Language and race

Is there something like a ‘racial memory’ in Natasha Rostov, who can perform a Russian folk dance without ever having been taught the steps? Tolstoy almost seems to imply as much. In the literature of the nineteenth century, the plain people are the guardians of the authentic cultural heritage of the nation, passing it on informally from generation to generation, in settings that are as intimate, as physical as the suckling of infants by their mothers and the acquisition of the native language in that most intimate of circumstances. We repeatedly encounter, in the nineteenth century, narrative themes where national continuity is presented as some demotic-popular inheritance, persisting unnoticed below the level of the governing elite.

This is a Romantic continuation of the ‘democratic primitivism’ we have traced in a previous chapter. While aristocrats were celebrating their unmixed ‘blue blood’, democrats countered by taking pride in their descent from the nation's tribal ancestors. This is already noticeable in a ‘dig’ that Sieyès took, in Qu’est-ce le Tiers État? against those aristocrats who claimed that they owned France by virtue of their descent from the Frankish conquerors. Sieyès countered: ‘Sons of the Gauls and the Romans! Why don't we send these self-proclaimed heirs of the Franks back to the forests of Franconia? Our blood is worth as much as theirs.’ From that moment onwards, there was a tendency to see the ‘Franks’ as the importers of aristocratic privilege, whereas the true, democratic traditions of France were the secret possession of the Gaulish-descended bedrock of the population, oppressed by church and nobility, but organized in communes and finally vindicated in the French Revolution. That biological vision was already present in a early generation of post-Revolution Romantic historians, such as the Thierry brothers and Jules Michelet; in 1829 the ethnographer W.F. Edwards even tried to put these historical theses to the test by trying to assess, through cranial measurement, which parts of the French population had Gaulish ancestry.

The ‘Gaulish myth’ (affectionately mocked nowadays in the comic strips of Astérixle Gaulois) became dominant in the mid-nineteenth century, specifically with the monomaniac historian Henri Martin, who saw in every admirable aspect of French history the persistence of the true democratic spirit of the ancient Gauls.