Nationalism and Culture (32 page)

In an address of one of the Jacobin clubs to the mother society in Paris occurs the statement: "The Frenchman has no other divinity but the nation, the fatherland!" The fatherland, however, was "the new king with seven hundred and forty-nine heads," as Proudhon called it—the new state, which served the nation as makeshift. For Jacobinism the state became the new national Providence, hence its fanatical zeal for the "one and indivisible Republic." For it would not do for others to dabble in the

^ A. Mathiez; "Les Origines des Cultes Revolutionalres," Paris, 1904.

trade of the new Providence. Declared Danton, in September, 1793, from the rostrum of the Convention:

They say that there are persons among us who are striving to dismember France. Let us eh'minate these inharmonious ideas by proclaiming the death penalty for their originators. France must be an indivisible whole. There must be unity of representation. The citizens of Marseilles wish to grasp the hands of the citizens of Dunkirk. I demand the death penalty for those who would destroy the unity of France, and I move the Convention that we declare as the foundation of government unity of representation and administration.

Legislation, army, public education, press, clubs, assemblies—all must serve to perfect the spiritual drill of the citizens, to make every brain conform to the new political religion. No exception was made of any movement, not even that of the Girondists, who had been reviled as federalists simply because their opponents knew such an accusation would arouse the patriots most violently against them. The Girondists had contributed to the deification of the nation no less than the men of the Mountain j had not one of their best-known leaders, Isnard, given expression to this sentiment?—"The French have become the elect people of the earth. Let us be concerned that their attitude shall justify their new destiny!" There was already in the minds of the representatives of "la grande nation" a premonition of Napoleon's victories.

A new priesthood had put in its appearance—the modern popular assembly. To it had been assigned the task of transmitting the "will of the nation" to the people, just as the earlier priests had transmitted to them "the will of God." Undoubtedly the revolution had swept away a rotten social order with an iron broom and given the people of Europe many glimpses of light for the future j but in the political field its results were, in spite of all revolutionary phraseology, entirely reactionary. It had strengthened the power idea anew, infused new life into prostrate authority, and chained man's will to freedom to a new religious dogma, against which it was sure to break its young wings.

The absolutism of royalty had fallen j but only to give place to a new absolutism even more implacable than the "divine right" of monarchy. The absolute principle of monarchy lay outside the citizen's sphere of activity, and was supported solely by the "grace of God," to whose will it allegedly gave expression. The absolute principle of the nation, however, made the least of mortals a co-bearer of the common will, even while it denied him the right to interpret this according to his own understanding. Imbued by this thought every citizen from now on forged his own link in the chain of dependence which formerly some other had forged for him. The sovereignty of the nation steered everyone into the same path.

absorbed every individual consideration, and replaced personal freedom by equality before the law.

Not without reason were Moses' tables of the law set up in the Convention as a symbol of the national will. Not without reason there hung upon the walls of the Assembly the fasces and ax of the lictors as the emblem of the One and Indivisible Republic. Thus was the man sacrificed to the citizen, individual reason to the alleged will of the nation. When the leading men of the revolution, animated by Rousseau's spirit, strove to destroy all natural associations in which the needs and impulses of men sought expression, they destroyed the root of all true association, transformed the people into the mob, and introduced that fateful process of social uprooting which was later speeded up and sharpened by the growing development of capitalistic economy.

Just as the "will of God" has always been the will of the priests who transmitted it and interpreted it to the people, so the "will of the nation" could be only the will of those who happened to have the reigns of public power in their hands and were, consequently, in a position to transmit and interpret the "common will" in their own way. This phenomenon need not necessarily be traced to inherent hypocrisy. Much more reasonably can we in this instance speak of "deceived deceivers"j for the more deeply the enunciators of the national will are convinced of the sacredness of their mission, the more disastrous are the results springing from their inherent honesty. There is deep significance in Sorel's remark: "Robespierre took his part seriously, but his part was an artificial one."

In the name of the nation the Convention outlawed the Girondists and sent their leaders to the scaflroldj in the name of the nation Robespierre with Danton's help removed the Hebertists and the so-called "enrages" j in the name of the nation Robespierre and Saint-Just made the Dantonists "sneeze into the sack"j in the name of the nation the men of Thermidor removed Robespierre and his adherents j in the name of the nation Bonaparte made himself Emperor of the French.

Vergniaud maintained that the revolution was "a Saturn who swallowed his own children." This could be said with much more reason of the mystical principle of the sovereignty of the nation, whose priests constantly brought new sacrifices to it. In fact, the nation became a Moloch which could never be satisfied. Just as with all gods, here, too, religious veneration led to its inevitable result: the nation all, man nothing!

Everything appertaining to the nation took on a sacred character. In the smallest villages altars were erected to the fatherland and sacrifices were offered. The holidays of the patriots came to have the character of religious feasts. There were hymns, prayers, sacred symbols, solemn processions, patriotic relics, shrines of pilgrimage—all to proclaim the glory of the fatherland. From now on the "glory of the nation" was spoken

of as formerly the "glory of God." One deputy solemnly called the Declaration of the Rights of Man the "catechism of the nation." The Contrat Social of Rousseau became the "Bible of Liberty." Enthusiastic believers compared the Mountain of the Convention with Mount Sinai, on which Moses received the sacred tablets of the law. The Marseillaise became the Te Deum of the new religion. An intoxication of belief had overspread the land. Every critical consideration was submerged in the flood of feeling.

On November 5, 1793, Marie Joseph Chenier, brother of the unhappy poet, Andre Chenier, said to the assembled Convention:

If you have freed yourselves from all prejudices to prove yourselves the more worthy of the French nation, whose representatives you are, then you know how on the ruins of the dethroned superstitions can be founded the one natural reh'gion, having neither sects nor mysteries. Her preachers are our legislators, her priests our executive officers of the state. In the temple of this religion humanity will ofiFer incense only on the altar of our country, the mother of us all and our divinity.

In the sultry atmosphere of this new faith modern nationalism was born, and became the religion of the democratic state. And the more deeply the citizen venerated his own nation, the wider became the abyss which separated it from all other nations, the more contemptuously he looked upon all who were not so fortunate as to be of the elect. It is only a step from the "nation" to the "Great Nation"—and that not alone in France.

The new religion had not only its own ritual, its inviolable dogmas, its holy mission, but also the terrible orthodoxy characteristic of all dogmatism, which will permit no opinion but the one opinion to find voice J for the will of the nation is the revelation of God, intolerant of all doubt. He who dares to doubt for all that, and to pursue considerations contrary to the expression of the national will, is a social leper and must be weeded out from the communion of the faithful. Saint-Just proclaimed gloomily before the Convention:

One dare not hope that things will improve so long as one foe of Freedom breathes. Not only the traitors, but also the lukewarm and the indifferent, everyone who takes no part in the republic and moves no finger for it. After the French people has announced its will everything which is contrary to its will stands outside the sovereignty of the nation; and who stands outside the sovereign is his enemy.

The young fanatic who had such a strong influence on Robespierre did not leave open to doubt what he meant by this enmity—"One must rule those with iron whom one cannot rule with justice." But one could

not rule with justice over men who could see the nation's will otherwise than as Robespierre and the Jacobins explained it. Hence, one must needs resort to iron. The sharp logic of the guillotine could hardly be justified more explicitly.

This fanatic logic of Saint-Just was but the inevitable result of his absolute faith in his point of view. Every absolutism is based on fixed norms, and must for that reason act as the sworn enemy of any social development which opens new outlooks on life and calls new forms of the community into being. Behind every absolutist idea grins the mask of the inquisitor and the judge of heretics.

The sovereignty of the nation means tyranny as surely as does the sovereignty of God or that of the king. If formerly opposition to the sacred person of the monarch was the most abominable of all crimes, so now any opposition to the sacred majesty of the nation became the sin against the Holy Ghost of the common will. In both instances, the hangman was the executive instrument of a despotic power which felt called upon to guard the dead dogma. Before its soulless cruelty every creative thought had to founder, every human feeling bleed to death.

Robespierre, of whom Condorcet maintains that he had "neither a thought in his brain nor a feeling in his heart," was the man of the dead formula. In place of a soul he had his "principles." Preferably, he would have founded the whole republic on the single formula of virtue. But this virtue did not have root in the personal righteousness of the peoplej it was a bloodless phantom hovering over men like the spirit of God hovering over creation. Nothing is more cruel and heartless than virtue, and most cruel and heartless is that abstract virtue which is not founded upon a living need, but has its roots in "principles" and must be continually protected by chemical means from becoming moth-eaten.

Although Jacobinism had overthrown monarchy, it became fanatically enamored of the monarchic idea, which it strengthened greatly by anchoring it to the political theology of Rousseau. Rousseau's doctrine culminated m the complete merging of man in "the higher necessity" of a metaphysical idea. Jacobinism had undertaken the task of transmuting this monstrous doctrine into life and quite logically had reached the dictatorship of the guillotine} which in turn smoothed the way for the saber dictatorship of General Bonaparte who, on his part, risked everything in order to develop this new state idea to its highest perfection. Man a machine—not in the sense of La Mettrie, but as the end product of a political religion which undertook to shape everything human according to the same pattern, and in the name of equality raised conformity to a principle.

Napoleon, the laughing heir of the great revolution, who had taken ove*- from the Jacobins the man-devouring machine of the centralized state and the doctrine of the will of the nation, attempted to develop the

State institutions into a flawless system in which accident should have no place. What he needed was not men, but chessmen, who would obey every turn of his whim and unconditionally submit to that "higher necessity" whose executive instruments they felt themselves to be. Men in the ordinary sense were not usable for thisj only citizens, parts of the machine, members of the state. "Thought is the ruler's chief enemy," Napoleon once said, and this was no chance figure of speech j he understood the truth of the words in their deepest meaning. What he needed was not men who think, but men who have their thinking done for them, men who offer themselves up when "destiny" speaks.

Napoleon dreamed of a state in which, above all, there existed no distinction between the civil and the military power: the whole nation an army, every citizen a soldier. Industry, agriculture, administration, were only conceived as parts of this mighty state body which, divided into regiments and commanded by officers, would obey the slightest pressure of the imperial will without friction, without resistance. The transmutation of the "Great Nation" into a gigantic unit in which the independent activity of the individual no longer had roomj which worked with the exactness of a machine and, throbbing w^ith the dead rhythm of its own motion, unfeelingly obeyed the will of him who had set it in motion—this was Napoleon's political aim. And with iron persistency he pursued it and tried to give it life. Quite obsessed by this delusion, he strove to exclude every possibility which might lead to the formation of an independent opinion. Hence, his bitter fight against the press and all other means of expressing public thought. He said: "The printing press is an arsenal which must not be made available to the generality. Books must only be printed by persons who possess the confidence of the government."

In the brain of this terrible man everything was transformed into figures; only numbers decide; statistics become the foundation af the new statecraft. The emperor demanded of his counselors not only an exact statement and record of all material and technical resources of the whole country; he also demanded that "statistics of morals" should be kept, in order that he might at all times be informed of the most secret agitations among his subjects. And Fouche, that uncanny, specterlike snooper, who saw with a thousand eyes and heard with a thousand ears, whose soul w-as just as icy as that of his master, became the statistician of "public morals," which he registered by police methods, being quite well aware that his own movements also were watched by unknown spies and recorded in a separate register.