The Moral Empire: The Persisting Ambiguity of Esprit de Corps in French

In the first decades of the twentieth century, two centuries after the birth of the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, many French uses of the phrase were still definitional, as if one of its attractions was its challenge to interpretation, or the possibility it offered for presenting an agonistic view on the relationship between groups and individuals. The war of connotations, webs of belief and nuances continued, for example in 1902 in a memoir about Napoleon:

A century after Louis de Bonald and his distinction between esprit de corps and esprit de parti, an author insisted again that ‘esprit de corps’ should have a good denotation only, proposing a new term for the negative connotation. Those were distinctions about distinctions – corps versus caste, after corps versus parti – a rhetorical way of separating the wheat from the chaff. This particular intertwining of military and political discourse comes as no surprise in a book about Napoleon.

Yet contrary to the UK and the USA, where esprit de corps became in the twentieth century a corporate cure, esprit de corps in France was still sometimes identified as a poison, or both a cure and a poison, a kind of pharmakon. For instance, a discussion about solidarity among police forces held at the Sénat in 1902 hesitated between ‘the disadvantages of esprit de corps’ and its ‘advantages’. It was not rare to see esprit de corps still associated with ‘intolerance, exclusivism’. Most debaters felt the ambivalence of ‘the esprit de corps, sometimes strengthening, and sometimes thwarting the feeling of our general duties’.