The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800.

By David A. Bell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv plus 304 pp.).

David A. Bell's elegantly written and handsomely produced book offers many new insights into the origins of modern French nationalism. Perhaps the most important insight involves the chronology of the analysis itself, for Bell establishes beyond doubt that patriotic sensibilities and the desire to build a cohesive nation predated the French Revolution by at least forty years. In fact, as Bell shows, attention to the patrie and its needs increased in intensity already in the last decades of Louis XIV's reign. The author traces the growing importance of the ideas of nation and pattie in published literature of the eighteenth century with such thoroughness and care that The Cult of the Nation must count as one of the most widely researched books to have appeared in the field over the last ten years. Few references to the nation and the patrie escaped the author's notice, it seems, and specialists of the eighteenth century, and historians of nationalism more generally, will benefit from Bell's meticulous research for years to come.

Nevertheless, Bell's considerable evidence attesting the efflorescence of patriotic and nationalist ideas is attached to an overarching thesis that, to say the least, will prove controversial. Drawing from the work of Marcel Gauchet, Bell constructs an elaborate hypothesis concerning the "disenchantment" of the European world in the later seventeenth century. By this process of disenchantment, the people of France (by which Bell really means the educated elites who reasonably form the focus of the book's investigation) came to regard God as "absent from the sphere of human affairs." This separation of the worldly realm from the realm of the divine inspired the assumption that the "ordering principles" of worldly institutions had to be the product of human creation (p. 199). The operation of human affairs, it was now assumed, obeyed no transcendent logic that ordered the cosmos and represented the mind of God for all to see. Consequently, the nation came to be seen as an object requiring the determined attention, and the shaping intentions, of the political community that it encompassed. Nationalism, as distinct from mere national sentiment, grew out of this new will to construct and shape the political community.

This argument is plausible, as far as it goes, but Bell does little to distinguish the phenomenon of disenchantment either from the appearance of a newly secular historical consciousness in the Renaissance or from the affirmation of "everyday life" that proved to be one of the important and widespread consequences of the Reformation. (1) The lack of conceptual precision is important, because Bell specifically dates the emergence of the new national ideas to the "decades around 1700" (p. 15). Even if one concedes the reality and importance of the long-term process of disenchantment, the timing of this "patriotic" turn still requires explanation. Bell alludes to changes in material culture that bespoke the appearance of a Habermasian public sphere, but he curiously rejects any political explanation for the change in sensibilities at the end of the seventeenth century. He does this even though "the decades around 1700" were a time of growing dissatisfaction with Louis XIV's absolutist style, and even though the king was criticized specifically for placing his own pursuit of gloire above the interests of the patrie and nation. (2) He snidely dismisses the evidence and arguments for a pivotal aristocratic resistance to absolutism, for example, partly on grounds that the aristocrats did not "treat the nation as a political artifact in need of construction, as the French revolutionaries would later do" (p. 25).

Leaving aside the issue of the accuracy of that claim, Bell's reasons for discounting aristocratic and other "political" opposition to absolutism around 1700 betray a teleological impulse that influences his reading of the evidence in unfortunate ways. Bell notes, for example, that widespread use of the terms patrie and nation really only occurred after about 1750, when conflicts between the king and the parlements focused attention on the adversaries' respective constitutional roles and their representative functions. Despite the timing of those conflicts, however, the political arguments developed by the former parlementaire Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, receive scant attention. In fact, Bell conspicuously bypasses the widely read and obsessively discussed Montesquieu and selects as his mid-century textual turning point a forgettable book on the character of nations written in 1743 by Espiard de la Borde, a second-rate writer who, ironically enough, would later go on to imitate Montesquieu (p. 10). Why does Espiard get the edge over Montesquieu? One suspects that Espiard's status as a priest (and his apparent distance from aristocratic politics) plays in his favor, because Bell wants to argue that the ideal of nation-building is linked organically to the transformation of religious sensibilities made possible by disenchantment. His commitment to that thesis also explains why the last chapter of the book is devoted to discussion of the abbe Gregoire's attempt to establish linguistic uniformity in the early years of the Revolution. Gregoire's plans, Bell persuasively argues, were indebted not only to the Revolutionary quest for a citizenry universally devoted to the patrie and its laws, but were also analogous to, and inspired by, the priestly effort to indoctrinate the masses during the Catholic Reformation. Gregoire's ideas, in other words, were the natural culmination of disenchantment-inspired nation building.

For Bell, then, the theme of "unity" that inspired early French nationalists can also be applied usefully to their own history. Going beyond even the revisionists, who removed social conflict from the narrative of French Revolutionary origins and made the Revolution largely the result of unforeseen political accidents, Bell represents the passage from old regime to Revolution as a seamless cultural transition that scarcely even required climactic political conflict. The early expressions of national consciousness by the likes of Espiard in the 1740s gave rise naturally to a socially homogenizing "republican critique" of national character by the 1770s and 1780s, one that forecast the Jacobin zeal to indoctrinate the masses in the Revolution (p. 152). Meanwhile, the monarchy, despite efforts in the 1750s-1770s to identify love of the patrie with loyalty to the person of the king (chapter 2), "shuffled toward collapse" at the appointed time, thus making way for the long-gestating "organizing principles" of nation and patrie (p. 199). The third estate's reconstitution of the Estates-General as a National Assembly (p. 73) and the Revolutionaries' desire to construct a genuinely cohesive nation, Bell suggests, merely reflected the emergence of a normative and anti-monarchical drive for national unity over the course of the long eighteenth century.

Despite the telescoping produced by its analytical framework, The Cult of the Nation throws new light on the dimensions and nature of national consciousness in eighteenth-century France. The insightful fourth chapter on "National Memory and the Canon of Great Frenchmen" shows that authors of collective biographies of French heroes subtly challenged the hierarchy of estates in the last twenty years of the old regime (pp. 134-6), and it highlights the diverse appeal of medieval and Renaissance history in the second half of the eighteenth century. A chapter on "National Character and the Republican Imagination" also establishes a clear link between old regime stereotypes of French frivolity and effeminacy and the later republican zeal for inculcating virtue and regenerating French morals. One only wishes that Bell himself had not fallen under the enchantment of an all-encompassing theory, for his insatiable eye and his talents for subtle analysis should have produced a study more sensitive to conflict, dissent, and the endlessly creative possibilities inherent in political argument.

Jay M. Smith

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

ENDNOTES

(1.) On historical consciousness, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). For acute discussion of the affirmation of the everyday, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA., 1989).

(2.) See Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965).