The construction of a national identity: the case of France

Résumé du document

According to Ernest Renan, in Qu'est ce qu'une nation, "Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an end". While the opposite assumption is widespread, nations are in fact recent in the human history. They are younger than their official histories that the nationalists would have us believe. Nations are barely two centuries old. In the modern or rather, political sense of the word, they did not exist before the ideological revolution that began in the 18th century and conferred political power on the people. From that time on, the nation referred to a community united by different links, like the allegiance to the same monarch, a common religion, culture or language. So nations belong to the modernity and are not, like in the eyes of the nationalists, a natural and eternal way of classifying men.

Extraits

[...] Can we already speak about a national identity interiorized and shared by French people'? Actually, it seems to be difficult to speak about the French nation as a concrete entity in 1789. Indeed, at the time of the Revolution, the official symbols of the nation were not yet established. French was only spoken by a minority and a small part of those who lived in the territory, now called France, thought of themselves as being French. According to Michael Billig, "The nation was not a concrete entity but a project to be attained. [...]

[...] In fact, according to Hobsbawm, nations and national identities are fabricated. As we said before, for him, nations belong to a historically quite recent period. So nations as a natural and eternal form of identification are a myth. In reality, nationalism and states precede nations. Nations do not make state but it is the state, which makes the nations. He emphasizes the part of artefact, which enters into the fabrication of nations. Indeed, he quotes Gellner who claims that "nationalism which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them". [...]

[...] They are supposed to precede the age of nationalism and nation-states. Michael Billig quotes Roland Barthes who argues that ideology speaks with "the Voice of Nature". According to him, ideology appears to those who inhabit it as a natural word. Ideology and nationalism try to make people forget that their world is an historical construction. That is why according to Ernest Renan, forgetting is an essential element in the construction of a nation. Nations, through their national histories, valorise their antiquity and forget their historical newness. [...]

[...] So the French national history of the Third Republic started with the Gauls, carried on with the kings and led to the Revolution. It also put forward special moments and heroes. With the Third Republic, Jeanne d'Arc and Vercingetorix, who symbolize the resistance for the national cause, became national heroes. Conquests of history are legitimate and dramas are forgotten. The Third Republic also tried to weld this disparate population groups through the unification of the language. According to Hobsbawm, a national language has to be codified and introduced instead of a mosaic of spoken idioms, downgraded to dialects. [...]

[...] Beside the military service, school was the first mean to inculcate the national identity in France. In fact, the founders of the Third Republic gave a new role to the school: to form the national unity. The school became compulsory in 1881. First school tried to realize the unity of the nation through the learning of French language. The republican school imposed the French on the pupils who spoke patois. The republic was an other common reference spread by school. [...]