Abstract

The final chapter revisits and offers some final thoughts on the major themes and questions pursued throughout the volume.

Keywords: Nation-building, Liberalism, national identity, Europe

Historical investigation, in fact, brings to light the acts of violence that have taken place at the origin of every political formation. […] Unity is always created through brutality.

This book has had two principle tasks. The first was to account for the prominence of the nation in French Revolutionary-era discourse. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 have accordingly sought to show how ‘the nation’ was entangled within an older, cross-cultural, and epistemic discourse on matters ranging from the operation of natural laws and the origins of language, to the ‘rules of social evolution’ and forms of governance – its fitness for such enquiries obtaining from semantic and heuristic conventions, such as those involving the formation of ‘national characters,’ of considerable vintage. Enlightenment thinkers were not in these cases wholly inventing new genres of episteme, heuristic strategies, or modes of practice; however, the explosion of interest in anthropological and related concerns raised ‘the nation’s’ entry in contemporary letters to a high rate of incidence. In supplying greater detail to the picture of Enlightenment engagement with ‘the nation,’ it is hoped that works of this kind offer an advance, in turn, to narrative coherence by suggesting how developments in the sphere of ideas influenced the terms of political debate in France and elsewhere; as witnessed in the diverse pronouncements concerning the cause of the nation's characteristic ‘lightness’ and other moral defects impeding its quest for self-consciousness and ‘regeneration.’ The immense outpouring of national rhetoric in 1789 and after echoes in this sense principles that had obtained a prominent position in pre-revolutionary high culture and thus acquired some power to inform the improvisations of revolutionary-era actors.