Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
- Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
- 1 Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
- 3 ‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 4 The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France
- 5 Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 6 The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
- Conclusion: Ensemblance
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
- Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
- 1 Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
- 3 ‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 4 The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France
- 5 Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 6 The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
- Conclusion: Ensemblance
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘You need spirit, esprit de corps’, presidential candidate Donald Trump responded evasively at a news conference in 2015 when asked about his ‘plan to improve race relations’ in the USA. In 2018, in a public speech at the White House given during a celebration of the Made in America label, the now President Trump declared:
Every time a new factory opens, every time jobs are returned to our shores, every time we buy a product made by our own American neighbors, we are renewing the bonds of love and loyalty that link us all together as Americans. There's tremendous spirit in our country right now, sometimes you don't see it but there is. And you are producers, you produce like nobody else, and the spirit is incredible. Esprit de corps!
Why does the US president repetitively insist on this exotic French phrase? The answer is far from superficial, as we will discover by embarking on an eye-opening, three-centuries-long journey. Donald Trump is by no means the first person to invoke the cult of esprit de corps. Since the eighteenth century, sophisticated minds have pondered it: Montesquieu, d‘Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Bergson, Churchill, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze and many others.
As we will see, incantations about esprit de corps are never innocent. The signifier ‘esprit de corps’ is today a leitmotif of meta-military capitalism and managerial discourse, designating the zeal, collective élan and quasi-alchemical loyalty that entrepreneurs are looking for among their employees. The US president might be aware that, according to a Gallup study, ‘disengagement in American organizations accounts for more than $450 billion in lost productivity annually’, with less than a third of employees ‘actively engaged’ in their work. In 2012, US companies spent $46 billion on team-building firms, and some observers are speaking of an ‘economy of esprit de corps‘: ‘Esprit de corps is a concept powerful enough to make soldiers go into battle knowing their odds of survival are slim: think how powerful it can be if harnessed in your marketing organization!‘
But Americans have forgotten that team spirit is only one meaning of espritde corps among many others, including negative ones.
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- Information
- EnsemblanceThe Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020