The Undivided Past (15 page)

In 1882, just over a decade after
France’s humiliating defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War, and less than ten years before the birth of
Charles de Gaulle, another Frenchman, the theologian
Ernest Renan, delivered a celebrated address at the Sorbonne entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in which he took up several familiar
definitions of nineteenth-century nationhood and national identity, and subjected all of them—except one—to a devastating critique. To begin with, he insisted, a nation was not the same thing as a race, since all modern nations were
ethnically mixed:
Germany was Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic, and even France was peopled by those of Celtic, Iberian, and Germanic ancestry. Nor, Renan went on, was a nation the same as its
language: otherwise how could the separation of the United States from the United Kingdom, or the South American colonies from
Spain, be accounted for—or, conversely, the unity of Switzerland despite its linguistic variety? Nor could a common
religion be considered an essential, unifying national basis, since confessional boundaries and national boundaries rarely coincided or aligned. As for “common interests,” a customs union or Zollverein was scarcely the same thing as a “patria” or fatherland. And as for “
geography,” the
“living space” of
nations, as embodied in their allegedly “natural frontiers,” had always been subject to change. Having demolished these inadequate definitions of nationhood, Renan advanced his own, and it bears a striking similarity to that which
de Gaulle would later espouse and evoke. A nation, Renan insisted, was above all a state of mind and an expression of the collective will: drawing from the past a shared “store of memories,” especially of “the sacrifices that have been made”; displaying in the present “the agreement, the desire to continue a life in common”; and in looking to the future, accepting and recognizing “the sacrifices the nation is prepared to make” again, as it has done before.
¹²⁸

Before discussing the five faulty definitions of nationhood that he would debunk prior to advancing his own, Renan had bravely observed that “forgetting, and I would even say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and thus the advances in historical study are often threatening to a nationality.” (
Eric Hobsbawm’s translation of the first part of this observation is more tellingly abrupt: “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”)
¹²⁹
Renan was—rightly—of the view that most of the criteria by which nations could be defined were historically unconvincing or unsustainable, but he erred in supposing that his own alternative definition was somehow immune from the same problems. Shared memories, an agreed life in common, and a willingness to make future sacrifices: all these deemed by Renan to be more plausibly constitutive of the nation and of national identity can also be shown to be partial, limited, selective, and timebound, and they have been as much undermined by “advances in historical study” as the definitions Renan himself demolished. For if in one guise, history has often been the willing and complicit handmaid to the creation of national identities and the celebration of national consciousnesses, in another, more skeptical guise, it is the implacable enemy of the selective myths, the sanitized memories, and the carefully edited narratives that galvanize collective resolve and sustain national solidarities over time. As Sir
Michael Howard has noted, history that challenges the comfortable assumptions and providential narratives of a shared group identity may be painful, but it is also a sign of
maturity and wisdom, and this is as true for the solidarities of nations as for those of religions.
¹³⁰

Yet like all the aggregations discussed here, religion and nation also differ markedly in their nature and their essence.
¹³¹
Religious identities derive much of their appeal from their claims to universal rather than to particular truths, which are (at least in theory) applicable to everyone willing to convert and believe. Here, for example, is
Saint Paul, asserting the claim of Christianity to encompass and override all lesser and alternative identities: “There is neither
Jew nor Greek,” he observed, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus.” Indeed, Christ’s final commission to the apostles was to “go forth and teach all nations.”
¹³²
By contrast, and indeed by definition, a nation sets out deliberately to exclude from its collective embrace all those who do not live within its boundaries (and on occasions also some of those who do), and since that means the vast majority of people, the result is that no nation, however large or rich or powerful or
imperial, can ever comprise more than a minority of the human population. So while religious collectivities claim transnational, continental, or indeed global reach, and have done so across more than one millennium, national identities are much more local, particular, and temporally circumscribed. As such they are in many ways very different forms of collective human solidarity.
¹³³

Such variety helps explain why identities are not like hats, which can only be worn one at a time, to the exclusion of any or all others. Most people in the past, like most people in the present, maintain several loyalties, attachments, and solidarities (of which religion and nation are but two) simultaneously, and any one of which might at any one time be foremost in their minds, as occasion suggested and circumstances required.
¹³⁴
Pace
Ian Tyrrell, this means it is not at all self-evident that collective identities are now or have ever been “primarily national ones.” Only in those relatively recent and rare periods of total war have the claims of the nation (or at least the claims of something presented by its leaders as “the nation”) become paramount and overriding. Whatever politicians or magistrates may declare the demands and
imperatives of the
nation to be, day-to-day life for most people in most times is not dominated by these concerns. Indeed, in every “mature national community,” there is a “crisscrossing of loyalties” that make up the fabric of people’s individual and collective lives.
¹³⁵
In times of peace, national identity recedes, and other solidarities of loyalty, awareness, and calls to action may seem more compelling and more convincing. Among these are the alternative collectivities of class, gender, and race, which, unlike
religion, are
secular in their concerns, and unlike the nation, are (at least in principle) global in their reach. It is to these alternative identities that we now turn.
¹³⁶

ON AUGUST 28, 1844
, two young intellectuals joined each other for drinks at the Café de la Régence on the Place du Palais-Royal in Paris. Their names were
Friedrich Engels and
Karl Marx, and they had first met in Germany two years previously, but that “distinctly chilly” encounter had given no indication that one of the most portentous collaborations and influential literary friendships of modern times had just begun.
¹
Despite the hostile view they shared of the
middle classes, both men came from quintessentially bourgeois backgrounds. Engels, born in 1820 in the Rhineland town of Barmen, was the son of a successful cotton-spinning entrepreneur who owned factories in Germany and Manchester, while Marx, who was two years older and another Rhinelander, was the son of a
Jewish attorney who was also a vineyard owner. But by the time they joined each other at the café, both men had rebelled against their comfortable upbringings. Engels had been initiated into the cotton business, and had reluctantly undertaken compulsory
Prussian military service, but he soon gravitated, via studies at Berlin University and his first prolonged period of residence in Manchester, overseeing family interests, toward radical politics, dissenting journalism, and Hegelian thought. Marx,
meanwhile, having turned his back on the study of the law, completed a doctorate in philosophy, his thinking likewise influenced by
Hegel, and had also taken up subversive newspaper writing, briefly editing the Cologne-based
Rheinische Zeitung
, until it was closed down by the Prussian authorities.
²

This second meeting between Marx and Engels was more agreeable than the chilly standoff their first had been, and in a mood of “cheerfulness and goodwill” they began a clutch of literary projects.
³
The first, of which Engels was sole author, would be
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, published in 1845. Drawing on his experiences in the family business in Manchester, he depicted the “shock city” of that decade as bitterly polarized between rapacious mill owners and exploited
industrial workers. Engels believed this cleavage into “two
great camps” was so deep that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat existed in a state of intransigent antagonism and perpetual conflict, and this description persuaded Marx that the alienated, impoverished industrial working class would become the instrument of a final transformative historical
revolution.
⁴
The second work, which Marx and Engels wrote together between 1845 and 1847, was
The German Ideology
, in which they developed the idea that social structures were the products of economic and technological forces, and that history should be understood as an unending struggle between different groups of people in different economic circumstances.
⁵
Their third effort, also jointly authored, appeared early in the revolutionary year of 1848, when for a time it seemed as though traditional authority was collapsing across much of Europe, and was entitled the
Manifesto of the Communist Party.
“The history of all hitherto existing society,” Marx and Engels confidently proclaimed, “is the history of class struggles,” and it was a history leading inexorably toward a revolutionary future in which the reviled bourgeoisie would be overthrown and cast aside: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” the authors concluded. “They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”
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This rousing, bravura, fortissimo exhortation was written by Marx and Engels at the end of a remarkable period of collaboration, drawing upon a wide range of legal, historical, philosophical,
sociological, theological, and political works in French, German, and English, from
Hegel to
Saint-Simon,
Adam Smith to
Feuerbach, Proudhon to Fourier.
⁷
Of all those writings,
The Communist Manifesto
would most significantly influence the course of twentieth-century history, not just within Europe but also around the world. For in that crusading and coruscating polemic, Marx and Engels sought to provide the most complete and comprehensive analysis of past human identities, both on their own terms and as they related to those of the present, thereby also foretelling how the inherent conflict in these existing solidarities might—indeed, must—define the future. In predicting that all current bourgeois societies must eventually be vanquished by an energized, mobilized, and self-consciously revolutionary proletariat, Marx and Engels would eventually inspire legions of political activists in Europe, Asia, Africa, and both North and South America who dreamed of helping move history ahead toward the fulfillment that Marx and Engels had envisioned for it, by overthrowing the much-reviled
bourgeoisie and ushering in the socialist utopia of a classless society. Marx and Engels would also influence two generations of Western scholars and academics, many of whom would espouse their view that the history of all human societies should indeed be understood and explained in terms of class identity and class struggle.

Their claims for the importance of class as the preeminent form of collective solidarity were breathtaking in their
historical scope, and they were no less audacious in their insistence that it would be the
working class that would eventually bring into being a new future that had to be struggled for and won, yet that was also, paradoxically, predestined and foreordained. But as many would-be revolutionaries would later discover, this analysis and these predictions raised more questions than they answered. Why did Marx and Engels believe class was the most potent and portentous of all forms of collective identity? What did they mean by class, how had it fulfilled, and how would it fulfill, the momentous historic tasks that the authors had assigned to it? Why and how did later leaders take up their call to bring about a
revolution against the bourgeoisie and in the name of the proletariat? Did their triumphs, beginning in
Russia in 1917, conform to the
Marxist model of revolutionary working-class solidarity, ushering in the proletarian millennium and the classless society? In what ways did the subsequent global spread of
Communism also come to influence how history was written, or rather rewritten, as the story of class identities? What has happened to these class-based solidarities, and to these class-cased accounts, since the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989? And when all is said and done, has class ever been the most important and influential form of collective
human identity and consciousness in the ways that Marx and Engels and their disciples, both practical and academic, repeatedly insisted that it was?

By the time they had been put forward so forcefully and influentially in
The Communist Manifesto
, claims that class was the preeminent form of human aggregation and awareness were scarcely novel. Albeit less stridently and polemically, similar views had been anticipated and advanced by British political
economists such as
Adam Smith and
David Ricardo, by German philosophers such as
Hegel and
Feuerbach, and by French historians and social theorists such as
Thierry,
Guizot, and
Saint-Simon.
⁸
But Marx and Engels were the first to assert the much larger claim that class identity and class conflict were the keys to understanding
everything
significant that had happened in the past, that was going on in the present, and that would occur in the future. In so doing, they offered a wholly new perspective on collective solidarities, for by asserting the primacy of class, they directly challenged the conventional—albeit competing—wisdoms which held that
religion, or the nation, were of paramount importance. Instead, Marx and Engels maintained that class was of much greater salience and significance, in part because it was a secular rather than a faith-based identity, which recognized the primacy of material interests and circumstances, and also because it was potentially a global solidarity, transcending the petty parochialisms of
national loyalties and national boundaries.