Etablir l’identité: L’identification des Français du Moyen Age à nos jours (review)

This is a very small book on a very large subject. It is not really a book about the rise of French identity as a nation since the Middle Ages, as a quick glance at the title might suggest. Instead, it is a book about the rise of individual identity for French men and women since the Middle Ages. Gutton notes that in the pre-modern world, the identity of nearly all men and women was defined in corporate rather than individual terms: by the family you belonged to, the parish you lived in, the guild you were a member of, etc. In other words personal identity was a product of which corporate bodies you were a part. The first stirrings of a less corporate identity emerged with the creation of coats of arms by aristocratic families in the Middle Ages. Then the emergence of family names, first by the elites, and eventually by the popular classes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided another element of individual identity, albeit in still another corporate group, the family. The introduction of parish registers in the sixteenth century to record all baptisms, marriages, and burials further regularized the use of family names. Indeed, prior to the Revolution the parish church was for all practical purposes the état civil in France. With the advance of literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, being able to sign one’s name was a further symbol of individualism. And the rise of individualism was accompanied by the rise of individual civil and legal rights under the law. In the Old Regime the law was applicable according to rank and social estate. After the Revolution equality under the law for all individuals was the norm.

Gutton is quick to point out, however, that the rise of individualism was also accompanied by the rise of the state. And the author takes a very Foucaultian view of the state as an institution that always had the capacity to threaten and undermine individualism altogether. His survey of mandated censuses, identity cards, and the rise of the police state, culminating in the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, inevitably leads to a narrative emphasizing state control and regulation. And while these are all useful and perfectly valid points to make, the state as “Big Brother”—and the author invokes George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four explicitly—seems a pretty one-sided account. While totalitarian states clearly are threats to individualism and so much else, in the democratic West, at least, a greater threat to individual identity than the state is the threat of identity theft from unscrupulous and unregulated commercial charlatans searching out our identities on the Internet. Commercial companies now tell us what books we will like, which foods we will eat, and what kinds of vacations we should want. And maybe we are also even potential threats to ourselves with our seemingly unlimited capacity for self-absorption in broadcasting and publicizing every mundane and inconsequential fact of our lives through blogs and social networking sites. This recent rejection of privacy combined with the yearning for celebrity has transformed individual identity into something very different. Instead of working to construct individual identity, we now put it up for sale to the masses. Gutton is aware of all these issues and mentions them briefly in his conclusion, though it might have made for a more interesting book had he expanded this section. There is also a very useful selection of documents at the end of the book.