Nationalism as State Centralism
Summary
I have in a previous chapter drawn attention to the fact that the doctrine of popular sovereignty involved a totalizing tendency. The people, once it has been proclaimed sovereign, cannot be at odds with itself; the volonté générale is not conceived of as a confused mass of conflicts but as something whole, unified, lapidary. The slogan liberté,égalité, fraternité can be read as a logical progression: Liberty cannot truly exist without equality, and equality requires a unity and solidarity of purpose; which means that dissent is easily interpreted as disaffection or disloyalty.
The course of events in France from the proclamation of the Republic onwards (in 1792) bears this out. To be sure, the course of events was also under severe external pressure: the ancien régime monarchies of Europe were armed against France, and the Revolution's survival stood on a knife's edge. The levée en masse or general military draft for all able-bodied men was part of the climate that saw the birth of the new Republic; the lines of the ‘Marseillaise’ (written in April of that fateful year 1792) likewise testify to an apprehension that an armed foreign invasion might restore the centuries- long oppression of the Bourbons:
Come, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has come.
Against us, tyranny’s blood-stained flag has been raised.
In our lands you hear those fell soldiers howl;
They come to cut the throats, even in our embrace, of our children and our women.
To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! March, march
And let their foul blood soak our fields.
What does that gang of slaves, of traitors and of conspiring kings want?
For whom are those ignoble shackles, those long-prepared iron fetters?
Frenchmen, that’s meant for us; oh what rage and fury must this provoke!
They dare to plan reducing us to our ancient slavery!
To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! March, march
And let their foul blood soak our fields.
The call for unity was, then, a military necessity as much as a piece of ideology. The Republic that was eventually proclaimed bore the title, logically enough, of the République française une et indivisible: the Republic was stipulated as being French, one whole, and indivisible. This formula allowed for no inner distinctions.
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- Information
- National Thought in EuropeA Cultural History - 3rd Revised Edition, pp. 145 - 152Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018