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The Catholic Historical Review 89.1 (2003) 108-109



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The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800. By David A. Bell. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 304, $45.00.)

In 1792 Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Étienne declared to the National Convention, "We must make of the French a new people" by following the example of "priests, who, with their catechisms,. . . ceremonies, sermons . . . [and] missions, . . . infallibly led men to the goal they designated" (pp. 2, 3). Rabaut's directive provides David Bell's starting point in his masterful analysis of nationalism in eighteenth-century France. Although nation-building was, he argues, a project with "a dynamic that was primarily . . . religious" (p. 199), it was not simply a substitute religion. It arose in eighteenth-century France deeply influenced by the Church's approach to inculcating beliefs, but it depended on a significant change in those beliefs.

Nationalists had only one possible model for their political project, that which the Church had used in Catholic-Reformation evangelization campaigns. The precedent became apparent during the Seven Years' War, when the government sponsored a propaganda campaign fashioned on the literature that demonized Protestants during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. However, the English were not denounced as heretics. Rather they were barbarians, beyond the pale of European civilization as defined by the French concepts of sociability and politeness.

Republican nationalists criticized this notion of civilization by associating it with a morally corrupt aristocracy and with women, who exercised too much influence in polite society. "National virility" was "impaired" (p. 150); national character needed to be reformed. To do so, nationalists disseminated a patriotic pedagogy based on a cult of great French men, whose lives made them secular saints celebrated for their service to the nation. The revolutionaries were firmly convinced that France's national character was corrupt, and they, particularly the Jacobins from 1792 to 1794, undertook an ambitious campaign to reshape it. Bell focuses on one aspect of this well-known campaign—the attempt to make French the language of all citizens. Linguistic diversity seemed a barrier to the regeneration of the nation. Here the irony of revolutionaries adopting church practices is most apparent. Catholic reformers had learned local languages to further evangelization. Revolutionaries now turned against priests and patois. But the regeneration they sought was, itself, a term laden with religious echoes of the miraculous. [End Page 108]

Does the religious heritage of nationalism mean that it was merely an alternate belief system substituting for religion, which modernity had left behind? Not so, according to Bell. Nationalism arose in eighteenth-century France because of changing beliefs about God's relationship to the world. In the years around 1700, the French began to think of the world as disenchanted; God was absent from it. They no longer perceived a necessary link between the earthly and divine orders. To fill the gap, they turned to certain "foundational concepts," particularly the nation and the patrie, which allowed them to conceive of an autonomous space within which human will could construct political legitimacy without reference to God, religion, or, for republicans, the king. A new moral or sacred community could be constructed around the nation and patrie. Bell's sweeping characterization of this change in sensibilities may be true only of a small segment of the population, but it offers a more sophisticated understanding of how nationalism was constructed than that which sees it as merely supplanting religion. Still the contrary view dogs his language, which sometimes suggests that nationalism was a substitute religion. Sacrality was transferred from the Church and its beliefs to the nation and patrie, which inspired "forms of adoration akin to religious devotion" (p. 52). Nor is it certain that modern nationalism necessarily depended on a notion of God's absence. Nineteenth-century nationalists devoted to the shrine at Lourdes did not see their world as disenchanted, and, as Bell admits, nationalism has often flourished where "religious observance has remained most intense" (p. 23). But as he shows well, eighteenth-century...

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