The Undivided Past (10 page)

While de Gaulle and Braudel believed the French nation first began to take shape in the nebulous “depths of the past,” historians have been unwilling to accept that such collective identities can be discerned so vaguely, or so far away in time. Egypt under the pharaohs may have resembled a
nation, with a shared sense of history and a precise
territorial attachment, but there was no accompanying sense of public culture or collective identity. As for the ancient Greeks, their limited pan-Hellenic aspirations, embodied in their shared language,
Homeric epics, and Olympic games, foundered on the disputatious reality of their fiercely independent city-states. Similar objections have been made to claims that the Sumerians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Aramaeans, the Philistines, the Hittities, and the Elamites were ancient nations, or that the Sinhalese, the
Japanese, or the Koreans might be so described during the first millennium of the Common Era.
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Only in the case of
Israel does it seem plausible to discern a recognizably ancient nation, with its precise (though disputed) territoriality, its creation and ancestry myths, its shared historical memories of the Exodus, the Conquest, and wars with the Philistines, its strong sense of exceptionalism and providential destiny, its self-definition against a hostile “other,” and its common
laws and public culture. These were, and are, essential themes in the unfinished history of the
Jews, but this example has also furnished ever since “a developed model of what it means to be a nation.” From this perspective, the
Bible was not just concerned (in the
New Testament) with the collective religious identities (and confrontations) of the saved and the damned; it also provided (in the
Old Testament) the prototype for the self-imaginings and collective identities (and confrontations) that were essential to becoming and being a nation.
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Notwithstanding Israel’s subsequent defeats, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the resulting dispersals and diaspora of the Jewish people, their vivid and compelling narrative of the making and maintenance of “the original nation” furnished a powerful biblical precedent for what would become, after the fall of the
Roman Empire, the peoples and polities of medieval
Christian Europe.
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As strains of national consciousness emerged
from new communities forming across the continent, the example of Israel was constantly invoked, and by the thirteenth century different groups of people were being referred to in terms of their specific national identities.
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When the emperor
Frederick II wrote to his fellow rulers in 1241 warning of the Mongol threat, he enumerated the qualities of the varied continental peoples—or nations—as follows:
Germany was “fervent in arms”; France was “the mother and nurse of chivalry”;
Spain was “warlike and bold”; and England was “fertile and protected by its fleet.” He also distinguished the lands at the extremes of what was then the known world, describing “bloodstained
Ireland, active Wales, watery
Scotland and glacial Norway.” These
stereotypes may have exaggerated the autonomy and territoriality of these nascent nations, but they suffice to suggest that such identities were already in the thirteenth century an important element in a ruler’s relation to his subjects, and in the assertion of power over his neighbors.
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Nor was this sense of secular solidarity exclusively confined to those who governed; it was also a collective sentiment, with medieval peoples expressing the belief that they belonged to nations and using the words “people” and “nation” in their Latin forms (“gens” and “natio”) interchangeably.
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Such was “the medieval construction of the world,” of which the
chronicler
Regino of Prüm had claimed as early as 900 CE that “the various nations differ in descent, custom, language and law.”
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Distinctiveness may not have been everywhere so pronounced, but it was certainly present in England by the reign of
Alfred the
Great when the joining of the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia meant that one collective identity of Englishness first came recognizably into being. Promoted by the monarch, who drew on the precedents of ancient Israel, as well as a shared sense of the past, a common religion and language, and opposition to the pagan and predatory Danes, this English national solidarity was readily and widely shared.
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And despite the traumas of the Norman invasion of 1066, it would reassert itself soon after, being fully reestablished by the fourteenth century. Just as Alfred the Great had drawn on the
Venerable Bede’s revealingly entitled
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(or
Nation
), as well as the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, in promoting a shared sense of English national identity, so twelfth century writers lent historical validation to the same development, among them
William of Malmesbury,
Henry of Huntingdon,
William of Newburgh, and
Geffrei Gaimar, who created an interpretation of the past that was “triumphantly English and almost teleologically English-centred.” They would be followed by
Geoffrey Chaucer, who was “the first writer in English explicitly to claim status as a national poet,” and by growing declarations that English was the natural national
language. The result was that by the early fourteenth century more Englishmen than ever before felt themselves to be part of a national community.
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By then, the continental analog to this revived English sense of “collective solidarity” and “national feeling” existed in many of the medieval realms.
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In
France, Kings
Louis VI and
Louis IX were able to draw on a growing sense of national consciousness, reinforced by the historical claim that all the Franks traced a common descent from the Trojans, which was also expressed in their great national epic
Chanson de Roland.
The same was true among the Germans, many of whom shared a common kingdom (as well as their own Trojan ancestors) and also took pride in their superior national cultural achievements. As the poet
Walther von der Vogelweide put it around 1200, “I have seen many countries, and I liked to observe the best of them,” but
Germany was “above all of them. From the Elbe to the Rhine and from there to the frontier of
Hungary certainly the best people live whom I have been acquainted with in all the world.”
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The “collective character” known as the nation, often reinforced by
mythical accounts of common origins, could likewise be found in medieval Poland and
Denmark, and by the late thirteenth century the word “patria” had acquired a recognizably modern meaning, denoting not only a delineated national
territory but also a loyalty to it as one’s fatherland.
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As with King Alfred’s battles against the Danes, these burgeoning national identities were often forged, defined, and strengthened as the result of conflict with an aggressive enemy or “other.” In the case of England, it was the wars against the Welsh and the Scots that produced the most strident, abusive, and self-congratulatory
writings in praise of Englishness. “The English,” remarked one contemporary author, “like angels are always conquerors.… As though a swine should resist the valour of the lion, the filthy Scots attack England.” “The two nations,” commented Archbishop
FitzRalph of Armagh, “are always opposed to one another from traditional hatred, the Irish and Scots being always enemies of the English.”
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Demonizing the enemy has always worked wonders at galvanizing self-identity, and during the twelfth century this solidarity morphed into what later became a characteristic mixture of “superiority and xenophobia” on the part of the English nation.
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And it was in response to such arrogance and hostility that in
1290 the Treaty of Birgham insisted that Scotland was “separate and divided from England,” and that in 1320 the Scots proclaimed their collective identity against the English in the
Declaration of Arbroath. Made on behalf of the whole
Scottorum nacio
, it was an eloquent affirmation of the Scots’ solidarity and distinctiveness, as one people under their own king.
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But no national animosity in Europe during an age of growing rivalries could rival that between the English and the French. In his chronicle of the reign of
Louis VI, the abbot
Suger of Saint-Denis recorded that in 1214 the king had appealed to “tota Francia” to protect the nation against the English (and the German) invaders, and celebrated his subsequent victory at
Bouvines as follows: “neither in our days, nor in far-gone ancient times, has
France achieved anything more illustrious than this, nor has she with the united forces of her members proclaimed more gloriously the honour of her power than she at one and the same time triumphed over the [Holy] Roman Emperor and the English king.” The
Hundred Years War between England and France further cemented these solidarities, as victories (especially
Crécy, Poitiers, and
Agincourt for the English, and
Orléans and
Castillon for the French) became defining moments in the developing national narratives, from which each side anointed its emblematic heroes and heroines (respectively the Black Prince and
Henry V, and
Joan of Arc and King Charles V). But this was merely a violently intensified version of a now familiar pattern: national identity defined not only intrinsically, in terms of one nation’s special
virtues, but also relationally, in opposition to the negative characteristics and stereotypes ascribed to “the other,” which must be confronted and fought and vanquished, as in earlier times.
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As royal authority was solidified across large parts of western Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, collective national feelings and awarenesses seemed correspondingly to strengthen.
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“All nations,” wrote the German theologian and astrologer
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim in 1526, “have their own special customs and habits that distinguish them from one another, and can be recognized by their discourse, manner of speaking, conversation, favourite food and drink, the way they go about things, the way they love and hate or show anger and malice, and in other ways besides,” and he went on to enumerate natural characteristics in a manner reminiscent of the emperor
Frederick II nearly three hundred years before. Unusually, Agrippa von Nettesheim tended to be least charitable toward his own nation, but it was more common to sing the praises of one’s own homeland, as did the Englishman
Richard Mulcaster in 1582: “I love
Rome, but London better,” he wrote. “I favour
Italy but England more, I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.… I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, whether with more pith or greater pleasure, than our English tongue is.”
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This cultural sense of competing national superiority was complemented by growing notions of separateness and uniqueness, as well as by feelings of providential approval. The result, as the Frenchman
Claude Seyssel remarked in the early sixteenth century, was that “all nations and reasonable men prefer to be governed by men of their own country and nation—who know their habits, laws and customs, and share the same
language and life-style as them—rather than by strangers.”
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As in medieval times, war was a major means of firing national consciousness and its shared sense of identity, by demonizing a belligerent and predatory “other.” During the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I, the enemy of England ceased to be the French and became the Spanish, and Gloriana identified herself personally with the English nation in battle, as in her stirring “Armada speech” at Tilbury, when she poured “foul scorn” on any foreigner
who would dare to try to invade her borders, and in what became known as her “Ditchley” portrait, which depicts the monarch standing over a map of her realm. At the same time,
Shakespeare’s history plays promoted an enhanced sense of English national identity:
John of Gaunt in
Richard II
, acclaiming “this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,…this blessed plot, this earth, this realm this England”; and in
Henry V
, the eponymous monarch, looking back on the earlier wars with France, urging “cry God for Harry, England and St
George!”
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Henry V
was also full of the anti-Celtic
stereotypes in existence since the twelfth century: traitorous and opportunistic Scots, garrulous Welshmen, and drunken, brutal Irishmen.
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In the same way, and in response, the Spanish came to feel their own intensified sense of collective identity, well expressed in these words spoken at the time of the Armada: “if the honour of Spain is at stake, what Spaniard would fail to seek the fame and glory of his nation?” By the reign of Philip II, such feelings were widely shared among Spaniards.
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Under the secular Great Power system ushered in by the Peace of
Westphalia of 1648, this sense of nations in conflict became both more geographically widespread and emotionally charged. Beginning in 1688, and following the Glorious Revolution, there had been a “Second
Hundred Years War” between England and France, a succession of increasingly far-flung conflicts fed by the bitter personal animosity between King
William III and King
Louis XIV, and culminating in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which pitted the venerable Hanoverian George III against the upstart emperor. Military aggression fed mutual stereotyping, with the
French depicting the British as vulgar, uncultured, perfidious, and anarchic, and the English (and increasingly the British) regarding the French as the cringing, overtaxed, frogs-legs-eating subjects of a diminutive despot. The result was that for every virtue a nationalist might claim for his own side, a corresponding vice was ascribed to the other.
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But these Franco-British antagonisms were only the most intense and protracted instances of a development overspreading the continent, as
Prussia, Russia, and Spain were caught up in conflicts during the eighteenth century, with the result, in each case, of a heightened sense of national identity, focused on the person of the sovereign,
whether Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, or the Spanish Bourbons.
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