Not Only in the Military: First Occurrences of the Phrase in Print

The idiomatic phrase esprit de corps first appeared in print several decades earlier than was generally believed when I started my research. A French reference dictionary, the Trésor de la langue française, in its etymological and historical entry on the word corps, indicated: ‘1771 esprit de corps (Turgot, OEuvres, éd. G. Schelle, t. 3, p. 521)’. The nineteenth-century major dictionary Littré quoted nothing older than Rousseau's L’Émile (1762): ‘It is not only in the military that one acquires the esprit de corps’, unarguably an important quote, of which more below. A recent source refers imprecisely to Voltaire (1767). Although it is difficult to identify with precision the birth of an old locution, what follows in this chapter offers new and significant information.

Before esprit de corps became idiomatic, between 1730 and 1762, the phrase esprit du corps appeared in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, published in 1721. This immediately famous epistolary fiction of moeurs was seen as the epitome of a literary genre probably invented by Jean-Paul Marana and imitated thereafter. It consisted in the technique of depicting the mores and manners of a society or nation through the eyes of a fictitious stranger. This literary vogue allowed the then immense francophone readership to discover the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, perhaps for the first time in print in 1732, in an imitation of the Lettres persanes, of which more below.

The narrative context of Montesquieu's reference to esprit de corps was a conversation between two ambitious Parisians in search of intellectual power by way of cunning rather than talent. Their strategy was to appear in high-society salons armed with rehearsed elements of wit, meant to be uttered as if brilliantly improvised: