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
6 - The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century
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 Moral Empire: The Persisting Ambiguity of Esprit de Corps in French
In the first decades of the twentieth century, two centuries after the birth of the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, many French uses of the phrase were still definitional, as if one of its attractions was its challenge to interpretation, or the possibility it offered for presenting an agonistic view on the relationship between groups and individuals. The war of connotations, webs of belief and nuances continued, for example in 1902 in a memoir about Napoleon:
An esprit de corps contained within wise limits is appropriate; it can, as in the case of uniforms, have excellent effects, be a barrier against moral failings, develop in the officer the feeling of solidarity, raise him towards ever greater perfection, give him a clearer feeling for his duty. The spirit of caste [l‘esprit de caste] has contrary effects: a spirit of selfishness and isolation, it manifests itself as a disdain for the rest of humanity, towards whom he then believes he can act as he pleases […] The esprit de corps confers only duties; but the esprit de caste, privileges.
A century after Louis de Bonald and his distinction between esprit de corps and esprit de parti, an author insisted again that ‘esprit de corps’ should have a good denotation only, proposing a new term for the negative connotation. Those were distinctions about distinctions – corps versus caste, after corps versus parti – a rhetorical way of separating the wheat from the chaff. This particular intertwining of military and political discourse comes as no surprise in a book about Napoleon.
Yet contrary to the UK and the USA, where esprit de corps became in the twentieth century a corporate cure, esprit de corps in France was still sometimes identified as a poison, or both a cure and a poison, a kind of pharmakon. For instance, a discussion about solidarity among police forces held at the Sénat in 1902 hesitated between ‘the disadvantages of esprit de corps’ and its ‘advantages’. It was not rare to see esprit de corps still associated with ‘intolerance, exclusivism’. Most debaters felt the ambivalence of ‘the esprit de corps, sometimes strengthening, and sometimes thwarting the feeling of our general duties’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- EnsemblanceThe Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps, pp. 166 - 193Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020