French Nation State

France appears to have developed as a nation-state comparatively late, although its existence as a territorial state dated considerably earlier. Eric Hobsbawm argues that there are three criteria which allowed a people to become a nation. The first is a historic association with a current state, or an association with a state that had a lengthy and recent past. The second is the existence of a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative vernacular. Finally, the third criterion is a proven capacity for conquest. France clearly succeeded in meeting these criteria. The problem in France was not necessarily the struggle for the formation of a state, but the struggle to form a collective unity underneath a preexisting state. The administrative means to do so existed already in the French state, but the problem was how to change the mindset of a people who felt a connection to the region in which they resided rather than to the state that ruled them.
A Rural Nation
Prior to the development of French nationalism, a divide existed between the rural and urban populations of France. The rural population held few of the basic ideals that we associate with nationalism--a connection between the citizenry and the territorial state, a common ethnic or linguistic background, or any other characteristics which later led to the formation of collective group membership.
The gulf between the comparatively educated, bureaucratic culture of Paris and the many different rural cultures in France was partly, but not entirely, the result of an urban-rural divide. Cities accounted for a small fraction of the total population of France. Paris itself, larger than its eight biggest French competitors in 1856, accounted for only about three percent of the population of the country by 1852. The divide was further exacerbated by transportation difficulties—before the Revolution, a journey from one side of the country to the other generally took approximately three weeks. At the same time, vast tracts of habitable land were unpopulated, further isolating many communities. Even in 1867, a national census estimated that 43% of potential farmland was ‘dominated by the forces of nature’.
Paris and the Provinces
As a result of this isolation, loyalties remained largely local. Hobsbawm, in presenting the argument that the linguistic beginnings of the idea of nationalism are derived from concepts of origin or descent, cites one example in a Medieval French dictionary, where Jean Froissart, a French chronicler during the medieval period , wrote “je fus retourné au pays de ma nation en la conté de Haynnau” (I was returned to the land of my birth/origin in the county of Hainault). Froissart’s concept of nation was not attached to a state or large political body, but the small county in which he was born. Yet it is clear that some form of primitive nationalism did exist. In 1756, Voltaire devoted an entry in the Philosophical Dictionary to critiquing the idea of a national patrie, or fatherland. It should be noted, however, that his critique was primarily aimed at the elites in Paris.
It is to these educated Parisians that modern France owes its national identity. Rather than a primordial French nation, modern French culture has its roots in the small class of comparatively bureaucratic, educated people who loosely controlled France from its Parisian center. Before the Revolution, government interference in local culture had been limited. The State extracted taxes and conscripts for its armies, and provided some degree of legal authority and roads, but its interference in day to day affairs in the provinces was limited. Before the Revolution, two-thirds of the territory that composes modern France had been connected to Paris for fewer than three hundred and fifty years. For most French, patriotism was confined to the pays—a culturally and linguistically distinct area in which, as Robb puts it, “a church bell be heard more distinctly than those of other villages in the region”, and which had its own patron saint. A pays would often have its own laws, parliaments, weights, and measures (the latter two were often designed to prevent products from outside the village from competing with local goods). Most crimes were handled locally without recourse to national authorities, to the point that official (national) crime statistics report some departements almost entirely crime-free as late as the mid-19th century. The discrepancy is due not to the lack of crime, but to the unwillingness of the inhabitants to report crimes to the authorities. The charivari, a form of communal violence against criminals, was preferred to State intervention.
Local “Tribalism”
Because of these divisions, Graham Robb has characterized non-Parisian French society before the late 19th century as “tribal”. Isolation and tradition created sharp distinctions between different villages. Awareness of larger, overarching identities was rare. Most peasants did not identify themselves as part of a French nation, and in many cases their Catholic identity was also nominal; religious beliefs often varied considerably from village to village. Like tribes, villages could become embroiled in private wars with one another. These conflicts continued into at least the middle of the 19th century, and number in the thousands. In this atmosphere, unflattering nicknames for neighboring villages were common. Nor was the tribal idea of descent from a common ancestor absent. In some cases, as in Thiers, codes of behavior were attributed to mythical ancestors. Romans were a popular choice, since many peasants envisioned them as an ancient aristocracy. Early travelers noted physical differences between groups from different villages , and later 19th century anthropologists discovered physical distinctions between groups living in adjacent villages and even in different suburbs of the same city that lead them to postulate common ancestry. To a degree, this description is accurate, since over three-fifths of the population of France stayed within their native villages as late as 1886. Like other tribes, French villages often placed high value purity and marriage within the community.
It should be noted, however, that most tribal customs and legends were not traceable to the distant past. Most old stories were fewer than three generations old. Even here, at a local level, a “primordial” sense of identity could not be said to exist, insofar as this meant an unbroken chain of descent or an uninterrupted passing down of extremely ancient customs. Most of these local legends began to disappear as literacy became widespread, and many survive only in the writings of ethnographers. In some cases, even the supposedly ancient tribe was itself of recent vintage. The inhabitants of the Marais Poitevin provide a good example of the latter. They were descended from a combination of deserters from Napoleon’s armies and freed serfs from the 13th century, but told origin stories dating back to Roman times.
This situation was not unique to France. In many ways, France’s extreme localism was mirrored in other newly forming nation states. For instance, in the first edition of the Spanish dictionary in 1726, the words patria/tierra (meaning homeland) were defined as “the place, township or land where one is born.” Connecting the concept of nation with that of a state in the Spanish dictionary did not come until the late 19th century. The modern definitions of state, nation, and language were not included in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy until 1884—an extremely late date. Prior to this time the word nación, or nation, was defined as “the aggregate of the inhabitants of a province, a country or a kingdom.” Post-1884 however, it was defined as “a State or political body which recognizes a supreme centre of common government.” The definition continued to evolve until the final version of ‘the nation’ was written in 1925, as “the collectivity of persons who have the same ethnic origin and, in general, speak the same language and possess a common tradition.”
Language and Nationality
In the wake of the French Revolution, France’s republican government took a marked interest in reforming and standardizing its’ citizens’ dialects along Parisian French lines. Although Parisian French had been the official governmental language since the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, its use had been restricted to a small, educated elite. With the Revolution’s emphasis on an organic nation, the new government saw France’s multiplicity of tongues as both backward and dangerous. On one hand, linguistic divisions were seen as “one of the sturdiest flying-buttresses of despotism” , a divide-and-rule tactic of the old regime. At the same time, ‘pure’ Parisian French was seen as a superior, rationalized language compared to its provincial counterparts. Like Medieval Latin and Classical Arabic, it was considered a language for formal occasions before it entered colloquial use in the provinces.
The first report to address the issue of France’s multiplicity of tongues was the Abbe Gregoire’s ‘The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language’, finished in 1794. It estimated that only eleven percent of the population spoke ‘pure’ French—a figure that later reports from the mid-19th century indicate was probably far too high. As late as 1880, only a fifth of France’s population was considered comfortable speaking ‘pure’, Parisian French. Instead, France’s communication landscape was a confusing mixture, with four languages, fifty-five dialects, and hundreds of sub-dialects at the end of the 19th century. Sub-dialects could be extremely local, belonging to a single village or, in one instance, a family. Through a combination of education (which often involved punishing students for speaking their dialect), the spread of “national” culture through the media, and the military’s efforts to universalize the language of its conscripts, Parisian French slowly became the standard language for day-to-day interaction.
Tied in with this process was the emergence in the 19th century of the liberal theory of nationality. This theory stated that the principles of self-determination could only be applied to nations that were culturally and economically viable. At the same time, the process of social evolution was expected to expand the scale of human social units, originally beginning with families and developing to the national and global scale. To be a useful part of the evolutionary process, nations were seen as a means of expansion, legitimizing national movements that supported the ideals of unification and expansion (in contrast to movements that supported separatism). While inclusive in its broad outlines, this theory was partly responsible for the French state’s illiberal attempt to stamp out local, under-evolved cultural and linguistic units. Until the late 19th century, however, these efforts were frustrated by technological limitations—long after the Napoleonic wars, transportation and communication technologies remained relatively comparable to their 18th century equivalents.
The State and Minorities
The slow erosion of local customs by the modern French nation-state was, in some cases, helpful to minority groups whose identities condemned them to marginalization within their pays. Although universalist, the liberal ideal of nationalism was an inclusive one. Existing linguistic or ethnic uniformity was not seen as prerequisite for French citizenship, but the acceptance of ‘French’ laws, liberties, characteristics, and language was. The transition towards a French state was one of attempting to induce the rural population into accepting conditions which would gradually lead towards a collective unity. Acquiring the French language became an inclusive condition of being a French citizen.
Part of the process of creating a French citizenry was the struggle to bring together communities based upon ethnic or linguistic grounds into a public that made up a territorial state. In the case of France, language actually developed as a barrier to this issue. From the point of view of French nationalists, speaking French wasn’t a precondition to gaining French citizenship, but accepting the conditions of French citizenship (which included learning the language) was. There was no intuitive connection between speaking the French language and being French, and indeed, “French experts were to fight stubbornly against any attempt to make the spoken language a criterion of nationality which, they argued, was determined purely by French citizenship.” As Hobsbawm puts it, “Sephardic Jews speaking medieval Spanish and Ashkenazic ones speaking Yiddish - and France contained both - were equally French, once they accepted the conditions of French citizenship.”
The Cagot community was one of the foremost beneficiaries of this process. The Cagots were a group most heavily concentrated in southwestern France, the first mentions of whom occur around the year 1000. They were subject to a variety of restrictions and persecutions by the majority communities in their area, including being barred from any professions other than ropemaking and carpentry—a prohibition that was often enforced by violence. They were considered unclean by their non-Cagot neighbors, and were sometimes refused burial with other Christians.
Many among the educated classes and the nobility disapproved of the persecutions—and often passed unsuccessful laws designed to illegalize these practices, as in Rennes in 1681. Only with a combination of industrialization and the idea of French “national” citizenship did the Cagot identity—along with persecution of that identity—largely disappear. Although traces of tribal practice survive, the Cagots, along with the Welche, Hautponnais, Lyselar, and other communities, have been absorbed into a larger French identity.
The Parisian Civilizing Impulse
The provinces were a popular target for satire and stories of backwardness for educated, Parisian French-speaking elites both before and after the Revolution. In many ways, their position at the center of the French empire placed these elites in the same position that colonial administrators would later find themselves in Africa. Their reaction was similar—they hoped to apply state powers of education and coercion to ‘civilize’ their subjects.
The project began in Paris. As one Parisian noted, “you don’t have to go to America to see savages”. On the Parisian streets, an average person could see the harsh conditions faced by the urban poor and the working class. This impression was further driven home when viewing the poor who lived in the Parisian lowlands that surrounded Paris and France’s other cities. Disease, filth, and hunger were abundant among the poor, yet local authorities were often apathetic. Elite priorities shifted as the urban poor became a potential threat and as greater working class power forced the state to nationalize the urban masses.
In France during the 1850’s, the poor were seen as a problem for the ruling elite because of their lack of civility. Laws were passed to remedy the situation, including the Gramont Law, which made the ill-treatment of domestic animals a misdemeanor crime. As the 19th century wore on, peasants and low income waging farmers remained a large proportion of the working force, though they declined in absolute terms. They made up 50 percent of it in 1870, 45 percent in 1900, and 35 percent in 1930. Such a large number of classless, supposedly “savage” individuals gave lie to the ideas of equality propounded during the French Revolution and by subsequent governments. It is easy to see why the government, facing such a legitimacy conflict, would initiate a course of nationalizing education. Later nationalizations of healthcare and industry also followed this logic.
The Late 19th Century: The Dreyfus Affair
Although the relatively new sense of French nationalism had a strong inclusive tendency, it also had the potential to fragment the political community. Toward the end of the 19th century, a political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair further demonstrated the passion and conflicts of opinion that marked the period of French nationalism. In 1894, a relatively unknown Alsatian Jewish captain in the French army was accused of spying for the German government. Both because of his family ties to the Alsace region (which borders Germany, and is often thought of as more German than French, and his Jewish heritage) Dreyfus was eventually found guilty of treason and sentenced to life in prison on the penal colony on Devil’s Island. Eventually, the probable true culprit was found, but it took twelve years for Dreyfus to be exonerated of all charges and brought back to France. Both because of the rampant anti-Semitism in the French army (and, to a lesser degree, in French society as a whole) and a strong current of exclusive of nationalism present at the time, the Dreyfus Affair took became a very divisive subject in the late 19th century.
France’s attempt to foster nationalism had the effect of increasing interest in and support for the national army. In the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, many nationalistic French were intent upon never allowing such a thing to happen again by creating a strong and unified army. If the French army was forced to publicly back down, many believed that such a move would be construed as weakness, thereby making France vulnerable again. A commonly held belief at the time was that those people seeking a revision of the Dreyfus trial were “not thinking in the nation’s best interest.” However, allowing trials like the Dreyfus case to be conducted based on false evidence, in secret, with defendant not even permitted to examine the evidence against him lead others to question the “rights” believed to be the hallmark of buying in to French national identity and citizenship.
The increase in anti-Semitism at the time only added further fuel to the fire. The anti-Semitism arose partly out of a drive to exclude immigrants from the national community. Many of the Jews in France were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and increasing numbers of French nationalists felt that they had no position in French society. Bernard Lazare captured this idea best in his writings when he stated that he wanted “the continual immigration of these predatory, rude, and dirty Tartars (East European Jews) who come to feed upon a land that is not theirs,” to stop. Dreyfus was instantly associated with these Jewish immigrants, which, when combined with his connection to Alsace, disbarred him from being a “true” citizen of France.
Modern Challenges to French Identity
The attempt to nationalize France walked a narrow line, seeking to promote French citizenship while at the same time attempting to maintain the cultural differences that existed between the people of France—except insofar as these identities interfered with the broader, newer “French” identity. In this, the nationalizers were not entirely successful—local cultures often fell completely before the homogenizing influence of Parisian French culture. However, unlike the thousands of tribal micro-cultures that made up pre-modern France, many minority languages have survived. Low estimates of their current number of speakers are:
Language Speakers (in France)
Occitan >2,000,000
1,500,000
500,000
280,000
80,000
80,000
70,000
The triumph was far from total even on the cultural front, however. French national identity since the 1970s has increasingly come under pressure from a variety of other identities competing with the central, state-imposed model. Locally, the challenge has come from independence, secessionist, and cultural revivalist movements, particularly among groups that retain linguistic differences.
One of the more unusual attempts is the Partit Occitan, a political party which hopes to secede from France and form an independent (and very large) nation incorporating most of southern France and pieces of Italy and Spain. Its foundational myth stresses the role of the Albigensian Crusade, declaring an “Occitan Resistance” “800 years after the Crusade”. It views Occitan as a separate language from either French or Italian (despite its similarities to the latter), going so far as to offer an “Occitan” option on its website. The movement has gained enough support to allow its members to redeem a portion of their taxes by officially donating to the party.
Breton nationalism, after the choice of many of its adherents to collaborate with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, has not met with much success since then. Like Occitan secessionism, it owes its existence in part to the survival of the Breton language. However, its major parties retained roughly 4% of the Breton vote as of 2000, and occasional acts of anti-government terrorism by the ARB (not affiliated with these parties) have occurred.
Interestingly, the ARB is thought to have close ties to another secessionist terrorist organization: the Basque ETA organization. Like the ARB, ETA is a counterpart to more moderate (and unaffiliated) electoral secessionist parties. While it is longer-lasting and better organized than the ARB, it has been relatively unsuccessful in its ongoing battle with the combined French and Spanish governments, though this is partly a consequence of the fact that the Basques have partial autonomy on the Spanish side of the border. Its active members, as of 2008, may number as few as 30.
A far more serious challenge to unitary French national identity has been presented by the existence of a large Muslim community in France, estimated at roughly 10% of the total population. The majority originate from North Africa, particularly Algeria, from which over one million individuals arrived in France during the 1960s and early 1970s. Thanks to the officially color-blind policies of the French state, many were able to acquire French citizenship after France’s withdrawal from Algeria in the mid-1960s, along with the so-called pied-noir community of European-descended French in Algeria (the former colonial ruling population). Relations between Muslim immigrant communities in the suburbs and the non-Muslim population have not been entirely free of trouble—riots broke out for three weeks between October and November of 2005, and some elements of the French political right favor extensive reduction in immigration. The motivating factor behind the riots partly stems from a perceived lack of employment compared to “native” French citizens. The riots created extensive criticism of the French state’s “blindness” to ethnic issues. The Pew Research Grant’s studies indicate that 39% of the Muslim population in France see non-Muslim French as generally hostile toward Muslims, and roughly half consider their identity as Muslims to outweigh their identity as French. However, these figures are considerably lower than in Britain (where almost 80% identify themselves primarily as Muslims rather than British), and the percentage of practicing Muslims has been estimated as low as 10%--roughly comparable to the percentage of practicing French Catholics.
Further Reading
1 Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
2 Weber, E (1976). Peasants into frenchmen: the modernization of rural france 1870-1914. Stanford University Press.
3 Robb, Graham. The Discovery of France.
4 Calhoun, C (1993).Nationalism and ethnicity. Annual Review of Sociology. 19, 211-239.
5 Froissart, J (1910). The Chronicles of Froissart. New York, NY: The Collier Press. Translated by Bourchier J and Berners, L.
6 Voltaire (1752). Patrie, in The Philosophical Dictionary. Accessed at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1752voltaire.html.
7 Baltz, Matthew. "The Dreyfus Affair: Its Causes and Implications." 25 Jan 1999. 7 May 2009. <http://www.harwich.edu/depts/history/HHJ/drey.html>.
8 Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. New York: George Braziller Inc., 1986.
9 Partit Occitan, "Partit Occitan: News." http://partitoccitan.free.fr/indexen.htm (accessed 5/10/09).
10 Lichfield, John. "Breton terrorism takes nastier turn." April 23, 2000.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/breton-terrorism-takes-nastier-turn-719310.html (accessed 05/10/09).
11 BBC News, "Who are Eta? ." November 17, 2008.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3500728.stm (accessed 5/10/09).
12 U.S. State Department, "France Profile." April 2009.http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3842.htm (accessed 5/10/09).
13 Allen, Jodie T. "The French-Muslim Connection." August 17, 2006.http://pewresearch.org/pubs/50/the-french-muslim-connection (accessed 5/10/09).
14 Alba, Richard. "Decolonizution Immipations and the Social orig'ns of the Second Generation: The Case of North Africans in France." IMR 36, no. 4 (2002): 1169-1193.

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