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
7 - The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
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
‘A happy phrase‘: The Specificity of English Uses of Esprit de Corps
Anglophone references to esprit de corps in the twentieth century were not only frequent and popular, but also predominantly laudatory. Most English users of the phrase forgot about the pejorative political meaning invented by the Philosophes in the eighteenth century. If the phrase ‘esprit de corps’ continued to thrive in several discourses – military, political, intellectual and theoretical, corporate, and in sport – it was with a meaning that was increasingly generic and standard, often close to the general idea of team spirit, often with a bellicose twist. To be fair, this reduction of sense was never unanimously satisfying, and esprit de corps continued to be ungraspable for those who wanted to theorise it scrupulously: ‘The expression esprit de corps covers so much ground that its meaning can no more be catalogued in a compact little definition.‘
Broadly speaking, the dominant English appropriation of the term was now much more about commanded collaboration than bias or partisanship. John Rowe, the president of a large American insurance company, explained that ’ “esprit de corps” […] visualizes, as no idiom of our own does, the essence of co-operation’. We must read in full his eloquent ‘practical philosophy’ article on esprit de corps, published in 1929 in a local newspaper of the western state of Washington:
A happy phrase is sometimes coined, so humanly expressive that barriers of language are swept aside and like music it becomes a universal sentiment. To the French we are indebted for such an expression, ‘esprit de corps’, which our English tongue has adopted and naturalized because it visualizes, as no idiom of our own does, the essence of co-operation. ‘Esprit de corps’ is the common spirit pervading men associated in business or social activity, implying sympathy, enthusiasm, devotion and jealous regard for the honor of the body as a whole. In concrete form it symbolizes the story of co-ordinated effort that has gradually raised humanity from the brutish isolation of history's dawn to the intensive inter-relations of today's high civilization. In proportion as ‘esprit de corps’ becomes a motivating force in men's lives do they transcend the narrow bounds of selfishness and become social beings, for it brings into action forces potent to lift men's thoughts from their own petty affairs to the contemplation of wider horizons.
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- EnsemblanceThe Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps, pp. 194 - 229Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020