Brian Sudlow - National Identities in France

The seeds of inspiration for this book were planted in my mind by a visit to the Roman Catholic diocesan archives in the town of Angers in Anjou, France, in 2008. There, among other activities, I delved into the writings and orations of Charles-Emile Freppel, a nineteenth-century French dput of legitimist leanings and a Catholic bishop of ultramontanist tendency who had presided over the Diocese of Angers and the Institut catholique associated with his episcopal see. In the midst of the religious wars which were triggered by Republican and anticlerical legislation in the France of the 1880s, it was Freppel who most vigorously condemned the second eviction of the Benedictine monks from the Abbey of Solemnes. In a speech to the National Assembly in June 1882, the bishop portrayed this action as an offence against the rights of the monks as French citizens. It was a pointed attack, attempting to hoist in their own petard the anticlerical elements within the chamber. More surprisingly, however, whenever in his discourse Freppel mentioned the words citoyens franais , Republicans and Radicals across the chamber called out raucously, citoyen romains, citoyens romains!

Having read this speech I sat back in my chair and wondered. If it was fascinating to find one of the most able protagonists of what was then known as the parti clrical defending the Benedictines on the basis of their human rights, it was perhaps of even greater fascination to find French Republicans and Radicals using the blunt stick of national identity to gerrymander their way toward excluding monks from the unity of the French nation.

The polysemic nature of national identity and nationalism, of which this incident in the French National Assembly is but one example, was at the heart of the early-career researchers conference at the University of Reading, Great Britain, in February 2010, where the chapters in this book began their life as conference papers. The conference had invited early-career academics to explore the morphologies of nationalism and national identities and the various ways in which these concepts are interiorized, adapted, mutated, discarded, or internally disputed across ideological divides. While national identities and nationalisms belong, respectively, to the discrete fields of cultural studies and political science or history, the many convergences which arise from their proper discourses justify their close association for the purposes of a methodology which is not hidebound by overly rigid distinctions. The findings of the conference underlined once again that the popular assumption automatically classing nationalism as a largely right-wing concern occludes the many ways in which nationalism and national identities have contributed to social imaginaries and political or cultural discourses across the rightleft spectrum. The clash between Freppel and the Republicans and Radicals is no isolated case.

The critical grounds on which such reflections could be undertaken are rich and varied. Eric Hobsbawms concept of invented traditions has long been suggestive of how such a thing as the modern nation-state could vest itself in the creatively assembled, albeit quite unmerited, robes of a dim-and-distant past.1 In plotting the ground on which nationalisms are located, Anthony D. Smiths work has shown among other things the uses and the limitations of the distinction of ethnic and civic nationalism.2 Meanwhile, Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities portrays the imitative process which brought about nation-building in former colonies of the western powers; in this regard Andersons view of the genesis of nationalisms differs from Ernest Gellners, which insists on the convergence of nationalism and the needs of political homogenization arising through industrialization, and from Elie Kedouries, which focuses on the contribution of the Enlightenment to the rise of nationalist consciousness.3