempt for life itself, when the safety of the City is at stake. What is Patriotism? Patriotism is the forgetting of the man, to be nothing other than
156 The Cult of the Nation in France
? a citizen [my emphasis]. In the heart of the true Patriot, personal interest constantly cedes to the general interest. He generously sacrifices all his passions to the passion for the Patrie. So what, finally, is Patriotism? Pa- triotism is the total abnegation of all feelings which are not directed to- wards the happiness of the City. 85
The passage reads like pure classical republicanism, yet in his conclusion to the pamphlet the author retreated somewhat. Adapting (without attribu- tion) the passage from Montesquieu with which this chapter opens, he asked a number of similar questions, beginning with: "[What] if there were a people who possessed to the highest point the social virtues; who were gentle, human, generous, charitable; whose general character was gai- ety, vanity, inconsistency . . . ? "86 He concluded that if such a people existed, it could not be patriotic. Again in echo of Montesquieu, he insisted that "if ever Patriotism took root in the heart of this people, it would no longer be the same, its constitution would have changed. "87 Unlike Montesquieu, however, he did not suggest that this change would be a bad thing.
Within a few years, the pamphleteer's suggestion had become, for oth- ers, a manifesto. If the Revolution began, in 1789, with the rejection of spe- cifically French constitutional precedents, it quickly proceeded to a rejec- tion of French history altogether. "It is France's salvation you must consult, not its archives," Cerutti instructed the deputies to the Estates General, while Rabaut de Saint-Etienne made his famous comment about France being fit not to follow examples, but only to give them. 88 Bare`re grandilo- quently asserted that "all must be new in France; we wish to date only from today," while Boissy d'Anglas borrowed from the Bible to swoop even higher in his rhetoric: "To set the destinies of the world, you have but to will it. You are the creators of a new world. Say let there be light, and light will be. "89 Robespierre made the same point more darkly: "Considering the depths to which the human race has been degraded by the vices of our for- mer social system, I am convinced of the need to effect a complete regener- ation, and, if I may so express it, to create a new people. "90 From this point, it was only a short step to a rejection of nature itself in favor of the de- mands of the patrie. Thus Danton could famously tell the Convention that children belong to the Republic before belonging to their parents, and the legislator Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau could propose (in a plan en- dorsed by Robespierre) to remove all French children from their families and send them to state-run boarding schools for periods of six years or
National Character and the Republican Imagination 157
? longer. 91 Thus Saint-Just could proclaim to the Convention that "there is something terrible in the sacred love of the patrie. It is so exclusive that it sacrifices everything without pity, without fear, without human respect, to the public interest. "92
The call to reject nature came with particular persistence in the arts. Already in 1789, Jacques-Louis David's neoclassical masterpiece, Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, celebrated the Roman hero who or- dered his own sons killed as a punishment for treason. The painting bril- liantly contrasted the still, unfeeling Brutus, staring straight ahead without visible emotion on one side of the tableau, to his wife and daughters weep- ing hysterically on the other. Under the Terror, revolutionary theater re- peatedly returned to such themes, with a series of plays celebrating the same sort of chillingly stern and unforgiving heroes, drawn mostly from the history of republican Rome. In Joseph Lavalle? e's 1794 Manlius Tor- quatus, ou la discipline romaine, for instance, a Roman father, in the man- ner of Brutus, kills his son for disobedience. The son pleads repeatedly with his father, but the stern Roman responds only with the words "la patrie! " Finally, he adds this explanation:
To save unhappy morals from chains,
Let us break, burst the chains of paternal affection;
And whether they finally call me just or barbaric,
Let me be the father of the people, and not the father of a man. 93
Similarly, in Antoine-Vincent Arnault's Quintus Cincinnatus, also from 1794, a Roman learns that his father-in-law has committed treason, where- upon his wife warns him not to let family sentiment soften his reaction:
Stifle the murmur of protesting blood,
Conquer yourself; enslave nature to the patrie, Feeling to laws, and the man to the citizen;
This is the effort worthy of your heart and mine. 94
From Soanen's reconciling of "man" and "citizen," to Rousseau's injunction to choose between them, to the 1789 pamphleteer's suggestion to forget the first in favor of the second, the French had finally arrived at the ulti- mate stage of the republican critique: demanding the enslavement of man, and nature itself, to the patrie.
From this perspective, of course, any national character shaped by cli- mate, historical evolution, and monarchy was nothing other than an ob-
158 The Cult of the Nation in France
? [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. ]
Figure 13. Jacques-Louis David, Les licteurs rapportent a` Brutus les corps de ses fils (Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons), 1789. David's stern, neoclassical masterpiece depicts a famous incident from the Roman Republic, in which Junius Brutus ordered the execution of his own sons for treason.
stacle to be overcome, which is precisely how the Jacobin and Terrorist Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne described it in his 1793 work, Principes re? ge? ne? rateurs du syste`me social, in the passage quoted at the start of this chapter. In Manlius Torquatus, Lavalle? e drew a contrast between the Ro- man and Latin peoples whose conflict lay at the heart of his story, stressing that even though they were neighbors sharing a common history, climate, and language, the thirst for liberty had changed the Roman character unal- terably. Robespierre expressed the same sentiment when he strikingly as- serted, in a report to the Convention on religious ideas and national festi- vals, that the Revolution had put the French two thousand years ahead of the rest of the human race, so that "one is tempted to see them . . . ] as a different species. "95 If France was to have a national character, it should have an entirely new one, reflecting its newly republican constitution. As we have seen, the playwright Che? nier told the National Convention that the state should take as its purpose "to make Frenchmen, to give the nation a physiognomy of its own. "96
The single most sustained exposition of this point of view came a few years after the Terror, in a remarkable short book called De l'influence
National Character and the Republican Imagination 159
? de la Re? volution franc? aise sur le caracte`re national ("On the Influence of the French Revolution on the National Character") by Jacobin magistrate Gilles Boucher-Laricharderie. Composed at a time when the achievements of the republican revolution seemed ever more precarious, Boucher hoped to encourage the left by sounding a tone of revolutionary optimism and confidence, declaring that the national character had changed, positively, completely, and irreversibly, since 1789. Before that date, he argued in a fa- miliar manner, despotism had caused the French to lose whatever national character they might once have possessed. Therefore, to consolidate itself, the Revolution needed to entirely recast that character. "This is what it be- gan to do," he continued, "with a success that even the most penetrating minds could not have predicted. "97 In keeping with earlier diagnoses of na- tional character, Boucher devoted the heart of the book to the role of women. Quoting Rousseau, he argued that before 1789 French women had taken advantage of the deference shown them by men to make themselves the true sources of power "in all conditions and ranks," right up to the royal court. But, he continued sententiously: "This strange domination ex- pired on July 14, 1789. " Since then, women's dominion had been restricted to the "interior of their families" and "the exercise of domestic virtues," with beneficial results for France in general. 98 Boucher did admit that the French possessed a natural gaiety which had suffered under the Terror. But he also insisted that the "frivolity" and le? ge`rete? which had accompanied this gaiety had disappeared, replaced by "decency, gravity, . . . simplicity. "99 The French had acquired a "new character," a martial, conquering disposi- tion that allowed their armies to march through Europe in triumph. And Boucher concluded, in echo of a thousand revolutionary speeches: "Thus the love of liberty has made of the French an entirely new people. "100 Al- though issued in the twilight of the First Republic, it was the perfect re- publican vision of a France transformed.
The Means of Conversion
It was one thing to pontificate about the weaknesses of the French national character. It was quite another to do something about it. And over the course of the Revolution, the task came to seem steadily more daunting, as the bounds of the political nation expanded. In the spring of 1789, with the French still divided into their three traditional estates and with voting rights strictly circumscribed by property requirements, it was still possi-
160 The Cult of the Nation in France
? ble--just--to follow Voltaire or Duclos and restrict the problem of the na- tional character to a small, influential, easily describable minority. But by the fall of 1792, when the National Convention had extended the suffrage, in theory, to nearly all adult males, the problems of the larger nation could no longer be overlooked, and the biblical and classical examples of nation- building cited by Rousseau in the Considerations on the Government of Po- land came to seem less and less relevant. For eighteenth-century France was not a small desert tribe knit together by painfully tight bonds of kin- ship and obedience, nor was it a walled classical city-state in which slaves supported the leisure of free citizens. Shaping the character of a population that numbered in the millions, most of whom had little formal education, many of whom could not read or understand any but rudimentary French, and who varied enormously in everything from language and folklore to village organization and forms of agriculture, was a project without any real secular precedent.
How was the task to be accomplished?
