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What it means to be French (Gallic community)

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https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...areesingh/

EXCERPT: One of the most influential evocations of modern French nationhood was offered by the historian and philologist Ernest Renan in a lecture in 1882. [...] Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? defined the French idea of the nation as an ethical principle, based on shared sacrifices, common memories and erasures, and a collective will to accomplish great things together. The nation, in his celebrated and oft-quoted expression, was “a daily plebiscite”.

This image captured the prevailing notion of Frenchness succinctly. Despite its homage to classic Rousseauist concepts of the general will and popular sovereignty, and to the universalism of the 1789 French Revolution, it was essentially a state-driven vision; its secular and Eurocentric qualities also fitted neatly with the Third Republic’s ideal of citizenship, which excluded France’s colonial subjects from full membership of the political community. Moreover, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? played into established representations of France as a “rational” nation, whose roots lay in René Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”. This Cartesianism was a matter of substance, but also style: “what is not clear” affirmed the writer Rivarol sweepingly in his De l’universalité de la langue française (1784) “is not French”. Hence the French fondness for abstract notions, as the essayist Emile de Montégut observed: “there is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies”. Seen as typically Gallic, too, was a questioning and adversarial tendency: as Fernand Giraudeau put it in Nos moeurs politiques (1868): “we are French, therefore we are born to oppose”.

Indeed, Renan’s ideal remained pivotal because definitions of the nation in modern France were always contested, and his scheme was elastic enough to incorporate contrasting senses of what it meant to be French. [...] Perhaps the most enduring of these fantasies was the myth of France as the grande nation, with a vocation to serve as a guide to humanity, as much through its effective leadership as its cultural and scientific creativity. This sense of exemplarity was shared by conservatives and progressives alike....

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...areesingh/
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