Revolution and the Republic
Page 43
10 L’Idée républicaine en France (1982), 16–18.
11 Patrick Weil, How to be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, NC, 2008),
11–13.
12 See Robert Shaver, ‘Paris and Patriotism’, History of Political Thought, 12 (1991), 627–46.
13 See Michel Delon, ‘Nation’, in Pascal Ory (ed.), Nouvelle histoire des idées politiques (1987),
127–35; Maurice Cranston, ‘Sovereignty of the Nation’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of
the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 97–104; Pierre Nora, ‘Nation’, in François Furet and Mona
Ozouf (eds.), Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (1988), 801–11; J.-R. Suratteau, ‘Nation/
Nationalité’, in Albert Soboul (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (1989), 781–3.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
201
the conflict between Britain and France as a duel between two royal houses or
between two different religions, presented it as ‘a battle between irreconcilable
nations’. ‘[S]upporters of the French crown’, he writes, ‘sought to mobilize the
nation as a whole against an enemy nation’. We cannot fully know the extent to
which this induced spontaneous expressions of patriotic enthusiasm but we can
accept Bell’s conclusion that through such propaganda the French came increas-
ingly to see themselves as a nation and one ‘which could mobilize itself, instead of
simply flocking behind a king’.14
More influential still was what Bell characterizes as ‘the politics of patriotism’.15
On this account there were three decisive moments in the development of national
sentiment: the regency of Philippe d’Orléans (1715–22); the parlementaire crisis in
the years 1748–54; and, finally, the so-called Maupeou revolution of 1771. By
1760, Bell argues, the concept of the nation had become central to French political
culture, but political competition still existed between rival claims to have originally
embodied the nation, to be its modern descendants, and to speak in its name. The
contenders are well known: the monarch (clothed increasingly in patriotic garb);
the aristocracy (never slow to articulate the view that it was from them, and in the
distant Frankish past, that kings derived their original legitimacy); and the parle-
ments (once recalled by Turgot, more than ever determined to cast themselves in
the role of the patriot party). Yet in each case the language spoken revealed a desire
to return to earlier, less troubled, legal arrangements and to put an end to the
growing political clamour. This could not be done, and increasingly therefore the
concept of the nation acted as a vehicle for political claims and as a source of
legitimacy. As Bell makes abundantly clear, the key moment came in September
1788 when the parlement of Paris ruled that the Estates-General should meet in its
traditional form, the three Estates sitting and voting separately. With this, aristoc-
racy joined royal despotism as the enemy, and a new definition of the nation had
quickly to be found.
This definition was provided with breathtaking audacity by the Abbé Sieyès.16
Henceforth, the Third Estate was taken to be ‘a complete nation’, with the
aristocracy in particular cast out unceremoniously and without regret from the
body politic. Next, the representatives of the Third Estate formalized their political
ascendancy not merely by redescribing themselves as ‘the representatives of the
French people’ but also by declaring themselves to be members of the National
Assembly. The nation thus had been given unambiguous political expression and
henceforth it was acknowledged that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides in the
nation’.
14 David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.,
2001), 78–106.
15 Ibid. 50–77.
16 See above p. 75. See also Charles-Philippe-Toussaint Guiraudet, Qu’est-ce que la nation et qu’est-
ce que la France? (1991). The emphasis in the text fell on overcoming the ‘imagined divisions’ which
separated the French as individuals from one another.
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Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
In this way were disclosed two ideas of immense significance and importance.17
The first was that the nation was a self-conscious political construct, the fruit and
product of an immense act of (revolutionary) will. The second, and one soon
to be made graphically explicit, was that nations possessed the right to self-
determination. The latter in particular denoted a complete break with traditional
international practices, although it had been presaged by the slightly earlier Ameri-
can example. Both were made manifest at the Fête de la Fédération, celebrated on
the Champ de Mars a year to the day after the storming of the Bastille and
orchestrated in such a way as to shroud the nation in a mystical halo. As Pierre
Nora has written, ‘[t]he festival expressed the disappearance of internal frontiers,
the abolition of regional disparities, the excitement associated with an act of mutual
consent submitting a united France to an authority freely accepted’.18 Just as
dramatically, these same ideas were applied to those parts of the territory that had
been annexed to France under the monarchy. In the so-called serment de Strasbourg
the delegates of the national guards of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté
affirmed the determination of these territories and their inhabitants to be a part
of the French nation. In similar vein, in May 1790 it was declared that ‘the French
nation renounces the intention to undertake any war whose goal is that of conquest
and it will never employ its arms against the liberty of a people’.
One of the most striking aspects of the Revolution of 1789 was that from the
outset its participants believed that their actions were of international significance
and that what was at stake was a set of universal values. One example of this
universalistic mentality was the assumption that France was not born to follow the
example of others but was rather the example that should be followed. As Tocque-
ville was later to comment: ‘It was not a question of taking lessons, but of
furnishing new examples.’19 Another feature was the manner in which it was
assumed that the truths being proclaimed were applicable to the whole of human-
kind. To cite Tocqueville again: ‘there was no Frenchman who did not believe he
had in his hands, not the destiny of his country, but the very future of the
species’.20 Seen from the political hothouses of Paris, the whole world was watching
and listening as revolutionary events unfolded. So too, a reborn French nation,
shorn of privilege, was thought capable of infinite enlargement and of embracing
the inhabitants of the earth. France was ‘la patrie de l’humanité’.
Given this, there are few more fascinating tales than the manner in which the
universalistic aspirations of the Revolution were replaced by the denunciation
of the foreigner and by what Mona Ozouf has termed a ‘fraternité xenophobe’.21
If, at the outset, all those who accepted the principles of the Revolution were
17 See Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation: L’Expansion révolutionnaire de la France
dans le monde
de 1789 à 1799 (1956).
18 Nora, ‘Nation’, 806.
19 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 2001), ii. 67.
20 Ibid.
21 Mona Ozouf, ‘L’Idée républicain et l’interprétation du passé national’, Annales, 53 (1998),
1074–87. See also Sophie Wahnich, L’Impossible citoyen: L’Étranger dans le discours de la Révolution
française (1997).
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
203
welcomed as citizens, the rhetoric of fraternity and hospitality quickly changed
into that of enmity as these very same foreigners—seven of whom, including
Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine, were elected to the Convention—were recast
as traitors and false friends. In part this can be explained by the yawning gap that
existed between the dream of national unity and the reality of a deeply divided
and heterogeneous country. The foreigner was no more—and no less—an object
of suspicion than the aristocrat and the priest. Next, the very logic of universalism
played its part. To harbour doubts about the claims of French liberty was to place
oneself in the position of being an enemy of the French nation and therefore, by
extension, of humanity. The foreigner could thus very easily be equated with
tyranny. To this could then be added the demands of political necessity. From
1792 onwards France, and the Revolution, was at war with her neighbours and
this perilous situation, in an atmosphere where rumours of plots and conspiracies
were rife, called for no half measures.
Most importantly, the retreat from the idealistic posture of universal embrace
followed inevitably from the realization that the nation as envisaged by the
revolutionaries had still to be made. From Sieyès onwards, the very definition of
the nation had a logic of inclusion and exclusion written into it and the boundaries
of the nation were drawn within and not beyond French territory. But it was
undoubtedly the discourse of political virtue voiced so enthusiastically by the
Jacobins that did most to separate the foreigner from the erstwhile country of
humanity. If Louis XVI, in the words of Saint-Just, could be cast (fatally) as ‘a
foreigner living among us’,22 the same could be said all too easily of the non-French
nationals who became the subject of relentless rebuke and attack in Robespierre’s
speeches. As Sophie Wahnich comments: for the Jacobins, ‘the victory of liberty
would be signified by the perfect transparency of the public space . . . the struggle
engaged upon was a struggle against all forms of opacity which might act as an
obstacle to the actions of revolutionary government’.23 The foreigner was necessar-
ily opaque, the mask-wearer par excellence, and therefore, unwittingly or not, a
traitor, a plotter, and an enemy of the patrie.24 As will be readily surmised, of these
foreign enemies the English were given pride of place as the enemies of the entire
human race (a sentiment later continued by Jules Michelet amongst many others).
Echoing the royalist propaganda of the Seven Years War almost word for word, ‘the
people of this debased island’ were again compared to the brigands and thieves of
Carthage.
Why France, having made known its pacific intentions, actually went to war is a
question not easily answered. The Girondins seem mistakenly to have believed that
this was their best way of keeping hold of the reins of power. Robespierre for one
opposed this policy, fearing that it would lead to military despotism and the
22 ‘Discours sur le jugement de Louis XVI’, in Saint-Just, Œuvres complètes (2004), 475–84.
23 Wahnich, L’Impossible citoyen, 155.
24 The concept of patrie is closely related to that of nation. It was, if anything, even vaguer in
meaning, both before and during the Revolution. In the Furet and Ozouf Dictionnaire critique de la
Révolution there is no separate entry for patrie.
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Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
overthrow of the constitution.25 Military success, however, brought its own pro-
blems. What was to be done with the newly conquered territories? If the annexa-
tions of Nice, Avignon, and even Savoy (each of which formally requested
incorporation into France) were relatively straightforward, the same could not be
said of Belgium. Here there was deep unease and indecision, not least amongst the
members of the Convention. Help however was at hand from the exiled Prussian
noble and (soon to be guillotined) apostle of universal fraternity, Anacharsis Cloots,
who justified the annexation of the left bank of the Rhine on the grounds that ‘this
river is the natural boundary of the Gauls’. It was this theme that was taken up and
given clear expression in the famous remarks of Danton before the Convention on
30 January 1793. The limits of the French republic, he announced, were ‘indicated
by nature. We will reach them at the four corners of the horizon: at the Rhine, the
Oceans and the Alps.’26 Two weeks later Carnot added the Pyrenees to the list. Was
this a novel doctrine or was it, as the nineteenth-century historians Augustin
Thierry and Henri Martin were to argue, a reworking of the traditional policy of
the French monarchy from Richelieu onwards?27 It matters relatively little because,
whatever the truth of the matter, it was now accepted that the principle of
geographical determinism could supplement or even supersede that of the right
to self-determination.
Appeals to local consent continued to be made and were duly met by the
minority determined to lend their support to the principles of the Revolution,
but henceforth the notion that peoples were being liberated from oppression served
only as a fiction and a pretext for national self-interest. What, moreover, was to be
done when French arms brought victories beyond even these natural boundaries?
Could these territories too not be brought within the confines of the universal
republic or did such geographical expansion (as the frequently cited example of
classical Rome appeared to show) entail the grave risk of subverting the Republic
itself? Prudence alone dictated that the first course should not be followed, and
thus, under the guise of respect for the sovereignty of other peoples, an additional
variety of annexation was invented: that of ‘sister republics’.28 All countries con-
quered by France were to be given new republican constitutions, and were in effect
to exist as French protectorates.29 This was the fate that first befell Holland in 1795
and much of the Italian peninsula in the next two to three years. ‘The system of
“sister republics”’, Jacques Godechot writes, ‘had the advantage, not merely of
flattering the national pride as well as the revolutionary pride of the French by
extending the influence of the new France, but it afforded undeniable strategic
benefits . . . and economic advantages.’30
25 See Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, iv. Le Défenseur de la Constitution (1939).
26 Quoted in Wahnich, L’Impossible citoyen, 340.
27 See Daniel Nordman, ‘La Frontière’, in Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson (eds.),
Dictionnaire critique de la République (2002), 499–505.
; 28 See Jean-Louis Harouel, Les Républiques sœurs (1997).
29 See Lucien Jaume (ed.), Les Déclarations des droits de l’homme (1989), 313–18.
30 Godechot, La Grande nation, 83.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
205
The last remnants of universalistic fervour were removed following the fall of the
Jacobins and the installation of the Thermidorian republic. This continued under
the Directory, when for the first time the notion of the ‘constitutional limits’ of
France was invoked in order to justify French expansion beyond its pre-revolution-
ary borders. Indeed, to the objectives of attaining natural frontiers and establishing
sister republics, the Directory added one new priority: economic and maritime
expansion in the Mediterranean. This was a policy that would shortly see the
departure of Napoleon Bonaparte for Egypt.
Bonaparte’s oriental adventure was very far from being a complete success but
one crushing military victory at Aboukir over disorganized Ottoman opponents
and some astute propaganda turned it into a personal triumph for the young
general. It was soldiers, rather than civilians, who were now the heroes of the
new Republic. From 1792 onwards, in fact, the levée en masse, conscription by
another name, had produced an army numbering as many as 800,000 men and this
not only turned the aristocratic army of the past into an anachronism, but also
changed the very way that war was fought, putting the entire resources of the nation
at the army’s disposal. From this it appeared to follow naturally that, when
politicians proved themselves incapable of managing affairs, recourse should be
made to one of those who had led the national army to glory. In this way the First
Republic came to an end.
Gone now was to be any reference to the right of nations to self-determination.
Far from granting them independence, whenever practicable, Napoleon integrated
conquered territories into metropolitan France, producing at its most extensive in
1811 a France consisting of 130 départements, stretching from the mouth of the
Elbe and Flanders in the north and to Rome and Tuscany in the south. Where
integration was not feasible, Napoleon set up what amounted to vassal states,
frequently headed by some undistinguished member of his own extended family