The National Identity

This chapter reviews the many factors that shaped French national identity. The principles of civilisation, the bonds of race, and the French language as an expression of these were put forward as the main factors which made the inhabitants of France into Frenchmen, conscious of their nationality. However, French ‘nationalism’ as a creed went far beyond this. Paradoxically, nationalism was a source of division among Frenchmen, because it became the instrument through which quite different political ideas were propagated. Thus on the one hand, nationalism was at first equated with liberalism or revolution: it was the Jacobin doctrine of the emancipation of oppressed peoples; the leaders of the Third Republic, from Gambetta to Clemenceau, proclaimed themselves heirs of this tradition, and the conservatives attacked them. On the other hand, nationalism, at the turn of the century, emerged also as a reactionary doctrine, protesting against the way French life was developing: Barrès found in anti-Semitism a passion around which Frenchmen could reunite, against what he called decadence; Maurras was anxious that his generation should not be ‘the last of the French’. All the different varieties of nationalism therefore aroused bitter hostility among Frenchmen, for they always emphasised only one aspect of the nation's values.