‘You need spirit, esprit de corps’, presidential candidate Donald Trump responded evasively at a news conference in 2015 when asked about his ‘plan to improve race relations’ in the USA. In 2018, in a public speech at the White House given during a celebration of the Made in America label, the now President Trump declared:

Why does the US president repetitively insist on this exotic French phrase? The answer is far from superficial, as we will discover by embarking on an eye-opening, three-centuries-long journey. Donald Trump is by no means the first person to invoke the cult of esprit de corps. Since the eighteenth century, sophisticated minds have pondered it: Montesquieu, d‘Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, the Founding Fathers, Sieyès, Mirabeau, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Bergson, Churchill, Orwell, Bourdieu, Deleuze and many others.

As we will see, incantations about esprit de corps are never innocent. The signifier ‘esprit de corps’ is today a leitmotif of meta-military capitalism and managerial discourse, designating the zeal, collective élan and quasi-alchemical loyalty that entrepreneurs are looking for among their employees. The US president might be aware that, according to a Gallup study, ‘disengagement in American organizations accounts for more than $450 billion in lost productivity annually’, with less than a third of employees ‘actively engaged’ in their work. In 2012, US companies spent $46 billion on team-building firms, and some observers are speaking of an ‘economy of esprit de corps‘: ‘Esprit de corps is a concept powerful enough to make soldiers go into battle knowing their odds of survival are slim: think how powerful it can be if harnessed in your marketing organization!‘

But Americans have forgotten that team spirit is only one meaning of espritde corps among many others, including negative ones.