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
1 - Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth 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
Not Only in the Military: First Occurrences of the Phrase in Print
The idiomatic phrase esprit de corps first appeared in print several decades earlier than was generally believed when I started my research. A French reference dictionary, the Trésor de la langue française, in its etymological and historical entry on the word corps, indicated: ‘1771 esprit de corps (Turgot, OEuvres, éd. G. Schelle, t. 3, p. 521)’. The nineteenth-century major dictionary Littré quoted nothing older than Rousseau's L’Émile (1762): ‘It is not only in the military that one acquires the esprit de corps’, unarguably an important quote, of which more below. A recent source refers imprecisely to Voltaire (1767). Although it is difficult to identify with precision the birth of an old locution, what follows in this chapter offers new and significant information.
Before esprit de corps became idiomatic, between 1730 and 1762, the phrase esprit du corps appeared in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, published in 1721. This immediately famous epistolary fiction of moeurs was seen as the epitome of a literary genre probably invented by Jean-Paul Marana and imitated thereafter. It consisted in the technique of depicting the mores and manners of a society or nation through the eyes of a fictitious stranger. This literary vogue allowed the then immense francophone readership to discover the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, perhaps for the first time in print in 1732, in an imitation of the Lettres persanes, of which more below.
The narrative context of Montesquieu's reference to esprit de corps was a conversation between two ambitious Parisians in search of intellectual power by way of cunning rather than talent. Their strategy was to appear in high-society salons armed with rehearsed elements of wit, meant to be uttered as if brilliantly improvised:
Let us team up and work together to develop our wit [esprit] […] Do what I tell you, and I promise you a seat in the Académie within six months; see, we won't have to work for long, for once elected you will be able to abandon your practice of the art; you will be a man of wit [homme d’esprit] even if you have any. It's been noticed in France that as soon as a man joins a society [compagnie], he promptly acquires what is called the esprit du corps: you will experience it; and I predict to you only the embarrassment of applause.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- EnsemblanceThe Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps, pp. 33 - 60Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020