Abstract
The spread of nationalism has often been attributed to France. For the French Revolution was based on ‘the sovereignty of the people’ and popularised the ideology of national self-determination. In this ideology, the nation is given a special place alongside democracy. In fact, the two are made interdependent. Without a nation there can be no democracy, since it is the nation which constitutes the people who are given the right of self-determination. Democracy propelled nations out of feudalism into the modern era since it gave all the people theoretical control over the state. So while nations certainly existed before the French Revolution, according to many scholars they were not nationalist until then. Only when the aim of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ was combined with existing national consciousness did nationalism (in this view) emerge. After that, nationalism spread as a contagion throughout Europe and the world. For the ‘modernising’ force of capitalism, then taking off in Europe through the Industrial Revolution, became inevitably intertwined with the desire for national selfdetermination to produce nationalism. So economic and political forces combined to make nationalism the most important feature of European history after the French Revolution.1
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Notes
This is the view taken by Hans Kohn in his The Idea of Nationalism (1944). He starts the first chapter: ‘Nationalism as we understand it is not older than the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation was the French Revolution, which gave the new movement an increased dynamic force’. However, ‘this did not mark the date of its birth. Like all historical movements, nationalism had its roots deep in the past’ (p. 3).
Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics. The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 77–8.
Janine Renucci, La Corse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 3rd edn., 1992), Ch. I, ‘La Corse, Une Colonie’.
P. Hainsworth, ‘The Front National: from ascendancy to fragmentation on the French extreme right’, in P. Hainsworth (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right (London and New York: Pinter, 2000), p. 20.
Normandy has the Normandy Movement (Mouvement Normand, MN), supporting self-government for Normandy in the EU, and the Party for Independent Normandy (Parti pour la Normandie Indépendante, PNI) which seeks independence for Normandy, and has set up a ‘provisional government’. Occitania has the Occitania Party (Partit Occitan/POC) (1987), and Savoy the Savoy League (1994) which seeks to reverse the French annexation of 1860 and re-establish a sovereign Savoy state. Its Secretary-General has been elected to the regional council. Alan J. Day, Political Parties of the World, 5th edn (London: John Harper Publishing, 2002), pp. 194–5.
A. Nouvel, L’Occita. Langue de Civilisation Européenne (Montpellier: Alain Nouvel, 1977), pp. 135–41.
F. Fernández-Armesto, The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe (London: Times Books, 1994), p. 74.
Oonagh O’Brien, ‘Good to be French? Conflicts of Identity in North Catalonia’, in Sharon Macdonald (ed.), Inside European Identities (Providence/Oxford: Berg: 1993), p. 109.
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© 2004 James G. Kellas
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Kellas, J.G. (2004). France. In: Nationalist Politics in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597273_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597273_4
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