‘A happy phrase‘: The Specificity of English Uses of Esprit de Corps

Anglophone references to esprit de corps in the twentieth century were not only frequent and popular, but also predominantly laudatory. Most English users of the phrase forgot about the pejorative political meaning invented by the Philosophes in the eighteenth century. If the phrase ‘esprit de corps’ continued to thrive in several discourses – military, political, intellectual and theoretical, corporate, and in sport – it was with a meaning that was increasingly generic and standard, often close to the general idea of team spirit, often with a bellicose twist. To be fair, this reduction of sense was never unanimously satisfying, and esprit de corps continued to be ungraspable for those who wanted to theorise it scrupulously: ‘The expression esprit de corps covers so much ground that its meaning can no more be catalogued in a compact little definition.‘

Broadly speaking, the dominant English appropriation of the term was now much more about commanded collaboration than bias or partisanship. John Rowe, the president of a large American insurance company, explained that ’ “esprit de corps” […] visualizes, as no idiom of our own does, the essence of co-operation’. We must read in full his eloquent ‘practical philosophy’ article on esprit de corps, published in 1929 in a local newspaper of the western state of Washington: