Whose Norms? Conformative Esprit de Corps and Autonomist Esprit de Corps

Throughout the French nineteenth century explicit references to esprit de corps remained constant. Esprit de corps was considered a useful device in the process of state building and social engineering. ‘Corporatisme d‘État’, as is called by the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, was a centralising, standardising, state-controlled social form of administration.

I have begun to distinguish two aspects of esprit de corps, conformative and autonomist: conformative esprit de corps is the form of group cohesiveness that is primarily meant to reproduce procedures, beliefs, repetitions and protocols. It maintains a centralised form of power, and serves a higher entity, as for example the state, a church or a cause. The fact that French elites were organised according this esprit remained true after Napoleon. Quoting François Guizot, who was both an academic and a minister under the Restauration (1814–30), Rosanvallon helps us to define the conformative aspect of esprit de corps:

Conformative national esprit de corps was sometimes called pejoratively jacobinisme: ’ “Jacobinism” or the demon of centralisation […] France has long been singled out by the pre-eminent role given to the public power in the organisation of collective life.‘

While a normative, state-ruled esprit de corps certainly became in the course of the nineteenth century France's style of governing and maintaining social order, we also observe at that time the slow peripheral growth of a utopian or sociological discourse regarding group autonomy that was not always congruous with state hegemony. The regulating and standardising national power was also challenged by formations which started as non-legal societies and sometimes engaged in seditious behaviour, for example during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871. These movements defended a form of esprit de corps concerned, for example, with the independence of work associations and in particular the creation of syndicats. In this case, groups were thought of as existing to create a form of independence towards a dominant form of power, according to an autonomy-driven esprit de corps.