| The Unbearable Lightness of Being French: Law, Republicanism and National Identity at the End of the Old Regime | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being French:
Law, Republicanism and National Identity at the
End of the Old Regime

DAVID A. BELL

"We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians." Historians of nationalism delight in quoting this famous saying of the Risorgimento leader Massimo d'Azeglio but usually only to echo his own point, namely that the formal creation of the Italian nation had little meaning for most of its supposed citizens.¹ Whatever their formal nationality, they remained first and foremost, in language, customs, historical traditions, and political allegiances, inhabitants of their villages and regions: Sicilians, Piedmontese, Tuscans, Calabrians, Romans, Umbrians, Venetians—not "Italians." 1

     Yet the saying is important for another reason, for it perfectly and concisely expresses something that is at the heart of nationalism: the idea of the nation as a political construct. The word "nation" itself is an ancient one, going back to the Latin natio, and it was long used unproblematically, in many European languages, to refer to such entities as France, England, Italy, and Germany.² But until the late eighteenth century, "nations" were treated as facts of nature, their existence taken for granted. Even in the absence of a unified Italian or German state, "Italy" and "Germany" were not things to be made. Supposedly, they were there already. What distinguishes the language of modern nationalism from earlier languages of national sentiment is precisely the conscious perception that nations are not there already but must be formed or completed through concerted political action. Even those nationalists who insist on the essential, natural distinctiveness of their particular nation, grounded in the people's common blood or the physical terrain, nonetheless also invariably define that nation as in some sense unfinished. Action is still urgently required to purge it of impurities (usually ethnic), to reattach unjustly severed portions of it, or to revive and reawaken essential national qualities that have been forgotten, abandoned, or stolen. To achieve these goals requires the full capacities of the modern state: to design and enforce citizenship requirements, to repress or even expel national minorities, to annex unjustly alienated national territories, to supply a proper civic education, and to provide inhabitants of different regions with common loyalties, traditions, beliefs, and even a common language. On this level, there is little difference between supposed "civic" and "ethnic" forms of nationalism. (Indeed, recent work has convincingly argued that this facile, familiar distinction obscures more than it illuminates.)³ 2

     The idea of the nation as a construction therefore long antedates the current academic tendency to treat everything as a construction. Those modern scholars who have triumphantly exposed the artificial nature of modern nations, as if nationalism were some great confidence game, have generally failed to realize that the very existence of nation-building programs amounts to at least a partial recognition of this artificiality by nationalists themselves.⁴ If the nation did exist in a complete and satisfactory form, nationalist politics would be redundant. Yet in this recognition lies the great irony of modern nationalism: for at the same time nationalists admit that their nation remains to be built, they make claims that take its full and complete existence for granted, and for justification. As Geoff Eley has concisely put it in reference to nineteenth-century Germany—a place not exactly lacking in lyrical invocations of a primordial national essence—"Unification entailed a subsequent process of cultural coalescence which in theory it had already presupposed."⁵ 3

     This idea of the nation emerged with particular strength and clarity in eighteenth-century France. It did not emerge in France alone: the eighteenth century saw the development of sentiments and movements that deserve the name "nationalist" throughout Europe, from powerful monarchies such as Great Britain to peripheral areas such as Greece and Corsica.⁶ But France was distinguished by the self-consciousness with which the issues were discussed, the unusually strong emphasis on political doctrine as the foundation stone of the nation (as opposed to language or blood or history), and the amazing suddenness and strength with which a coherent nationalist program crystallized during the French Revolution. Nearly eighty years before d'Azeglio's call for the making of Italians, the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier could speak to the National Convention in much the same terms about making Frenchmen: "What is our duty in organizing public instruction? It is to form republicans; and even more so, to form Frenchmen, to endow the nation with its own, unique physiognomy."⁷ The word "nationalism" was coined in the late 1790s, precisely as overwhelmed observers were struggling to make sense of the political deluge they had just witnessed in France.⁸ 4

     France therefore makes a useful test case for reevaluating the origins of nationalism—a reevaluation that is presently somewhat overdue. The last two decades have seen a great and fruitful outpouring of theoretical studies, but empirical, historical study has proceeded very unevenly, with certain areas receiving enormous attention and others relatively little.⁹ With the exception of Great Britain, eighteenth-century France still falls into the second category, despite the fact that the theoretical literature nearly always discusses it and, indeed, often puts great emphasis on it.¹⁰ Fortunately, a reevaluation has now begun, thanks to scholars such as Pierre Nora, Peter Sahlins, Edmond Dziembowski, Sophie Wahnich and Hélène Dupuy.¹¹ In this essay, I hope to advance the discussion further, and to move toward a general interpretation. 5

     In my view, the history of the origins of French nationalism divides into three distinct parts.¹² First, there took place the rise of the "nation" as a political concept, starting in the decades around 1700. There then followed, especially in the last twenty years of the Old Regime, the concept's radical destabilization, as a result of the collapse of traditional constitutional politics, and the development of a classical republican critique of French institutions and society. Finally, there was the judgment, reached by the Jacobins under the First Republic, that the construction of the nation required a laborious process of national education. The first and last of these developments, in particular, reveal the extent to which nationalism arose out of changes in the realm of religion. I have argued elsewhere that the rise of the "nation" as a political concept took place as educated Europeans came to perceive a radical separation between God and the world in the decades around 1700, struggled to find ways to discern and maintain terrestrial order in the face of God's absence, and devised new intellectual means of understanding the world on its own terms, without reference to supernatural determinations. I have further argued that as the French attempted to develop actual programs and policies aimed at constructing the nation, particularly during the revolution, they fell back on languages and practices of conversion developed by the clergy of the Catholic Reformation, in their attempts to construct not a new nation but a new church.¹³ 6

     In this essay, however, I will concentrate on the second, more purely secular part of the story: the period of destablization when the concept of the "nation" that had become central to French political culture was suddenly and profoundly called into question. It was a stunningly paradoxical moment, for, from most points of view, the coming of the French Revolution marked the concept's apotheosis in France. On June 17, 1789, the deputies to the Third Estate in the newly convened Estates General took the dramatic step of declaring themselves the National Assembly. Within a few months, this new assembly would declare, as its most important and inviolable principle, that "the source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation."¹⁴ Yet, at the same time, many French writers were emitting unprecedented doubts on the subject. In December 1788, for instance, the anonymous author of a book called Lettres angloises wrote that the French "perceive quite well that they are not a nation; they want to become one."¹⁵ A political pamphlet from the same year claimed that "this people, assembled out of a multitude of small, different nations, do not amount to a national body."¹⁶ In 1789 itself, the great orator the comte de Mirabeau, one of the prime movers behind the June 17 declaration, called France "nothing but an unconstituted aggregate of disunited peoples," while the other prime mover, Emmanuel Sieyès, spoke of the need to make "all the parts of France a single body, and all the peoples who divide it into a single Nation."¹⁷ In short, at the moment that the concept of the nation mattered more in French history than ever before, the French seemed more uncertain than ever about what, exactly, the nation was—indeed, if it was even there at all. How did this moment come about? 7

     Obviously, a short, speculative essay cannot hope to offer a definitive answer to this question. It cannot lay out the complex eighteenth-century discussions of "the nation" in systematic detail, and must confine itself largely to illustrative quotation. Nor can it do much in the way of relating the concept of the nation to such concepts as the patrie and the "people." As far as definitions go, I cannot do much more here than state that eighteenth-century authors most often used "nation" to mean a community that satisfied two loose conditions. First, it grouped together people who had enough in common—whether language, customs, beliefs, traditions, or some combination of these—to allow them to be considered a homogeneous collective. Second, it had some sort of recognized political existence. A "people" most often only met the first of these conditions, while the concept of patrie, in the eighteenth century, more often had a more purely political sense, referring to the political unit to which a person felt ultimate loyalty.¹⁸ Nonetheless, within this limited space, I hope I can at least suggest some reasons why the concept of the nation was so radically destabilized at the end of the Old Regime, leading to what can fairly be described as the birth of nationalism in France. 8

We have to start with a brief survey of the concept's acquisition of political and cultural salience in the eighteenth century. Despite the claims of Colette Beaune and Myriam Yardeni concerning the birth of a French national consciousness in the late Middle Ages and sixteenth century, respectively, their own evidence fails to demonstrate that French authors before 1700 invested the word "nation," as opposed to patrie or "kingdom," with significant political or cultural meaning.¹⁹ Only in the period around 1700 did polemical authors, notably Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, begin to make sweeping political claims for "the nation." Only in 1743 did a French author, the priest and magistrate François-Ignace d'Espiard de la Borde, make "nations," for the first time, an object of systematic scholarly inquiry. (Montesquieu drew heavily on his book, and d'Espiard in turn tried to capitalize on Montesquieu's success by publishing a rewritten version in 1752 under the title L'esprit des nations.)²⁰ And only in the 1750s did "the rights of the nation" become a rallying cry for France's principal institutional opposition to the monarchy, the high courts known as parlements. It was their usage that led the marquis d'Argenson to note in 1754 that "the words nation and state have never been repeated as often as they are today."²¹ By 1789, the words "nation" and "national" had become ubiquitous. "The epithet 'national' is in everyone's mouth," a history book reported in 1789. "A fruit merchant the other day cried out in the street, selling her merchandise: 'national plums, national apples.'"²² If any further confirmation is needed, the newly digitized catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale reveals that "nation" and "national" appeared in just 105 French-language book titles before 1700 but in 895 between 1700 and 1789. In the largest collection of French electronic texts, the ARTFL project, the frequency with which authors used "nation" and "national" during the 1710s and 1720s was double what it had been in the 1690s and 1700s. During the 1730s and 1740s, the usage doubled again.²³ 9

     Explaining this rise is beyond the scope of this essay. But it is important to note that the concept of the nation took on particular salience in two very different arenas. One was the arena of traditional institutional politics, in which various opponents of the royal ministry—particularly the parlements—sought to justify their opposition by symbolically placing the figure of the "nation" vis-à-vis, or even above, the crown. Before 1770, their claims remained very limited in comparison with later, revolutionary ones, for they did not assert that "the nation" had any right to change France's ancient constitution, or its hierarchical, corporate social order, much less grant it any clear right of resistance against tyranny, or ground such a right in natural law or a social contract. While they used the phrase "the rights of the nation," they generally meant not natural rights but positive ones, defined by French law and history. The rights in question belonged not to the nation as a whole but to the modern French institutions that had inherited the authority of the nation's supposed original assemblies, those famous gatherings of the triumphant Franks in their thousands, on the Champ de Mars next to conquered Roman Lutèce. The actual political changes they demanded consisted essentially of a shift in power from the crown to its traditional, corporate, institutional rivals. In short, they conceived of the "nation" as an essentially juridical entity, and their writings fit squarely into a constitutionalist tradition that stretched back to the sixteenth century.²⁴ 10

     The second arena was international. During the eighteenth century, French interest in other lands and peoples grew vertiginously, and publishers hastened to satisfy it with travel writings, The Jesuit Relations, newspapers, atlases, and Orientalist novels, not to mention the omnivorously cosmopolitan writings of the Philosophes.²⁵ Furthermore, France engaged in continuous and anxious competition with Great Britain, even when not actually at war, and over the course of the century, French attitudes toward this competition changed dramatically. While the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14) appeared to French commentators principally as a war of royal houses, the Seven Years' War (1756–63) struck them as a war of nations.²⁶ As a contributor to Elie Fréron's newspaper L'année littéraire concisely wrote: "There are wars in which the nation only takes an interest because of its submission to the Prince; this war is of a different nature; it is the English nation which, by unanimous agreement, has attacked our nation to deprive us of something which belongs to each of us."²⁷ Both curiosity and international competition prompted the growth of a substantial literature devoted to what we would now call the comparative study of national character, much of which had as its not-so-subtle purpose the defense of the French character and the denigration of the English.²⁸ 11

     Thanks to these developments, by 1770, the "nation," whether defined by reference to its historical rights or to its "character," had become a central organizing category in French political culture and cultural politics. It was incessantly referred to, deferred to, and treated as the fundamental ground on which other forms of human relations were built.²⁹ In the last two decades of the Old Regime, the concept would grow more important still. But at the same time, it was radically challenged and destabilized. 12

The quotations are familiar: "It is France's salvation you must consult, not its archives" (Cerutti). The French nation "was made not to follow examples but to give them" (Rabaut Saint-Etienne). "All must be new in France; we wish to date only from today" (Barère). "I am convinced of the need to effect a complete regeneration and, if I may so express it, to create a new people" (Robespierre).³⁰ All illustrate, if not a rejection of history in toto by the French revolutionaries, their specific repudiation of France's prerevolutionary history, now contemptuously dismissed as "the Old Regime."³¹ Students of the revolution are of course familiar with this rejection, and Dale Van Kley has convincingly argued that to a large extent it derived from the logic of the intense prerevolutionary political debate of 1787 and 1788.³² What has not been appreciated is the extent to which the rejection, which actually began with actions taken by the crown well before the revolution, affected the concept of the nation. 13

     For roughly half a century before 1770, political debates about the nation remained largely bound up within the juridical paradigm discussed above. Such was the power of French juridical language, and the institutions—above all, the parlements—that had begotten it, and that still dominated French political life. In these debates, the nation was defined by its historical and juridical inheritance from its supposed founders. The "rights of the nation" were, in this view, identical to the "fundamental laws" that the founders had supposedly laid down and that formed the basis of France's ancient, unwritten constitution, limiting the king's freedom of action with regard to such matters as taxation and the royal succession.³³ Furthermore, the inheritance was inseparable from the traditional institutions, which, under the ancient constitution, were held to "represent" the nation. As Paul Friedland has cogently argued, according to prevailing, pre-modern understandings of representation, the parlements and Estates General were not held merely to speak for and stand in for the nation but to incarnate it—in a sense, to be it.³⁴ Montesquieu illustrated this usage in The Spirit of the Laws when he wrote that, in the early Middle Ages, "one often assembled the nation, that is, the lords and bishops."³⁵ The nation could not freely choose other representatives, because the nation could only take form in particular institutions. 14

     Because the debates remained within this framework, before 1770 they largely turned on the questions of just what the "fundamental laws" were, how far they extended, and whether the parlements could be considered the lineal descendants of the original assemblies of the Franks. Thus these decades witnessed passionate but also clotted and limited legal controversies over the nation's history, in which half-forgotten or altogether mythical figures like Kings Clotaire, Childebert, and Pharamond loomed up out of the Dark Ages to menace the century of lights, and antiquarians rummaged through dusty archives in search of lost capitularies with the intensity of knights chasing the grail. The parlements put claims about "the rights of the nation" into their published remonstrances—which were their principal means of opposing royal legislation—while supporters of the monarchy, in response, insisted that the nation's principal representative remained the monarch himself—that he alone embodied the nation and gave it form.³⁶ But throughout, the substance of the debate resembled a lawsuit over a piece of property, with the nation primarily a juridical category, whose "rights" and "privileges" were unchanging and unmodifiable inheritances, passed from one generation to the next like an heirloom or estate. 15

     All this changed, however, in the year 1771. It changed, above all, because the ancient judicial framework of French political life crumbled at this time, and it crumbled, above all, because of the actions of the monarchy itself. In the winter of 1770–1771, King Louis XV and his lord chancellor, Maupeou, at the end of a particularly convoluted and drawn-out battle with the parlements, abruptly ended the traditional ballet of respectful remonstrance and measured reply with a brutal show of force, arresting and exiling the recalcitrant magistrates. Moreover, while the king and the chancellor did not initially have a radical program in mind, as the crisis developed they drew on new, enlightened ideas about rational government so as to justify altogether abolishing existing judicial offices (which judges had owned as a form of property) and replacing the magistrates with their own, pliant nominees, a move that had very little precedent in French history and law. They thereby went beyond even what the authoritarian, but ultimately more traditional, Louis XIV had ever done, provoked the greatest institutional crisis in France for over a century, and prompted the formation of a broad-based opposition movement, which called itself the Parti Patriote.³⁷ 16

     As recent scholarship has shown, the so-called "coup" of 1771 demonstrated not only to the magistrates and their supporters but also to a wide spectrum of French readers that the crown itself no longer respected the grand principles of French law, and therefore the sovereign courts could no longer act as an effective restraint on royal power.³⁸ From now on, opposition to the crown would have to search for different sources of legimitation, and so dissident writers increasingly embraced full-blown theories of national sovereignty, in which the nation could freely choose its form of government. "It is the nation which is sovereign," wrote the comte de Lauragais in one of the most popular pamphlets of the crisis. "It is so by its power, and by the nature of things."³⁹ Even the innately conservative and consensus-seeking Parisian jurists who had guided the magistrates through the previous decades' conflicts belatedly acknowledged that the parlements could not take the place of the Estates General, whose convocation after 150 years they suddenly deemed desirable. Some started to draw on both natural law theory and classical republican ideas to justify their resistance to the monarchy.⁴⁰ 17

     Going even further, as Keith Baker has shown, a few particularly radical jurists started infusing the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract into the mainstream of French political discussion, thereby sweeping away any notion that inflexible legal and historical constraints bound the French nation to a particular form of government. In 1775, the young Parisian barrister Jacques-Claude Martin de Mariveaux published L'ami des lois, which rehearsed the familiar potted histories of the Franks and their successors but then went far beyond them. "Man is born free," declared Martin vigorously, if not originally, and added for good measure that "the French Nation has a social contract," which gave it the right to choose whatever form of government it wished, without reference to any original foundation.⁴¹ The same year, the Bordeaux barrister Guillaume-Joseph Saige published his influential, Rousseauian Catéchisme du citoyen, which argued the point even more explicitly: "For there is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will; apart from that, everything is absolutely contingent and depends, for its form as for its existence, on the supreme will of the nation."⁴² In these writings, the idea of the nation as the fundamental ground of human existence, the ultimate framework for all social and political action, an idea that had only become thinkable in the early eighteenth century, now found active, powerful political expression. 18

     When Louis XV succumbed to smallpox in 1774, his successor, Louis XVI, restored the old parlements, but this act could not close the Pandora's box that had flown open three years before. The concepts of the "nation" and the patrie had emerged as the principal symbolic sources of political legitimacy in France, and they still held this position when the final crisis of the Old Regime began ten years later, with the slide of the French state toward bankruptcy. The older, judicial mode of arguing about the "nation" admittedly took time to disappear. So-called "patriots" and supporters of the ministry alike continued to wrestle in the archives of medieval institutions right down to 1789, not infrequently choking on the dust they stirred up.⁴³ Yet, in the so-called "pre-revolution" of 1787–1789, an increasing number of the self-proclaimed "patriotic" writers no longer invoked the authority of patrie and "nation" merely in the hopes of altering the balance of power among existing institutions. With the state collapsing, they now did so in order to justify the wholesale transformation of the political system. And in the great blooming of political debate that preceded the final convocation of the Estates General in 1789, they led the way in abandoning the appeal to French history altogether and fully endorsed Saige's claim that everything depended on the supreme will of the nation. Most important in this regard, of course, was Emmanuel Sieyès's brilliant pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? which argued that only the deputies to the commoners' Third Estate were the true representatives of the French nation. It was this work that set the stage for the first great act of the revolution, namely the Third Estate's arrogation of the title "National Assembly," at Sieyès's instigation, on June 17, 1789.⁴⁴ 19

     But what was this "nation" that the National Assembly spoke for? What made the 28 million people commonly designated as "French" into a single entity? What was seen to bind them together, besides their status as subjects of Louis XVI? It was certainly not language, at a time when French remained a foreign tongue for much of the population.⁴⁵ Nor was it ethnicity, for notions of a single "French race" as yet had little purchase. As Voltaire had famously written, "France is an assemblage of Goths, Danes . . . Germans . . . Franks, Swiss, and some Romans mixed with the old Celts."⁴⁶ Throughout the century, it was rather French law and history that had been perceived as the essence of French nationhood, and French law and history were what had now been put radically into question, first by the monarchy in 1771 and then by the opposition in 1789. Thus the turn away from traditional historical and juridical understandings of the French nation radically destabilized the meaning of the concept of "nation," precisely at the moment of its apparent apotheosis. 20

     The problem was exacerbated by the fact that, after 1771, the traditional, juridical means of argument was used not only in reference to France itself but to individual French provinces, and in a manner that called the existence of the nation into question from another direction. In 1771–1774, and then again in 1788–1789, it was widely feared that the king or Estates General might take drastic and unprecedented measures against traditional provincial liberties and privileges. In response, self-appointed spokesmen for many provinces asserted the utter inviolability of these liberties, over even the unity of France, and they claimed for the provinces the status not just of "nations" (a terminology that was not altogether uncommon in the eighteenth century) but of "nations" equal to France itself. Thus an anti-Maupeou pamphlet entitled Manifeste aux Normands, reprinted in 1788, insisted: "We [the Norman people] are bound to France by agreements which are no more and no less authentic than . . . all other treaties between nations." The magistrates of Pau, in the southwest, described themselves in 1788 as inhabitants of "a country [pays] foreign to France, although ruled by the same king," and talked of the Pyrenean "nations" of Navarre and Béarn. A little later, the former mayor of Strasbourg, Johann von Türckheim, asked the following: "will Lower Alsace have the courage and resolution to . . . declare that it was subject to the French crown but not the French nation, and intends to preserve its rights and liberties?" Similar language was employed in debates in Mirabeau's native Provence.⁴⁷ It was in this context that Mirabeau and Sieyès could so easily describe the France of 1789 as a mere aggregate of different peoples. 21

Yet it was not merely the destabilization of traditional juridical politics that led observers to question the very existence of the nation at the end of the Old Regime. At the same time, a critique of the French nation arose from within the literature on national character, as that literature increasingly turned in a direction that deserves the label "republican." 22

     It hardly needs saying that national stereotypes, usually based on the attribution of exaggerated individual characteristics to an entire people, long predate the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, at the end of the Old Regime, the French went to unprecedented lengths in cataloging, analyzing, debating, and caricaturing national differences, in forms ranging from learned treatises such as d'Espiard's to crude war propaganda. They did not usually go so far as to ascribe a "national character" to the entire population of a nation, something the enormous social and demographic variety of France and its neighbors would have made an impossible task. Instead, they generally let a single part stand for the whole. Voltaire, for instance, wrote in the Essai sur les moeurs 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," while Charles Pinot-Duclos, in his Considérations sur les moeurs, 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 nationalism, found the "genius" and mores of a nation in the "most distant provinces." "It is the countryside that makes the country [pays]," he insisted, "and the people of the countryside who make the nation."⁴⁸ 23

     While French authors wrote about national character for many different purposes, and in wildly varying styles, they nonetheless generally saw it determined by three broad factors. First and foremost came the physical environment, or "climate," a subject whose serious study in France went back to Jean Bodin, and whose popularity in the eighteenth century was due above all to Montesquieu. (Eighteenth-century wits quipped that where Nicolas de Malebranche had seen everything in God, Montesquieu saw everything in climate.)⁴⁹ Secondly, there was a nation's constitution, and political action more generally. Their importance in shaping national character was meditated on most profoundly and influentially by Rousseau, who claimed in his Confessions to have seen early on in life that "everything fundamentally depended on politics . . . and that no people would ever be anything other than what its Government made of it."⁵⁰ Finally, there was historical evolution: the idea that nations tended to follow roughly the same pattern of linear development from "savagery" to "civilization," and that their character therefore depended on how far they had progressed along the scale. This idea lay behind Voltaire's mammoth and powerful exercise in comparative national history, the Essai sur les moeurs, and also animated the marquis de Mirabeau's enormously popular L'ami des hommes, where, in the accents of biblical lyricism, the process was likened to the life of an organism: "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 revolutions, the life of man from cradle to tomb, and that of states from their foundation to their fall."⁵¹ The factor of moeurs (mores or manners), which eighteenth-century French writers also frequently invoked, generally depended in its turn on some mixture of politics or evolution, while the phrase "moral causes" (as opposed to physical), which appears frequently as well, usually amounted to a conflation of the two.⁵² 24

     To the extent that French authors believed that political action and historical evolution determined national character, they also generally saw these two factors working through a particular intermediary: women. For if national character was in some senses identical to or symbiotically linked to moeurs, moeurs themselves were the province of women, both because of women's general influence on social interactions and their specific role in educating the young. "Women," d'Espiard remarked, "are the essential part of moeurs," and the military reformer Guibert agreed with him: "Men make laws," but "women make moeurs, there lies their true empire."⁵³ Montesquieu, in a brief discussion of whether it was possible to alter a "national character," could envision only one way of actually doing so: "One could constrain [the] women, make laws to correct their moeurs, and limit their luxury."⁵⁴ Not coincidentally, these measures, which Montesquieu himself hesitated to apply, formed the heart of Rousseau's misogynistic prescription for preserving the moeurs of Geneva in his Letter to d'Alembert.⁵⁵ Women, in short, constituted both a measure of a nation's civilization and the key to the preservation of its character. 25

     Armed with these conceptual tools, eighteenth-century French authors went eagerly about investigating national characters, particularly the one they saw reflected in the mirror. They were not always consistent, to say the least. To take perhaps the most obvious example, 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" (from his bitter exile in the 1760s).⁵⁶ Still, outside of wartime literature (which predictably hailed every French male as a heroic warrior), the French national character was generally associated with a relatively well-defined and consistent constellation of closely related traits.⁵⁷ To be French was to be particularly sociable, particularly refined or polite, and above all particularly léger—a term that literally means "light" but that implies a mix of vivaciousness, inconstancy, and perhaps also superficiality. Often, these traits were invoked all at once, as in Baron d'Holbach's umbrella comment that "the general character of the French nation is gaity, activity, politeness, sociabilité," or the reforming magistrate Joseph Servan's characterization of the Frenchman as a "model of politeness," whose "vivacity has no object other than the pleasures of society."⁵⁸ 26

     All three qualities were easily explained by reference to climate, political action, and history. The French, living in a supposedly perfectly temperate climate, had, so it was claimed, succeeded in avoiding the solitude, seriousness, and moroseness of northern peoples and the weakness, indolence, and debauchery of southern ones. Their moderate sociability, refinement, and légèreté were the result.⁵⁹ The French character also showed the influence of its monarchical government and aristocratic social system, in which court grandees, who embodied most perfectly the qualities of sociability, refinement, and légèreté, set the tone and everyone else scrambled to imitate them. Above all, if the French were said to maintain a degree of polite social interaction unknown elsewhere and to devote themselves to endless rounds of pleasure, it was because they stood at the end point of that long process of historical evolution that had taken them away from their "savage" or "barbarian" origins and rendered them steadily more "polite," "policed," or "civilized." Sociability, refinement, and légèreté were all closely linked to the concept of "civilization" that took shape in the mid-eighteenth century, and that itself depended on a vision of historical progress and cosmopolitan exchange between "civilized" people.⁶⁰ 27

     Although many authors, following Montesquieu's example, couched their reflections in a tone of studied scientific impartiality, observation melded easily into apologia. French moderation, sociability, and refinement were praised and pointedly contrasted to the alleged "turbulence," sullenness, and brutality of the English, whom French authors regularly denounced as "barbarians" and "cannibals."⁶¹ Even the quality of légèreté, so easily associated with frivolity and superficiality, had its defenders. The pamphleteer Jean-François Sobry, in a survey of French characteristics and institutions, wrote that "if [the Frenchman] has légèreté, it is not at all of the sort which is fickle and superficial but rather that légèreté which recoils from heaviness and monotony. The Athenians were also léger, and they were the foremost people in the world." The novelist Jacques-Antoine Perrin likewise commented: "Our neighbors may well call us léger, 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 virtues for us."⁶² Many other authors avoided the negative associations of léger by using gai as a substitute. Being gai, like being léger, was presented as the opposite of being "heavy" (lourd) or "pedantic" (characteristics often associated with the English).⁶³ 28

     The civilized traits of sociability, refinements, and légèreté also represented what French authors tended to see as the extraordinary influence possessed by women in French society. D'Espiard and Montesquieu agreed that women, to whom vivaciousness and love of society came naturally, ruled French moeurs, obliging men to strive to please them.⁶⁴ Sébastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigné, author of a historical essay on the "principal absurdities of different nations," attributed the refinement and sociability of the French to political and historical factors, but particularly to the "company of women."⁶⁵ Many observers considered the position of women the principal difference between France and those nations that restricted women to what Antoine de Rivarol called "the domestic tribunal."⁶⁶ D'Espiard stressed that "society cannot exist without women," and added that, therefore, nations like the Chinese "have destroyed Society by this eternal imprisonment of women, which is the least philosophical and most unjust thing in the world."⁶⁷ The anonymous author of a book comparing the French and English characters 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 aimiable qualities which distinguish him from other peoples to interchange with women."⁶⁸ 29

     Yet it was precisely over the position of women that French students of national character revealed their greatest anxieties. D'Espiard, for all his solicitude where Chinese women were concerned, also commented that "foreigners say that in France, men are not men enough, and women are not women enough."⁶⁹ Gazon-Dourxigné added a similarly cautionary 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."⁷⁰ 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."⁷¹ 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."⁷² 30

     These authors nonetheless had ambiguous attitudes toward the reform of the French character, because they believed that, thanks to the favorable climate, beneficial historical evolution, and a political system they would not dream of challenging, the French character was still generally acceptable. In effect, they agreed with Montesquieu, who wrote, in a passage from The Spirit of the Laws that obviously referred to France: 31

If there were in the world a nation which had a sociable humor, an openness of heart, a joy in life, a taste, an ease in communicating its thoughts; which was lively, pleasant, playful, sometimes imprudent, often indiscreet; and which had with all that, courage, generosity, frankness, and a certain point of honor, one should avoid disturbing its manners by laws, in order not to disturb its virtues. If the character is generally good, what difference do a few faults make? ⁷³

In the final decades of the Old Regime, however, in the context of military defeat, and the vulnerability of the French constitution to "despotism" supposedly exposed by Maupeou's coup, moderate assumptions of this sort increasingly came into question. More observers adopted a caustic, Rousseauian view of the progress of civilization, and started to think of impaired national virility as an urgent problem in need of a solution. As early as 1762, at the end of the Seven Years' War, a Discours sur le patriotisme, read in the Academy of Lyon, warned that the French had developed a tendency to become "sybarites, plunged into a voluptuous stupor, breathing and thinking only for pleasure, deaf to the voice of the patrie." It added sternly that "if fashion, modes and frivolity take the place of moeurs and reason . . . then a nation is done for."⁷⁴ In 1787, an entrant in an academic essay competition on patriotism called the French "too léger and too dissipated," and warned they might perish unless they grew more civic-minded.⁷⁵ Even the poet and academician Antoine-Léonard Thomas, in other contexts a great eulogist of national heroes, scolded the French for being a "léger and impetuous nation, ardent for pleasures, concerned always with the present, soon forgetting the past, talking of everything and caring about nothing; it treats everything that is great with indifference."⁷⁶ 32

     Almost without exception, as Antoine de Baecque has stressed, these critiques associated French traits such as refinement and légèreté with the corporeal failings of lethargy, sickness, physical coruption, and old age.⁷⁷ "The French nation has changed," one typical prerevolutionary lament proceeded. "We are no longer as robust, as strong, as the ancient Gauls from whom we descend."⁷⁸ The people had become "indolent, 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."⁷⁹ Such images, heavily influenced by Rousseau's pessimism, first appeared in political literature after the coup of 1771, but in 1788–1789 they became ubiquitous, and even more despairing. "O my Nation! To what degree of abasement have you fallen," wrote the future Jacobin Jérôme Pétion in his exemplary Avis aux françois.⁸⁰ And a 1789 address to the Estates General asked: "Is there a nation more immoral than the French? Is there one that misunderstands and violates the laws with such légèreté? . . . When one has grown old in corruption, one can no longer be healed, and when the maladies are at their height, the sick man shudders at the sight of the doctor. So, messeigneurs, abandon the present generation."⁸¹ 33

     This radical critique of the national character undoubtedly expressed French reactions to the paralysis and eventual collapse of the state, and also, as Edmond Dziembowski has recently emphasized, anxieties over France's dramatic loss of geo-political status following its defeat by Britain in the Seven Years' War.⁸² Yet the form in which it was expressed derived largely from a different source: the growing influence of classical republican thought in France. As a good deal of recent historical work has shown, this venerable tradition held a fascination for French elites in the last decades before the revolution. From the writings of Rousseau and Mably, to the neo-classical paintings of Jacques-Louis David, to the court speeches and printed briefs of barristers denouncing corruption and injustice, reverent images of the ancient republics proliferated, along with praise for political systems in which free, independent, and equal citizens, effortlessly resistant to the blandishments of luxury and amour propre, joined together in governing and in defense of the commonwealth.⁸³ 34

     In strictly political terms, it is true, this republicanism remained detached from day-to-day political argument, for until the very end of the Old Regime, serious constituitonal change seemed utterly unimaginable to most French observers. But as a result, French republicanism under the Old Regime tended to express itself less as a political blueprint than as a radical moral critique of moeurs and national character. Furthermore, it derived its polemical energy in large part from the contrast it set up between between properly organized polities, where male citizens dominated the public arena and women remained in the private, domestic realm of the home, and corrupt polities, where these gender lines became hopelessly blurred.⁸⁴ Republican writers consistently argued that the first step toward the establishment of republican male liberty in France lay not in any change of the government, but in restricting the liberty of women. The novelist Jean-Louis Castilhon put the matter most starkly in 1769, in a republican rewriting of d'Espiard's earlier study of nations: "it seems to me that it is through social intercourse with women that the French have lost . . . the qualities which form the republican character . . . Just as there can be no monarchy without nobility, so I do not think there can be a republic with women, or at least where women dominate."⁸⁵ 35

     Seen through the prism of republican thought, in other words, the traits of sociability, refinement, and légèreté, which, cultivated by women, made up the French national character, had little to recommend them. They kept French men from developing a proper sense of independence, blinded them with vain and ephemeral pleasures, distracted them from their civic dutes, and made it impossible for them to develop the sense of stern civic virtue, of patriotic devotion, that characterized citizens of a properly organized republic. It is no surprise that the French thinker most clearly endebted to classical republicanism, Abbé de Mably, specifically attributed the French failure to establish a free government to what he termed a servile "national character" shaped by geography and history.⁸⁶ Légèreté was a deceptively agreeable symptom of deadly disease, the mark of a people on the brink of senile collapse. The only hope lay in a complete transformation of the national character—a reconstruction of the nation. 36

We therefore return to the paradox with which this essay opened. In the eighteenth century, the French came increasingly to see themselves not as a kingdom that took shape solely through the person of the king, nor as a part of a greater Christian commonwealth, but as a freestanding, autonomous nation. The concept became central to French political culture and cultural politics, to the extent that the founding acts and documents of the French revolutionary state invoked the sovereignty of the nation as the highest political principle. And yet, at the very same historical moment, the identity of the French nation was called into radical doubt. The juridical, historical narratives that had defined it were rejected, and the national character that two generations of writers had sketched out in such detail—and contrasted favorably to the English variety—was condemned as corrupt and unsuitable. Therefore, even as the concept of the nation became, symbolically, the foundation stone of the French polity, it was declared not even truly to exist, or, at the very least, to stand in urgent need of reconstruction. 37

     The questions remained as to what form this reconstruction would take and how it would be accomplished, and they elicited many different answers. Some revolutionaries thought the key lay in recovering a pure and virtuous national past that had vanished under the corrupt accretions of absolutism and the court society. This past was located, depending on the authors, in the Renaissance with Henri IV, in the heyday of medieval chivalry, in the days of the Franks, or even with the Gauls before Christ and Caesar.⁸⁷ Pierre Pithou's Le 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 beard grow, and you will wear the long hair that they favored."⁸⁸ A curious pamphlet from 1793 actually demanded, in the name of Gaulish liberty, that the country reject the name of France and call itself Gaul once again.⁸⁹ Even when no specific historical era was adduced, the language of recovery, reconstruction, and rebirth appeared reflexively in nearly all political writing, and the concept of "regeneration," of spurring new growth in old or corrupt tissue, became a touchstone of revolutionary political language.⁹⁰ Yet, at the same time, calls were also heard for France to break with its own past entirely and to leap into the future. As Robespierre famously declared, far from returning to the days of the Franks or Gauls, 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."⁹¹ 38

     In addition, as both Mona Ozouf and Lynn Hunt have emphasized, the process of construction or regeneration was envisaged in two very different ways. Either it would involve a great and sudden effusion of will, capable, almost miraculously, of blowing down all resistance, or it would take a slow, laborious process of education, of the sort needed to change engrained habits of thought and even the very language people used to express themselves.⁹² Particularly under the First Republic, the Jacobins proposed hugely elaborate educational projects aimed at "forming Frenchmen" in primary schools and special language classes, not to mention in patriotic festivals, theatrical productions, and public sessions of the Jacobin clubs, and through books and newspapers.⁹³ 39

     In the French Revolution itself, the differences over the means and ends of constructing the nation remained largely a difference of rhetorical tropes on the revolutionary left. The same speakers might well invoke both the language of a return to the past and a break with the past, of both an effusion of will and of laborious, state-guided change, depending on the circumstances.⁹⁴ Rapidly shifting political alignments, and the constraints imposed by government insolvency and external and civil war, made it impossible for stable political programs of nation-building to emerge, or for policies to take shape and be implemented in a coherent manner. Most of the Jacobin projects never even got off the drawing board. 40

     In the nineteenth century, however, as nation-building became a matter of organized party politics and of systematic educational policy, the differences adumbrated at the time of the revolution became more and more significant. The questions of which portions of the French past should be recovered, and how, of the proper means of integrating peasants into the national whole, and of which values and principles should be inculcated in the process of "forming Frenchmen" became sources of powerful and lasting political divisions.⁹⁵ They are differences that continue down to the present day, in which Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front parades behind images of Joan of Arc and argues for a program of national reconstruction centered on the expulsion of unwanted aliens, while on the left, the national past invoked is the revolution itself, and nation-building is linked to images of multi-cultural exchange. Between them, a new movement of self-proclaimed "national republicans" harkens back to the Third Republic of the late nineteenth century, and calls sternly for a reimposition of uniform "republican values" on a fragmented and disillusioned population.⁹⁶ In short, while the revolutionary era posed the problem of "nation-building" for the first time, and thus opened the era of nationalism in France, it did not thereby point the way toward anything like a national consensus or a stable "national identity." In France, as elsewhere, the modern nation is what Kathleen Wilson has nicely called a "continuously contested terrain," while nationalism has proven a doctrine that divides even as it unites.⁹⁷ Therefore, when Chénier spoke of "forming Frenchmen" and giving the French nation "its own, unique physiognomy," just as when d'Azeglio spoke of "making Italians," he was not so much solving a problem as creating one, and opening a debate about what form the nation should take, which has remained unresolved ever since. 41

David A. Bell is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He received his PhD from Princeton University, where he studied with Robert Darnton, in 1991. He has also taught at Yale University. A historian of eighteenth-century France, Bell is the author of Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (1994), and of The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (2001). He has also co-edited, with Stéphane Pujol and Ludmila Pimenova, Raison universelle et culture nationale au siècle des lumières (1999). He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and the London Review of Books. His web site is www.davidbell.net.

Notes

¹ See, for instance, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992), 44; Hugh Seton-Watson, Nation and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (New York, 1977), 107.
² The argument that for centuries "nation" meant primarily communities of foreign university students, developed particularly by Guido Zernatto in "Nation: The History of a Word," Review of Politics 6 (1944): 351–66, has been too easily accepted by many scholars. See the persuasive evidence presented by Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998), 14–17 (although the author proceeds to draw unwarranted conclusions about the antiquity of nationalism itself); Jean-Yves Guiomar, La nation entre l'histoire et la raison (Paris, 1990), 13; and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, ed., L'imaginaire de la Nation (1792–1992) (Bordeaux, 1992), 20.
³ Most recently, see the persuasive work of Anne-Marie Thiesse, La création des identités nationales: Europe XVIII^e–XX^e siècle (Paris, 1999).
⁴ The artificiality of modern nations has been emphasized most strongly by Ernest Gellner, in Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983). Gellner has been taken to task over the question by many authors, includng notably Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), who points out that all large-scale communities are in some ways fictitious. My own point is rather that, in the case of nationalism, the fiction is consciously conceded by the nationalists themselves. I have developed this point further in David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
⁵ Geoff Eley, "State Formation, Nationalism, and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany," in From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), 66.
⁶ On Britain, see above all Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992). For the "peripheral" states, see especially Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, vols. 3 and 4 (Turin, 1979, 1984).
⁷ Quoted in Réimpression de l'ancien moniteur, 32 vols. (Paris, 1847), 18: 351.
⁸ On the origins of the word, see Beatrice Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789 according to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934), 22.
⁹ In the secondary literature, in addition to the works of Anderson, Gellner, and Seton-Watson, the most important for this essay have been John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982); Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and Difference: The Politics of Identity Writ Large," in Calhoun, ed., Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford, 1995), 231–82; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York, 1971); Smith, National Identity (Reno, Nev., 1991).
¹⁰ The chapter that Greenfeld devotes to early modern France (88–189) in Nationalism is a good illustration, relying heavily on such outdated quasi-amateur works as Jean Lestocquoy, Histoire du patriotisme en France des origins à nos jours (Paris, 1968), and Marie-Madeleine Martin, The Making of France: The Origins and Development of the Idea of National Unity, Barbara and Robert North, trans. (London, 1951).
¹¹ See especially the following works: Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 3 parts, 7 vols. (Paris, 1984–92); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrennees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); and Sahlins, "Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787," Representations 47 (1994): 85–110; Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l'époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford, 1998); Sophie Wahnich, L'impossible citoyen: L'étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française (Paris, 1997); Hélène Dupuy, "Genèse de la Patrie Moderne: La naissance de l'idée moderne de patrie en France avant et pendant la Révolution" (Mémoire de Doctorat, Université de Paris–I, 1995).
¹² The following paragraph is based on my book The Cult of the Nation.
¹³ I have developed this point in "Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism," AHR 100 (December 1995): 1403–37.
¹⁴ Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Article 3.
¹⁵ Cited in Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva, 1985), 140.
¹⁶ Discours sur le patriotisme (n.p., 1788), 82.
¹⁷ Cited in C. Berlet, Les tendances unitaires et provincialistes en France à la fin du XVIII^e siècle (Nancy, 1913), 151; Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Instructions envoyées par M. le duc d'Orléans pour les personnes étrangères de la procuration aux assemblées de baillages reletives aux Etats-généraux (Paris, 1789), 44.
¹⁸ The myriad conflicting and often contradictory eighteenth-century formal definitions of these terms would require a long article of their own to elucidate in full. For a survey of contemporary dictionary definitions, see Elisabeth Fehrenbach, "Nation," in Rolf Reichart and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, vol. 7 (Munich, 1986), 75–107. In my own understanding of these terms and their contemporary meanings, I rely above all on Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1995).
¹⁹ Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, Susan Ross Huston, trans., Fredric L. Cheyette, ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1991); Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559–1598) (Louvain, 1971). For an excellent critique of the position they adopt, see Steven Englund, "The Ghost of Nation Past," Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 299–320.
²⁰ Boulainvilliers' works are discussed in Harold A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); [François-Ignace d'Espiard de la Borde], Essais sur le Génie et le Caractère des Nations, Divisé en six livres, 3 vols. (Brussels, 1743); [d'Espiard], L'esprit des nations (The Hague, 1752).
²¹ René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson, Journal et mémoires, Edme-Jacques-Benoît Rathéry, ed., 8 vols. (Paris, 1859), 8: 315 (June 26, 1754).
²² Cited in Fehrenbach, "Nation," 98.
²³ The following table gives the frequency, per 100,000 words:

Date "Nation"

1690–1709 4.7

1710–1729 10.0

1730–1749 20.8

1750–1769 22.2

1770–1789 22.5

In addition, the use of the neologism "national" went from 0 in 1710–1729, to 1.0 per 100,000 in 1730–1749, to 1.3 in 1750–1769, and 3.8 in 1770–1789. The word-frequency database can be consulted on the World Wide Web at: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL. The French national library catalog is located at: www.bnf.fr.
²⁴ I have developed this point in David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York, 1994), 117–19. For a recent survey of the ongoing debate over these matters, see Michael Sonenscher, "Enlightenment and Revolution," Journal of Modern History 72, no. 2 (1998): 371–83. See also, more generally, Roger Bickart, Les parlements et la notion de souveraineté nationale au XVIII^e siècle (Paris, 1932).
²⁵ See Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle de lumières (Paris, 1995); Gilbert Chinard, L'Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVII^e et au XVIII^e siècles (Paris, 1913); Geoffroy Atkinson, Les relations de voyages du XVIII^e siècle et l'évolution des idées: Contribution à l'étude de la formation de l'esprit du XVIII^e siècle (Paris, 1927).
²⁶ This point is developed in David A. Bell, "Jumonville's Death: Race and Nation in Eighteenth-Century France," in Bell, Ludmila Pimenova, and Stéphane Pujol, eds., Raison universelle et culture nationale au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1999), 227–51. See also Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme.
²⁷ "Projet patriotique," in Année littéraire (1756), 8: 43.
²⁸ Among the works of the major Philosophes, Montesquieu's L'esprit des lois, Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, and Rousseau's Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne devoted particular attention to the question of comparative national character. A complete bibliography on this subject will be available in November 2001 at www.davidbell.net.
²⁹ For this formulation, I am indebted to Calhoun, "Nationalism and Difference"; Keith Michael Baker, "Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History," in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema, eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam, 1992), 95–120; and Marcel Gauchet, "Les Lettres sur l'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry," in Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, pt. 2, vol. 1: 247–316. Baker, in his essay, prefers to see the concept of "society" occupying this position. I would suggest that in fact a series of shifts around the year 1700 opened an intellectual space in which a number of different concepts could occupy the position, including also, notably, "civilization."
³⁰ Joseph-Antoine-Joachim Cerutti, Mémoire pour le peuple (Paris, 1788), 63; Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, quoted in Mona Ozouf, "La Révolution française et la formation de l'homme nouveau," in L'homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1989), 116–57, at 125; Bertrand Barère, quoted in Ozouf, L'Ecole de la France: Essais sur la Révolution, l'utopie et l'enseignement (Paris, 1984), 33; Maximilien Robespierre, July 13, 1793, in James Guillaume, ed., Procès-verbaux du Comité d'instruction publique de la Convention, 6 vols. (Paris, 1891–1907), 2: 35.
³¹ On the complexity of revolutionary views of history, see Joseph John Zizek, "The Politics and Poetics of History in the French Revolution, 1787–1794" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995).
³² Dale Van Kley, "From the Lessons of French History to Truths for All Times and All People: The Historical Origins of an Anti-Historical Declaration," in Van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Declaration of the Rights of Man (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 72–113.
³³ See on this point Bickart, Les parlements et la notion de souveraineté, 54–55.
³⁴ Paul A. Friedland, "Representation and Revolution: The Theatricality of Politics and the Politics of Theater in France, 1789–1794" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995).
³⁵ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone, trans. and eds. (Cambridge, 1989), 544 (pt. 6, book 28, chap. 9).
³⁶ See Bickart, Les parlements et la notion de souveraineté, 41–57.
³⁷ On the "Maupeou coup," see above all Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (Cambridge, 1995); Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985); and Shanti Marie Singham, "'A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen': Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault on Absolutism during the Maupeou Years, 1770–1775" (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1991).
³⁸ In addition to the literature mentioned above, see also, on this theme, Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 249–302.
³⁹ Louis Brancas, Comte de Lauragais, Extrait du droit public de la France (n.p., [1771]), 45.
⁴⁰ Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris, Collection Le Paige, 571, no. 26 (Le Paige to Murard, May 20, 1772). See also Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unravelling of the Old Regime, 1750–1770 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 193. The most important work to draw on natural law and classical republicanism was Claude Mey, Gabriel-Nicolas Maultrot, and Armand-Gaston Camus's influential Maximes du droit public françois (Amsterdam, 1772).
⁴¹ [Jacques-Claude Martin de Mariveaux], L'ami des loix, ou les vrais principes de la législation françoise (n.p., 1775), 6, 25.
⁴² [Guillaume-Joseph Saige], Le catéchisme du citoyen, quoted in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 143.
⁴³ See particularly, on this issue, Van Kley, "From the Lessons of French History."
⁴⁴ Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (Paris, 1789). On Sieyès and his influence, see most recently William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and "What Is the Third Estate?" (Durham, N.C., 1994).
⁴⁵ See Bell, "Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei."
⁴⁶ Voltaire in Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le grand, quoted in Laurent Versini, "Hommes des lumières et hommes de couleur," in Jean-Claude Carpanin Marimoutou and Jean-Michel Racault, Métissages, vol. 1 (Paris, 1992), 25–34, at 28. See, on this subject, Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996); and Jacques Barzun's still-useful book The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications prior to the Revolution (New York, 1932).
⁴⁷ "Manifeste aux Normands," rpt. in Maupeouana, ou Recueil complet des écrits patriotiques publiés pendant le regne du Chancelier Maupeou, 7 vols. (Paris, 1775), 6: 1–21, quote from 1 (see also the similar "Manifeste aux Bretons," 84–97); 1788 rpt. cited in Berlet, Les tendances unitaires et provincialistes, 10; magistrates of Pau cited in Berlet, 59; Türckheim cited in Jules Keller, Le théosophe Frédéric-Rodolphe Saltzmann et les milieux spirituels de son temps, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1985), 1: 194; Provençal debates discussed in Rafe Blaufarb, paper delivered at Society for French Historical Studies, Washington, D.C., March 1999.
⁴⁸ Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, 8 vols. (Paris, 1804), 6: 230; Charles Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (Amsterdam, 1751), 16; Rousseau, Emile, ou de l'éducation (Paris, 1966), 615.
⁴⁹ Quoted in Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1961), 302. Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Buffon, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius all embraced theories of climate enthusiastically. In general on theories of climate, see Shackleton, 302–19; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 141–82; Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire; Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (New York, 1989). As Shackleton observes, Montesquieu drew heavily on d'Espiard's earlier work.
⁵⁰ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, 4 vols. (Dijon, 1964), 1: 404.
⁵¹ Victor de Riquetti de Mirabeau, L'ami des hommes: ou, Traité de la population, Rouxel, ed. (Paris, 1883), 317. He was the father of the revolutionary orator, the comte. The most commonly used full title of Voltaire's work, significantly, was Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, et sur les principaux faits de l'histoire, depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à Louis XIII.
⁵² Rousseau, for instance, believed that mores and religion alike depended largely on the form of government. For Voltaire, in the Essai sur les moeurs, both were heavily influenced by the development of civilization.
⁵³ D'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 2: 207; Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de Guibert, Le connétable de Bourbon, in Oeuvres dramatiques de Guibert (Paris, 1825), 22 (the observation comes in an exchange between the heroine Adélaïde, who begins a line of verse saying "Les hommes font les lois," and the hero Bayard, who completes it with the phrase "Les femmes font les moeurs").
⁵⁴ Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 310.
⁵⁵ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater, Allan Bloom, trans. and ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), esp. 81–92, 100–13.
⁵⁶ Voltaire, quoted in Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 75; Voltaire, Le poeme sur la bataille de Fontenoy (Amsterdam, 1748), unpaginated; Voltaire, quoted in Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 50.
⁵⁷ For a full exposition of this argument, with ample supporting evidence, see David A. Bell, "La caractère national et l'imaginaire républicain à l'époque de la Révolution Française," forthcoming in Annales: Histoire, sciences, sociales.
⁵⁸ Baron d'Holbach quoted in Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty, 76; [Joseph Servan], Le soldat citoyen, ou vues patriotiques sur la maniere la plus avantageuse de pourvoir à la défense du royaume ("Dans le pays de la liberté," 1780), 16. See also, for instance, d'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 1: 62–64. Jean-François Sobry, Le mode françois, ou discours sur les principaux usages de la nation françoise (Paris, 1786), 18. This discussion is greatly endebted to the work of Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty, and Goodman, Republic of Letters.
⁵⁹ See, for instance, Antoine de Rivarol, L'universalité de la langue française (1783; Paris, 1991), 25; d'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 2: 25; [Thomas-Jean Pichon], La physique de l'histoire: ou, Considérations générales sur les Principes élémentaires du temperament et du Caractère naturel des Peuples (The Hague, 1765), 262–63.
⁶⁰ See Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, Peter Burke, ed., K. Folca, trans. (New York, 1973), 219–57; Joachim Moras, Ursprung und Entwicklung des Begriffs der Zivilisation in Frankreich (1756–1830) (Hamburg, 1930); Pierre Michel, "Barbarie, Civilisation, Vandalisme," in Rolf Reichard and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, vol. 7 (Munich, 1988), 1–43; Anthony Pagden, "The 'Defence of Civilization' in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory," History of the Human Sciences 1 (1988): 33–45.
⁶¹ See Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme; and Bell, "Jumonville's Death."
⁶² Sobry, Le mode françois, 19; Perrin quoted in Grieder, Anglomania in France, 95–96. See also, for instance, the defense of légèreté in Apologie du caractère des anglois et des françois, ou observations sur le livre intitulé Lettres sur les Anglois&les François,&sur les Voyages (n.p., 1726), esp. 105. The anonymous author claimed that the quality made the French more witty and adventurous.
⁶³ See, for instance, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 310; Rivarol, L'universalité, 23; Discours sur le patriotisme, 82.
⁶⁴ Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 311–2; d'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 1: 153.
⁶⁵ Sébastien-Marie-Mathurin Gazon-Dourxigné, Essai historique et philosophique sur les principaux ridicules des differentes nations (Amsterdam, 1766), 138.
⁶⁶ Rivarol, L'universalité, 23.
⁶⁷ D'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 1: v–vi.
⁶⁸ He added that if Asians and Africans stopped keeping women in chains, "they would lose their cruelty, and grow civilized" like the French. Lettre d'un jeune homme à son ami, sur les Français et les Anglais, relativement à la frivolité repochée aux uns, et la philosophie attribuée aux autres (Amsterdam, 1779), 16.
⁶⁹ D'Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 1: 153.
⁷⁰ Gazon-Dourxigné, Essai historique et philosophique, 138.
⁷¹ Rivarol, L'universalité, 23.
⁷² Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 100.
⁷³ Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 310.
⁷⁴ [Claude-François Xavier Millot], Discours sur le patriotisme françois (Lyons, 1762), 26, 34.
⁷⁵ Clément-Alexandre de Brie-Serrant, Ecrit adressé à l'Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne, 15.
⁷⁶ Antoine-Léonard Thomas, Essai sur les éloges (Paris, 1829), 508.
⁷⁷ See Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, Charlotte Mandell, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 1–25, 133–56. See also on this subject, Ozouf, "La Révolution française et la formation de l'homme nouveau"; and Zizek, "Politics and Poetics of History."
⁷⁸ Maille Dussausoy, Le citoyen désinteressé, ou diverses idées patriotiques, concernant quelques établissemens et embellissemens utils à la ville de Paris (Paris, 1767), 114.
⁷⁹ Bouquier quoted in Ozouf, "La Révolution française et la formation de l'homme nouveau," 134; Discours sur le patriotisme (n.p., 1788), 40; "Sur l'influence des mots et le pouvoir de l'usage," by "C.B., homme libre," in Mercure national et révolutions de l'europe, journal démocratique 47 (December 14, 1789): 1813; Citoyens français, quoted in de Baecque, Body Politic, 143; De l'égalité des représentants, et de la forme des délibérations aux Etats-Généraux de 1789 (n.p., 1789), 3; Boissy d'Anglas, quoted in Elisabeth Liris, "Eduquer l'homme nouveau," in Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, ed., Former un nouveau peuple? Pouvoir, éducation, révolution (Quebec, 1996), 303.
⁸⁰ Quoted in de Baecque, Body Politic, 138.
⁸¹ J. Villier, Nouveau plan d'éducation et d'instruction publique dédié à l'Assemblée nationale dans lequel on substitue aux universités, seminaires et collèges des établissements plus raisonnables, plus utiles, plus dignes d'une grande nation (Angers, 1789), vi–viii.
⁸² Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme.
⁸³ See Franco Venturi, "From Montesquieu to the Revolution," in Utopia and Reform in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), 70–94; Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, Calif., 1997); Keith Michael Baker, "Transformation of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France," Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 32–53.
⁸⁴ See notably Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Sarah Maza, "Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell," French Historical Studies 17, no. 3 (1992): 935–53. In general, on the ways that conceptions of private life influenced political ideas, see Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993); and Hunt, Family Romance.
⁸⁵ Jean-Louis Castilhon, Considérations sur les causes physiques et morales de la diversité du génie des moeurs, et du gouvernement des nations (Bouillon, 1770), 2: 212–13. This book, the first edition of which appeared in 1769, was largely plagiarized from d'Espiard's L'esprit des nations.
⁸⁶ In Abbé de Mably, Observations sur l'histoire de France (1765). See Wright, Classical Republican, 152–53.
⁸⁷ See, for instance, Dussausoy, Le citoyen désinteressé, 114; Bertrand Barère, quoted in Le moniteur, August 17, 1793; Petition pour rendre à la France son véritable nom (n.p., n.d.). The pamphet is signed "par Dupin et Lagrange, républicains gaulois." See Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Fonds Révolution 120, no. 45.
⁸⁸ Quoted in de Baecque, Body Politic, 142.
⁸⁹ Petition pour rendre à la France son véritable nom.
⁹⁰ See Mona Ozouf, "Régénération," in François Furet and Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988), 821–31; de Baecque, Body Politic, 131–56; and Alyssa R. Sepinwall, "Regenerating France, Regenerating the World: The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution, 1750–1831" (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1998).
⁹¹ Maximilien Robespierre, Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public: Sur les rapports des idées religieuses et morales avec les principes républicains, et les fêtes nationales (Paris, 1794), 4.
⁹² See Ozouf, "La Révolution française et la formation de l'homme nouveau"; Ozouf, "Régénération"; and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 72–74.
⁹³ A comprehensive history of revolutionary cultural policies remains to be written. In the meantime, see Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class; and Antoine de Baecque and Françoise Mélonio, Histoire culturelle de la France, vol. 3 (Lumières et liberté) (Paris, 1998). On revolutionary educational policies, see Boulad-Ayoub, Former un nouveau peuple?; Dominique Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir: La Révolution (Paris, 1981); Bronislaw Baczko, Une éducation pour la démocratie: Textes et projets de l'époque révolutionnaire (Paris, 1982); Robert R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York, 1993), 163–222.
⁹⁴ See Ozouf, "La formation de l'homme nouveau," for a particularly acute analysis of this phenomenon.
⁹⁵ On nineteenth-century French nation-building, see above all Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, Calif., 1976); Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J., 1993); James Lehning, Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1995); Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France: L'exaltation des regions dans le discours patriotique (Paris, 1997); Jean-François Chanet, L'Ecole républicaine et les petites patries (Paris, 1996); Stéphane Gerson, "Parisian Litterateurs, Provincial Journeys and the Construction of National Unity in Post-revolutionary France," Past and Present 151 (1996): 141–73.
⁹⁶ See David A. Bell, "The French Republicans," Correspondence, no. 5 (2000): 21.
⁹⁷ Kathleen Wilson, "The Island Race: Captain Cook, Protestant Evangelicalism and the Construction of English National Identity, 1760–1800," in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1999), 265–90, at 268.

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