How militaristic was French nationalism?

Bemoaning the corruption of French morals in Le Peuple, Jules Michelet urges his reader to
take heart: “The mass is good ; do not judge of it by the floating scum.” Whereof then to
judge? We must, Michelet says, look to the power within that mass: to “the sentiment of
military honour ever renewed by our heroic traditions.” 1 His judgement speaks to one
recurrent view of the military in the French nationalist tradition: the army not merely as the
defenders of the fatherland, but as a reinvigorating force which could exemplify the French
spirit. In the course of the long nineteenth century this was a conception which existed
alongside a more sceptical attitude—one which envisaged the military as against rather than
of the nation. Both views find their origins in the French revolution, but it appears that
militarist nationalism petered out under the Napoleonic order and was only fully restored to
dominance in theory after the Austrian Empire’s 1866 defeat at Sadowa, and in practice after
France’s 1870 defeat at Sedan.2 Writing in 1846, Michelet does not fit clearly into this
chronology, and could be held to demonstrate its inadequacy. But it is evident that in
nationalist doctrine, some level of praise directed towards the defenders of the spiritual
community must be considered inevitable. In this analysis, then, it is necessary to focus on
policy debate and change as a more distinct indicator of the ‘militarist’ strain of nationalism.

The terms of the debate over militarism in the French nationalist tradition were, as with so
much else, set in the cauldron of modernity that was Paris during the Revolution. Robert
Gildea identifies a difference of opinion within the Jacobin club between Robespierre and
Danton regarding the necessity of recourse to military means to defend the Revolution. 3
Robespierre argued in January 1792 that “War is good for army officers, for men of ambition,
for speculators who profit from these kind of events […] the destruction of the patriot party is
the prime object of all their plots.” He therefore suggests the antithesis of the military and the
nation, fearing—with prophetic reasoning—that mass mobilisation may create a second
Caesar. By contrast, Danton’s hope of the same year that “The commisaires of the Commune
will solemnly invite citizens to arm and march to the defence of the fatherland…” bespeaks a
far more bellicose tendency, which considers the forces of reaction too powerful to be
repulsed diplomatically. These two attitudes may, however, not be so different as Gildea
frames them, perhaps distinguished from each other not by their nationalist militarism (or
lack thereof), but rather by their idea of what a French army would look like. Danton’s notion
of “[inviting] citizens to arm” suggests a nation-at-arms, or a community of equals who by
dint of their citizenship have equal obligations to militarily serve the fatherland.
Robespierre’s antimilitarism assumes that such a model will founder on the rocks of vaulting
ambition, and degenerate into Caesarism—but not that the model is itself undesirable.
Therefore, we can identify a unity in early Jacobin militarist thought, namely that the arms
should be as closely associated with the masses as possible, a situation which was realised
just the next year with the levée en masse. As the National Convention decree of 23 August
1
Jules Michelet. The People. England: Printed for Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846. Web. p. 62.
2
Richard D. Challener. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866-1939. New York, NY, 1952. Columbia
Studies in the Social Sciences ; 579. Web. p. 8.
3
Robert Gildea. The past in French History. New Haven ; London: Yale UP, 1994. Print. p. 134.
1793 read, “From this moment until that in which our enemies shall have been driven from
the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the
armies.”4 In this proclamation, Richard Challener identifies “the theory and practice of what
the twentieth century was to call “total war”,” 5 as a modern centralised state concentrated the
mass of its energies on the object of conquest. It is no surprise, then, that the nationalism of
this period was inextricably linked to militarism, perhaps best indicated in the refrain of La
Marseillaise, written in 1792 and adopted as the national anthem in 1795. The triumphant
horns rise with the words: “To arms, citizens! / Form your battalions, / Let us march, let us
march! / That their impure blood / Should water our fields.”6 The emotional crescendo of
French nationalism was a vision of killing Austrians, Prussians, and other enemies of the
Republic, and a vision that rested on citizen participation in military affairs.

But this nationalist militarism did not last. Michael Rowe argues that national
sentiments emphasised during mobilisation were quickly usurped by more tangible loyalties,
writing that the army “gradually ‘praetorianized’, with soldiers owing allegiance to their
comrades, units, and above all generals so long as these provided for them.”7 Napoleon was
not interested in (and indeed was wary of) emphasising the national status of the army, and
preferred to promote his own cult of personality that would ensure units operated at his beck
and call. This also enabled the recreation of Swiss, Irish and German foreign regiments, and
later an army composed by a majority of non-Frenchmen. The Napoleonic model of a
military discrete from the people was entrenched under the Bourbons and July Monarchy, as
reforms in 1818 and 1832 established a “small, professional, long-service army, inculcated
with what was known as the spirit militaire,”8 and conscripted by means of a draft lottery
(tirage au sort).9 This lottery—which included exemptions for those pursuing clerical and
educational careers, as well as the ability to pay for a substitute—was only a great danger to
the rural poor, for whom the risk of having a son taken off for seven years was tantamount to
his death.10 Weber emphasises that this military system could not in any way be read as a
nationalist institution—for the peasantry, “conscription was seen not as a duty owed to some
larger community or nation, but as a heavy tribute exacted by an oppressive and alien state.” 11
Even the republican nationalist resurgence of 1848 was not to restore the military to a central
pillar of the national ideal, with the assembly voting for the continuation of exemptions and
substitution in the conscription system. The obligation to serve in the army—once considered
the duty and honour of every French citizen—was called in the mid-nineteenth century the

4
Michael Rowe. "The French Revolution, Napoleon, and Nationalism in Europe." The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Nationalism. Oxford UP, 2013. p. 132.
5
Richard D. Challener. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866-1939. p. 3.
6
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "La Marseillaise". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Feb. 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/La-Marseillaise. Accessed 15 February 2023.
7
Michael Rowe. "The French Revolution, Napoleon, and Nationalism in Europe. p. 134.
8
Robert Gildea. The past in French History. p. 137.
9
Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen : The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. London: Chatto &
Windus, 1977. Print. p. 292.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid. p. 294-5.
impôt du sang.12 It is difficult to frame the French nationalism of this period as militarist—
and only the spectre of Prussian militarism would eventually force France out of its slumber.

Napoleon III was among the group who, in the wake of the Prussian victory at
Sadowa in 1866, identified the need for reform in the ossified structures of the French
military.13 However, the proposals of the conference at Saint Cloud that autumn—focusing on
universal male conscription and the end of exemptions—were deeply unpopular with both the
generals and the public. In the end, it was the trauma of war that galvanized the French state
into action—namely the Franco-Prussian catastrophe, during which Léon Gambetta realized
an improvised nation-at-arms by necessity.14 Nationalist militarism was instrumental both in
the war’s inception, and its legacy. In 1870, the Empire reauthorised the singing of La
Marseillaise to boost militarist sentiments. Adolphe Thiers, attempting to induce the corps
législatif to avoid taking Bismarck’s bait and declaring war, “was shouted down by cries of
‘Remember 1840’”, which referred to the statesman’s earlier de-escalation during the Rhine
crisis.15 A clear statement of militarism was thus counterpoised against a historical détente,
evidence of the changing character of nationalism—or of a return to the character of 1792.
After French defeat, this militarism by no means disappeared, but rather became more
pronounced, first in a spirit of denial and then of vengeance. Gildea points to a well-attended
June 1871 military review of 120,000 men as symptomatic of the former, the march-past led
by Marshal MacMahon, whose dubious honour was having been defeated at Sedan. Later,
revanchist militarism became dominant, for example manifesting in Paul Déroulède’s Ligue
de Patriotes, founded 1882, which mourned the land losses of 1871 with “pilgrimages to the
battlefields and other symbolic sites of the war of 1870 as if they were stations of the cross.”16
Policy change was also forthcoming, with a new conscription law in 1872 partially
standardizing obligatory national service.17 This latter stage of national militarism was
checked in its Republican spirit by the disaster of the Commune, which terrified the
bourgeoise and made any notion of a true nation-at-arms a fearful prospect. But a balance
was to be struck between a truly national army—as Gambetta argued would forge French
national identify—and a protective force which could be deployed by the government against
popular unrest.

Thus the militaristic nature of French nationalism, after four-score years of dormancy,
appeared to rear its head again in the Third French Republic. But as per the quip of Marx, it
renaissance form was a farcical fig leaf—covering a reality of weakness—compared to the
untrammelable energies unleashed by the Revolution. Any characterisation of the militarism
of French nationalism that does not consider these changes through time is inadequate:
nationalism, insofar as it was a real political force and not just abstracted intellectual thought,
was moderated and reformed in character by the contingent factors of its context. For the
France of the Revolution, this meant a nation-at-arms. For Napoleon, it meant a universalist
12
Richard D. Challener. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866-1939. p. 14.
13
Ibid. pp. 17-18.
14
Ibid. 28.
15
Robert Gildea. The past in French History. p. 118.
16
Ibid. p. 121.
17
Richard D. Challener. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866-1939. p. 41.
doctrine where militarism was in service of himself and not the nation. For the Bourbons, the
July Monarchy, and even the Second Republic, there remained a reluctance to mobilize the
masses to arms. Only the rise of Prussia, itself having benefitted from the reforms of Stein,
was able to spur its neighbour into militarist nationalism once more.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "La Marseillaise". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Feb.

2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/La-Marseillaise. Accessed 15 February 2023.

Michelet, Jules. The People. England: Printed for Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans,
1846. Web. p. 62.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Challener, Richard D. The French Theory of the Nation in Arms 1866-1939. New York, NY,
1952. Columbia Studies in the Social Sciences ; 579. Web.

Gildea, Robert. The past in French History. New Haven ; London: Yale UP, 1994. Print.

Rowe, Michael. "The French Revolution, Napoleon, and Nationalism in Europe." The Oxford
Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford UP, 2013.

Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen : The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1977. Print.