Slightly briefer than previous outings, and also with a bit of an organisational conundrum – I’m starting to think that chapters 2-4 might work better in reverse order: comments welcome.
Chapter 4: Being French…
Open with the sweep of ‘greater France’ as it was still imaginable prior to the collapse of the 1763 settlement – from Madras to the Mississippi – and the crashing impact of that collapse, especially in the context of a discussion of the ‘new patriotism’ [Dziembowski, Bell] that recent war had developed. Moves into the basic question of how ‘Frenchness’ was experienced, and by whom. Relating topics from the previous two chapters to the concept of ‘nationality’ as it emerges, and is in competition with others such as privilege and particularism. And also forms of cosmopolitanism, both intellectual and aristocratic.
‘Nationality’ as a concept itself new to the period, set against old-regime practices – droit d’aubaine and its ‘feudal’ implications – and innovations, from the revolutionaries’ definitions of the patrie to Napoleon’s creation of jus sanguinis identity. [Rapport, Wahnich, Weil]
Considering the physical bounds of nationhood; old-regime models of borderlands, where identities blur, against revolutionary and ‘modern’ interpretations of (apparent) clarity. The Pyrenees [Sahlins, McPhee], Alsace, Savoy, the Belgian territories… also the cultural bounds and the debates over language in the Revolution and after [Bell, other work on Grégoire]… and the racial bounds:
Life under the Code Noir for whites, free blacks and slaves; promises of revolutionary liberation, and betrayals. Napoleonic imperial attitudes – both crudely racial and also intra-European – and their continuities after 1815. The question of Algeria, colonisation and rationalising the subjugation of a ‘free’ population – early C19 thoughts on Islam and exclusion.
After considering these various forms of outer boundary, attention to inner ones. Considering in the classic perspective of ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ how far dialect and geography held the population apart – versus how far, through interchange of information, individual and collective seasonal and permanent mobilities, there was from the beginning of the period already a sense of the wider world, and perhaps the wider nation, in far-flung corners of France. And against this perspective and its teleologies, the question of what might be lost in ‘becoming French’ – custom, autonomy, identities not pivoted around the nation-state. This leads on to a revisiting of issues already touched on, such as privilege, taxation, administrative centralisation, from a more cultural dimension as they shape or interact with identities at local and national level. Also looking ahead to structural material changes around migration, urbanisation, demographic transitions – the 1840s as a watershed era?
Definitely reverse order! I think that the current chapter four helps you to define your subject – France and the French – clearly, so it would come best earlier, at the outset (or close to the outset).
This chapter looks good, by the way. I like the colonial dimension: this posed something of an ideological challenge from the perspective of any revolutionary politician soaked in Montesquieu or Rousseau: if a state is defined by its customs, climate etc., or if a nation is a group of citizens living under the same law, then the colonies didn’t fit easily into this. Your sentence on the problem of the putative European citizens in the annexed territories from 1792 is innocently short, but I have a horrible feeling that this will be even more challenging (fascinating though it will be). I’ve always wondered how sincerely the Napoleonic regime thought of its further-flung subjects in Italy, Illyria and the Hanseatic towns as ‘French’ and worthy of meaningful cultural and political assimilation, or merely as cannon-fodder and suppliers of taxation…