Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
- Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
- 1 Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
- 3 ‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 4 The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France
- 5 Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 6 The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
- Conclusion: Ensemblance
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Esprit de Corps: A Timeline
- Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps
- 1 Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 ‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
- 3 ‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 4 The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France
- 5 Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 6 The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century
- Conclusion: Ensemblance
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Mask of Reason: The Dialectics of Particularism and Patriotism
Could actual personal merit be of greater value than centuries of noble ancestors? Such was the contention of Jean Soret in 1756, in his Essai sur les moeurs. He added that esprit de corps was a bad emotion:
The esprit de corps, like the particular spirit [l‘esprit particulier], ought only to be reason; but passions take the mask of reason, and enjoy its rights […] Reason says that to be appreciated in society requires a sound judgment, a righteous heart, a solid merit, and above all great modesty. It is sad that reason is belied by experience.
The intriguing hypothesis of a rational esprit de corps was here immediately dismissed as a rhetorical fiction. Societies were not rational, only a few people could be so. It was becoming common in the middle of the eighteenth century for an author to consider that individual reason was the highest human value while expressing moralistic contempt towards social mores. Because civilised humans were biased, there was much doubt regarding their collective capacity to act accordingly to reason instead of partisanship or pride.
Soret alluded to another important value of the century, experience, which confirmed that among human societies passions were more powerful than reason. In this context, what exactly was esprit de corps? ‘Almost always a spirit of ambition, pride, illusion and vertigo. The esprit de corps is the mania of false spirits or weak spirits.’ This unnuanced claim represented another stage in the radicalisation of the critique against esprit de corps: not only a political critique but also a psychological one. Stubborn faithfulness to a group was likely to be a manifestation of self-deception. Behind apparently selfless attitudes such as dedication to a cause or discipline, the sceptical moralist detected irrational drives.
Yet a different idea was to become more influential before the French Revolution; it was a kind of synthesis between the national individualism of the Philosophes and the Jesuits’ esprit de corps. This idea would claim that patriotism and devotion to the nation were an even healthier and grander form of esprit de corps than that encountered in smaller communities.
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- Information
- EnsemblanceThe Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps, pp. 61 - 86Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020