The Mask of Reason: The Dialectics of Particularism and Patriotism

Could actual personal merit be of greater value than centuries of noble ancestors? Such was the contention of Jean Soret in 1756, in his Essai sur les moeurs. He added that esprit de corps was a bad emotion:

The intriguing hypothesis of a rational esprit de corps was here immediately dismissed as a rhetorical fiction. Societies were not rational, only a few people could be so. It was becoming common in the middle of the eighteenth century for an author to consider that individual reason was the highest human value while expressing moralistic contempt towards social mores. Because civilised humans were biased, there was much doubt regarding their collective capacity to act accordingly to reason instead of partisanship or pride.

Soret alluded to another important value of the century, experience, which confirmed that among human societies passions were more powerful than reason. In this context, what exactly was esprit de corps? ‘Almost always a spirit of ambition, pride, illusion and vertigo. The esprit de corps is the mania of false spirits or weak spirits.’ This unnuanced claim represented another stage in the radicalisation of the critique against esprit de corps: not only a political critique but also a psychological one. Stubborn faithfulness to a group was likely to be a manifestation of self-deception. Behind apparently selfless attitudes such as dedication to a cause or discipline, the sceptical moralist detected irrational drives.

Yet a different idea was to become more influential before the French Revolution; it was a kind of synthesis between the national individualism of the Philosophes and the Jesuits’ esprit de corps. This idea would claim that patriotism and devotion to the nation were an even healthier and grander form of esprit de corps than that encountered in smaller communities.