Neo-Nationalism and Religion in France

Abstract

The Nation, historically speaking, is a recent political structure. In France, it emerged at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries1. Until then, the country lived under the system of dynastic loyalty: with a long chain extending from the peasant to the king and beyond, to God Himself, from whom the monarchy evolved. The Revolution in 1789 changed the given order: inspired by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and, at its heart, very specifically by the doctrine of Parliamentary “Gallicanism”, it introduced a new form of political connection which was national in this instance, as evidenced by the affirmation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that: “The principle of all Sovereignty essentially resides in the Nation.” In the past, social connections had revolved around a vertical mechanism, that of subjection to the sovereign; but from then on, the political system was constructed horizontally along an axis of relationships between equals. The establishment of this national pattern often operated, as in the north of Europe, under the aegis of a narrative of continuity between the modern political age and the Christian religion which allowed the Church, which was predominant, to maintain a presence in the apparatus of the State. It was not such a case here in France. With the exception of the interim period after the signing of the Concordat of 1801 by Napoleon and Pope Pius VII, France constructed its idea of the nation by breaking all ties with religion, specifically with Catholicism – which as a whole seemed to be welded to the Ancien Régime. Emile Durkheim recorded that, at its very foundations, The French Republic placed the “ideas, feelings and practices derived from reason alone.” (Durkheim 1903, 3) Yet during recent times nationalism, conceived here in very general terms in the style of Ernst Gellner or Benedict Anderson as the ideology of campaigners who promoted the national structure of life, has embraced the Christian frame of reference, which until recently it had failed to acknowledge with the exception of certain groups that had evolved from the