Vincent Denis' gigantic A History of the French Identity 1715-1815 comes under scrutiny from S. Jahan in today's L'Humanité. In it Denis develops a complex story of a state machine that gradually extended its social control until, after the Revolution, an early form of social panaptican had been created. It was the Ancien Regime that created the sans papier but it took 1789 to create a uniform and homogeneous population. Whilst that seems a bit of an exaggeration (France, like most other Western bourgeois 'states' has its cultural and 'ethnic' variations) the concept of nationhood goes less challenged here than it does in Britain.
This is dangerous, and ultimately intensely boring, terrain I know - but the spasms of national (which is meant mediatic) debate which surround St.George's day (for instance this morning on Sky there was a Natfest special called 'Disuntied Kingdom' - - "disunited" geddit?) are things which prompt the thought as to why July 14th (not exactly a national day I suppose - more the evocation of its violent past) is a national festival in France but in Britain there is (rightly) a sense of ennui and futility surrounding the whole tedious charade. Even the debate about 'What Britain means' along with all the handwringing about, yawn, 'Britishness' has become a defining part of what that (elusive because non-existent) entity is.
If one can be bothered to think about nationality, nationhood and all the rest of the weasly lexical field, at all one would have to start from class oppression, examine the educational and linguistic roots of the idea before moving on to war. Because it is their that the nationalists find their bone.
If Britain's identity is propped up by the thought "Two World Wars and one World Cup.", a definite aspect of modern French nationhood is the resistance movement against the fascist occupation. It fills the magazines on a regular basis, is on the TV in one shape or another every week and is remembered in monuments scattered all over the country. (The picture is of the lonely place where Guy Moquet was murdered by the Nazis in Britanny). The 'heroic resistant', idea, the British equivalent is, perhaps, the plucky Spitfire pilot, helps people to forget or not ask questions about the massive collaboration that took place in France during WW2. Its replaying creates or helps sustain the myth that France stood up to tyranny and protected the ideal of liberty. It gives something to believe in no matter how complex the reality was at the time (Guy Moquet was a communist and thus, for the rightist government not wholly the hero he has subsequently become) and no matter how disparate today's politics has evolved from those concepts.
However, as the recent riots in the Paris suburbs showed, the homogeneous and uniform French citizenry has itself become more complex. Further, class divisions are becoming more pronounced and the government's immigration policies are not creating the solid electoral support the UMP anticipated. Hence, Sarkozy's increasingly shrill pleas for 'nation, family and work'. He even used the anniversary of Guy Moquet's death as a platform for such nonsense in a speech under the monument in the picture. It embarassed everybody and his idea that every teacher should read Guy Moquet's last letter to his mother out to their classes every week, was quietly dropped. In Britain we have the same sort of squirm inducing cam from Gordon Brown.
The political class see nationality as a good wheeze - but its one that is fading away. Nationality is a tricky and ever changing narrative to pull off for the weary politicians and their media guard dogs. But that is the trouble when you try to define something that is not that owes its unexistence to that which its excludes from its unself. On the fire with the whole puny debate.
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