The Politics of patriotism in later eighteenth century France’, French History, 2010, 24 (4):...

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French History, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2010)doi:10.1093/fh/crq052

* Peter R. Campbell is a Professor of History at the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin and may be contacted at [email protected]. He would like to thank the British Academy and the Lever-hulme Trust for a Research Award and a Research Fellowship that enabled him to carry out much of the research for this article and also the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton for the opportunity to finalise the text. A shorter version of this article was presented at the Society for the Study of French History conference in Dublin, 29–30 June 2009.

1 On eighteenth-century French republicanism there is a wealth of material, much of it centred upon Rousseau and Montesquieu: J. Kent Wright ‘The idea of a republican constitution in Old Ré-gime France’, Republicanism: a shared European heritage, ed. Q. Skinner and M. van Gelderen, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2002), I, 289–307; more broadly there is R. Monnier, Républicanisme, patrotisme et Révolution française (2005). See also C. Grell, Le dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France, 2 vols (Oxford, 1995); K.M. Baker, ‘Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern History (2001): 32--53; some of the most interesting recent perspec-tives in this field include R. Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-century France. Between the Ancients and the Moderns, (Manchester, 2010); A Jainchill, Reimagining politics after the Terror. The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY and London, 2008); and D. Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2009); and current work in the context of P. Serna’s seminar at the Institut de l’histoire de la Révolution française, Paris.

T H E P O L I T I C S O F P A T R I O T I S M I N F R A N C E ( 1 7 7 0 – 1 7 8 8 )

P E T E R R . C A M P B E L L *

Abstract—This article focuses on the language of patrie as it was employed from the 1770s to the 1780s in relation to the parlements. It was a complex and ambiguous rhetoric with roots in classical republicanism that was significantly modified in the 1740s and put to many uses. The study seeks to show how and why the parlementaires moved in public opinion from being patriotic heroes in the early 1770s to the decidedly unpatriotic agents of aristocracy in late 1788. The premise is that language in the courts is employed rhetorically and involves an attempt to convince auditors and readers of the arguments on both a rational and an emotional level. The discourse was thus appropriated by actors rather than dominating them. Patrie was evocative of emotions on several levels, from austerity to sensibility. On the other hand, the courts were not supposed to employ emotional arguments but judicial ones based upon the corpus of existing legislation. It is therefore instructive to trace their relationship to this idiom, particularly in the crisis periods of 1770–74 and 1787–89.

It is now widely recognized that in the eighteenth century the word patrie was revived as a key term or concept, and is today often associated with the idea of a rising current of republicanism. The classical republican tradition is currently being heavily investigated, and historians stress various aspects1.

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P E T E R R . C A M P B E L L 551

This article seeks to throw light upon how a discourse that is often linked with republicanism was actually employed in royal politics in France during the later ancien régime. The language of patriotism in this period was no longer simply a revival of a classical concept, for it had undergone significant development or modernization in the 1740s and 1750s. New notions of virtue and the rise of sentiment combined with older currents to produce a popular new idiom. As recent studies have shown, the language of patrie is to be found in many other forums, such as tracts on economic, commercial and fiscal matters, education, political science, agriculture, war, eulogies of great men, sermons, prize essays and mémoires judiciaries and of course brochures and libelles.2 Although there are occasional examples before mid-century, from about 1748–50 the terms patrie and patriote began to be commonly used in some of these forums and became increasingly widespread especially after the 1770s; by the 1780s the term could almost be said to have passed into general usage among those who had benefited from a good education.

Associated with this linguistic stream were two other concepts of capital importance: vertu and bienfaisance.3 These three terms are central to changing notions of citizenship, and vertu and patrie in particular underpin arguments in opposition to both royal policy and the existing social and political order. These notions are cross-referential and their coherent use suggests the emergence of a new reference point before the Revolution, an ‘imagined community’ in terms of an ideal res publica, a patrie with virtuous citizens, seeking the public good, actively engaged in bienfaisance, educated by good morals and observing good laws enshrined in a constitution.4 This set of related and overlapping concepts (though as yet far from being coherent enough to be called an ideology) takes on its full meaning only when contrasted with the notion of despotism. It should be of immense significance to historians of the Revolution that this vision of politics was essentially a moral one, in which virtuous citizenship was given pride of place, rather than, say, a democratic one, or a juridical one. For it is this moral

2 Recent works dealing with aspects of patriotism that illustrate this range of contexts include S. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1993); E. Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750-1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans, SVEC 365 (Oxford, 1998); D. A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2001); J. M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London, 2005).

3 On virtue: M. Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Houndsmills, 2001); on bienfaisance, C. Duprat, Pour l’amour de l’humanité. Le temps des philanthropes, la philan-thropie parisienne des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet, 2 vols (Paris, 1993), vol. 1.

4 For a sense of how far critical views remain in favour of well ordered moderate monarchy throughout much of Europe in the eighteenth century: H. Blom, J. C. Laursen and L. Simonutti (eds), Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism and the Common Good (Toronto, 2007).

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T H E P O L I T I C S O F P A T R I O T I S M I N F R A N C E ( 1 7 7 0 – 1 7 8 8 )552

vision that lay at the root of the Jacobin Republic of Virtue, and perhaps of the Revolution in general. Although this wider conjunction of discourses deserves attention as a significant development, this article limits itself to just one important strand: the language of patriotism and in particular the way it was related to the parlements.

The use and development of the concept of patrie in the later ancien régime were closely related to the work of parlementaire lawyers and magistrates and to the participation of the parlements in politics. Those who wielded the language were often magistrates, but perhaps more importantly, for two brief but crucial periods the courts became the object of patriotic fervour. In order to explain this situation the nature of the patriotic discourse first needs to be discussed, because the patriotic sentiments of the magistrates can only be understood in the light of the wider development of this language. The basic meaning of patriotism was a love of one’s community or country that impelled one to act for the public good. The definitions compiled for the Encyclopédie by the chevalier de Jaucourt in 1765 defines it thus:

Le philosophe sait que ce mot [patrie] vient du latin pater, qui représente un père & des enfants, & conséquemment qu’il exprime le sens que nous attachons à celui de famille, de société, d’état libre, dont nous sommes membres, & dont les lois assurent nos libertés & notre bonheur. Il n’est point de patrie sous le joug du despotisme. . . L’amour qu’on lui porte conduit à la bonté des moeurs, & la bonté des moeursa conduit à l’amour de la patrie; cet amour est l’amour des lois & du bonheur de l’état, amour singulièrement affacté aux democraties; c’est une vertu politique, par laquelle on renonce à soi-même, en préferant l’intérêt public au sien propre; c’est un sentiment, & non une suite de connoissance; le dernier homme de l’état peut avoir ce sentiment comme le chef de la république.

Patriote: c’est celui qui dans un gouvernement libre chérit sa patrie, & met son bonheur & sa gloire à la secourir avec zèle, suivant ses moyens & ses facultés. . . . Servir sa patrie n’est point un devoir

chimérique, c’est une obligation réelle.

Love of or devotion to the patrie was seen as a virtue, and for several key authors the first virtue. It was potentially radical in that the patrie was not simply represented by the king, but existed independently of the king, who traditionally incarnated the nation in his person. Indeed, a patriotic king acted for the patrie, rather than for his own gloire, so he was subordinated to the community or res publica. Despite its strong roots in the classical republican world, patriotism in the 1750s became something more complex than simply a revival of ancient Greek and Roman ideas as exemplified in the frequently cited writings of Cicero and Plutarch: it became more ‘modern’, for it was in great

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measure the product of a redefinition made possible by changed notions of virtue and the new vogue for sentiment much in evidence from mid-century on. As such, it was a much less a theory of political legitimacy than an emotional and moral commitment to the good of the community. Partly for this reason, in the context of the rhetorical world of eighteenth-century politics, the arguments that could be made by appealing to love of the patrie were very varied, as the good could be envisaged from different perspectives. And the language of patrie was not suited to some contexts. If we look closely at how the language was put to use, we can see that before 1789 patriotism was not a political ideology but a loose idea underpinning a variety of oppositional viewpoints and notably was exploited by the monarchy itself. It would be a mistake to take utterances at face value as if they constituted a coherent body of expression. Rather than see patriotism as an ‘ideology’ or a sentiment capable of motivating people, it is more useful and accurate to interpret it as an ambiguous discourse. As such, it contained many associations from its past history, and therefore could be exploited rhetorically for different interests.5 Its range of meaning develops through contingencies that encourage writers to develop the latent elements, as for example when the expulsion of the Jesuits and the publication of Émile gave rise to a debate on education in which one important strand was to become the education of patriotic citizens—an aspect that was not explicitly stressed earlier in the 1750s. Similarly, as we shall see below, the coup Maupeou of 1771 encouraged the emergence of the heretofore latent potential for patriotic language to become a critique of despotism. There are antecedents to the portrait of the parlementaires as virtuous patriots, in the sixteenth century for example, and it is more appropriate to think of the later period as one of revival rather than continuity.

As I have argued elsewhere, the language of patriotism emerged not during the Seven Years War, nor as a result of the debate on la noblesse commerçante, but in the later 1740s, as a coherent combination of classical republicanism (which was undergoing an important scholarly revival in the 1730s and 1740s, led by Rollin), current English usage, the new vogue for sentiment, and recently redefined concepts of virtue.6 This language, with powerful and enticing new associations, operated as a semantic field in which there were close connections between the concept of patrie and such words and concepts as vertu, citoyen, communauté, liberté, égalité, lois, bien public, roi, république, nation, société

5 For a full statement of this interpretation: P. R. Campbell, ‘The language of patriotism in France, 1750–1770’, e-France, Journal of French Studies, 1 (2007), 1–43, available at http://www.reading.ac.uk/e-France/Campbell%20-%20Language%20of%20Patriotism.htm.pdf. This article contains an appreciation of other work as well as a long section on definitions. Since full references to the current body of work on French patriotism can be found there (nn. 2–23) they are not repeated here.

6 See Note 5 supra. On the influence of English ideas: A. Skornicki, ‘England, England. La référence britannique dans le patriotisme français au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue française de science politique, 59 (2009), 681–700. For another perspective on the debate provoked by the controver-sialist Coyer: Smith, Nobility Reimagined, ch. 3

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and bienfaisance. All these words and concepts also contained further ambiguities in their meaning, with the result that the whole patriotic discourse can be described as inherently ambiguous and susceptible to many different inflections and arguments. Although a patriotic impulse was initially appealed to in order to legitimize interventions in the public sphere on subjects closed to discussion by the authorities, the monarchy itself encouraged its development as a sentiment of loyalty to the king and nation.7 Even so, it is highly unlikely that patriotism had acquired the nature of an internalized sentiment before the end of the ancien régime. The patriotic language, as the history of its usage shows, developed through an interaction between the discourse and politics. The latent possibilities in the language were brought out by the contingencies of politics, in such a way that the arguments it buttressed did indeed develop over time, even leading to a change of accepted emphasis—but they still remained within its initial range of meanings.

Love of the patrie was first described in French politics as ‘the first virtue’ by the abbé Duguet in his Institution d’un Prince, then of course by the hugely influential philosophe and magistrate Montesquieu. In the specific sphere of French politics, the Jansenist lawyer and publicist Daniel Bargeton and others took up the concept and used it both to legitimize intervention in the controversy over the vingtième (over the issue of clerical immunities) and as a pillar of their argument that particular interests should be subordinated to the general good. The language of patriotism was soon actively encouraged by the ministry, notably by controller-general Machault, his protégé Vincent de Gournay and by Madame de Pompadour, who was keen to stress patriotic finance after the War of the Austrian Succession.8 The Gournay Circle used it to buttress their advocacy of the reform of commercial practices and decision-making (and the debate over Coyer’s Roussel de la Tour’s pamphlet on taxation entitled La Noblesse commerçante actually forms a part of this campaign).9 During the Seven Years War came a further ministry-sponsored effort to stimulate patriotism; it was also employed as a protestation of loyalty by Huguenots during the war; by Jansenists in their defence over the Damiens affair; in the debate over education after the expulsion of the Jesuits; in the debate over Roussel de la

7 This element is particularly stressed in the works of Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme, and Bell, Cult of the Nation.

8 On the Gournay circle, the pioneering article by A. Murphy, ‘Le développement des idées économiques en France, 1750–1756’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 33 (1986), 52–41.

9 The debate over Coyer’s book advocating commercial endeavour by the nobility as patriotic (he also wrote a dissertation on the word patrie) has attracted the attention of several historians lately. See A. Murphy, ‘Le développement des idées économiques’; J. M. Smith ‘Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over noblesse commerçante,’ J Mod Hist 72 (June 2000), 339–74, Robin Ives, ‘Political publicity and political economy in eighteenth-century France’, French History, 17, 1 (2003), 1–18; Loïc Charles, ‘French Political economy and the making of public opinion as a political concept (1750--1763)’, at http://library.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/frnit/pdfs_gimon/charles.pdf; A. Skornicki ‘L’État, l’expert et le négociant: le réseau de la “science du commerce” sous Louis XV’, Genèses, 4, no. 65 (2006), 4–26. John Shovlin, Political economy, The Political Economy of Virtue. Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London, 2006), 44–8.

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Tour’s pamphlet on taxation entitled Les Richesses de l’État in 1763; and to promote agricultural societies under controller-general Bertin—and this list is not exhaustive. Its true characteristics were debated by major and minor philosophes; it was exploited in art (especially by Greuze) and the theatre, notably in Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais, widening its popularity. Bell’s work on the eulogies of great men of the patrie shows how far there was a royal programme, albeit one that could be subverted by opposition writers.10 The mémoires judiciaires studied by Sarah Maza clearly reveal yet another important aspect of patriotic virtues, the insistence on private virtues as well as public ones.11

Although it is tempting to associate patrie with republicanism, this was by no means necessarily the case during the absolute monarchy. For several reasons, the appeal to love of the patrie always contained seeds of radicalism, but this did not mean anti-royalism. Because its main root lay in classical republicanism there was bound to be some tension with theories of absolute monarchy (for example in the stress on active citizenship rather than the obedience of subjects). And when notions of patrie became popular in France from the mid-eighteenth century they were inevitably related to the popularity of the concept in England—which by contrast had a very different political and commercial system. In France in the sixteenth century the word patrie had been related to the idea of the bien public, to which the monarchy itself subscribed, but for more than a century that term fell out of fashion as the Bourbon monarchy actively promoted the notion of service du roy or bien de l’État as the focus of loyalty.12 Moreover, the widespread notion of patrie did not equate to a political philosophy and was much more malleable and even imprecise. It is important not to select from the very large body of patriotic literature those texts that most resemble works of political philosophy in order to assemble an argument that appears to show clear lines of progression from one position to another, as if the whole set of developments could be explained without the interaction of political contingency. Borrowings and reformulations inspired not just by contemporaneous texts but by works centuries apart mean that a synchronic approach to ideas is infinitely preferable to the diachronic one, as lines of evolution are complex and blurred. The present study attempts to avoid these pitfalls, by stressing the way language and arguments that some might interpret as ‘proto-republican’ were in fact part of semantic fields that were, in the mind of the ancien régime, easily reconciled with monarchy. Thus, it is profitable to regard the development of ‘republicanism’ and ‘patriotism’ as highly dependent upon the contingency of politics, rather than on a necessary (and teleological) ideological evolution from monarchy to republic. A second potential pitfall for historians with a republican take on the

10 D. Bell, Cult the Nation, ch. 4.11 Maza, Private lives, and with much on public and private virtues, Linton, Politics of Virtue.12 On this semantic development: J. B. Collins ‘De la République française à l’État français, Dup-

lessis-Mornay et la transformation de la citoyenneté en France’, in Servir Dieu, le Roi et l’Etat, Phil-ippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), eds H. Daussy and V. Ferrer, Actes du colloque de Saumur, Albinea, 18 (2006), 325–38, and his Slaying the Hydra of Anarchy: From Republic to State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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notion of patriotism is that, because of the similarity of the rhetorical tropes, it is easily confused with what should more properly be attributed to the strong conciliarist tradition represented by much Jansenist thought, which passed into the mainstream of political debate during the eighteenth century and is particularly associated with the parlements.13

In short, we should not imagine that in mid-eighteenth-century France the language of love of the patrie implied republicanism in the sense of a state in which sovereignty lay with the citizens without a king. Nor was that the case in England at the time, where patriotism was revivified and appealed to as a plank in the Tory attack on Whig corruption which a patriotic king ought not to countenance.14 In France the res publica was protected and incarnated by a monarchy that ruled by law and was thought to protect liberties in a large state—only small city-states being suitable for the truly republican institutions, while republics continued to be associated with anarchy. Thus, what radicalism there was lay not in advocating a republic without a king for France, but in the question of whether the patrie was subordinate to the king, or the king to the patrie.15 In the first argument the king was the head of the body politic, thus at one with the patrie, though it could be claimed that he had a duty to put its interests first (as was argued in the sixteenth century as well as the eighteenth, and this was precisely the attraction of the concept). As the organic metaphor of the ‘body politic’ with the king as its head became less current during the eighteenth century, it became easier to conceive of a king who was actually separated from the nation without having to be beheaded, and ultimately a patriotic nation without a king became thinkable, though the path was not a straightforward one.

I

An important area that has been relatively neglected in recent studies of patriotism is the relationship between the judicial world and the language of patrie. The subject is larger than it would have been twenty years ago. Where once historians would have confined their approach to only the magistrates,

13 D. Van Kley, ‘The Estates General as ecumenical council: the constitutionalism of corporate consensus and the Parlement’s ruling of September 25, 1788’, J Mod Hist., 61 (1989), 1–52, in which he argues that the dominant mode of thought in the Parlement in the second half of the eighteenth century was not Rousseauism, nor the commonwealthman tradition, but French conciliarism.

14 Q. Skinner, ‘The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Wal-pole’, in Historical perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. N. McKendrick (London, 1974), 93–128.

15 This argument is not dissimilar to the debate over whether the king was above the law or sub-ordinate to it, which was an issue often exploited by the Parlements. On the relationship of the king to the patrie, N. Elie-Lefebvre ‘Le débat sur l’idée de patrie et sur le patriotisme, 1742–1789’, mé-moire de maîtrise, Université de Paris, 1974 (on microfiche in the Bibliothèque Nationale) and by H. Dupuy, ‘Le roi dans la Patrie’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1991), 139–57.

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now that the history of Jansenism has revealed the nature of the parti janséniste and its role in the formulation of the official statements of the magistrates, at least in Paris, it is more appropriate to include avocats au parlement in the analysis. The only specific studies relating to the language of patrie and the courts focus on the period of Maupeou, and they all treat ‘patriotism’ as a political philosophy rather than as a rhetoric.16 David Bell’s wide ranging analysis focuses for the period after 1770 more on the writings about the parlement than on their official pronouncements – so there is space for further elucidation of the thought of the magistrates themselves.17 But it is clear from the nature of patriotism that an understanding of the relationship of the parlements to the concept of patrie requires a much broader essay in interpretation than might at first be supposed. The courts were not somehow ‘naturally’ patriotic, and even could be seen as selfishly oligarchic.

In order to understand what motivated parlementaire opposition to royal policies and how far this opposition was responsible for the crisis of the regime, and for politicizing Frenchmen by the later 1780s, we need to explore the way in which their concepts and language related to these questions. Certainly from the 1750s up to 1788 the magistrates succeeded in having themselves portrayed as ‘pères de la patrie’ in times of crisis.18 It is worth remembering however, that although the apparent patriotism of the courts sustained them in the public eye up to 1788, suddenly, after the arrêté of 25 September 1788, this image collapsed and d’Eprémesnil’s attempts to regain crédit for the parlement de Paris on 5 December were unsuccessful. By January 1789 a complete reversal of fortune had taken place, as public opinion had abandoned the courts and now could speak of ‘the despotism of the parlements’, as a pamphlet of that title suggests.19 Some pamphlets in 1789 described as ‘pères de la patrie’ not the

16 Studies on the patriote pamphlet literature of 1771–75 include D. Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France 1770-1774 (Baton Rouge and London, 1985), 37–124; S. Singham’s thesis on the Jansenists, ‘A conspiracy of twenty million Frenchmen: public opinion, patriotism and the assault on absolutism’ (PhD thesis, Princeton Uni-versity, 1991), and her article ‘Vox populi vox dei’, in Jansénisme et Révolution, ed. C.-L. Maire, Chroniques de Port Royal, 39 (1990), 183–94; K. M. Michael Baker (ed.), The Maupeou Revolution: The Transformation of French Politics at the End of the Old Regime, special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 18 (1992), with articles by Van Kley, Singham (on the Corre-spondance secrète) and Maza.

17 Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 58–62 before 1750 and 68–74 on patrie after 1770–89. A signifi-cant collection of articles dealing with the thought of the magistrates is A. Lemaître (ed.), Le Monde partementaire au XVIIIe siècle. L’Invention d’un discours politique (Rennes, 2010). The only pre-vious specific study of the vocabulary of the courts at the end of the régime does not deal with patrie: J. H. Shennan, ‘The political vocabulary of the parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth century’, in Diritto e Potere nella Storia Europea, Atti del quarto Congresso internazionale della Società Italiana di Storia del Diritto, in onere di Bruno Paradisi (Florence, 1982), 951–64.

18 That this appellation was due to more than self-definition through classical analogy can be seen in C. Coulomb, Les Pères de la patrie. La Société parlementaire en Dauphiné au temps des Lumières (Grenoble, 2006), for the magistrates clearly were the leaders of provincial society, their patrie. The book contains an analysis of the magistrates’ transition to national arguments from 1787, ch.12.

19 E.g., J.-L. Carra, L’Orateur des états-généraux (Paris, 1789), 5–6; Anon., Essais critiques sur l’état actuel de l’esprit public, ou éléments du patriotisme (Paris, 1789).

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magistrates but the deputies to the Estates General.20 No longer seen as patriotic, many of the magistrates themselves were destined to be condemned to death in the Terror, unless they had fled or shown more recent ‘proofs of their patriotism’. Thus our study of patriotism and the courts has clear limits imposed by contemporaries, from the 1750s to the end of 1788.21

Before considering the subject in detail, we should also note that the use of the word nation is not closely related to the use of the word patrie in parlementaire discourse, and that nation is a much more obvious contender than patrie for the role of key word in the parlementaire remonstrances. As Roger Bickart showed long ago, the concept of nation played an important part in the remonstrances.22 This is not so with patrie. If the two terms come to be associated closely in the Revolution, they were by no means synonyms before, although once again there are examples of the words being associated, as in the Remonstrances of the parlement de Toulouse in 1760, and much more frequently in 1788. Nation means the people of France as a political entity, which may or may not possess sovereignty. There is no sense that patriots or the patrie embodied sovereignty, while it is equally clear that there is no moral connection between nation and politics; on the other hand, because of the sphere in which it is exercised (family, local community, province, kingdom) private virtues are as central to the concept of patrie as public virtues. Patrie was a term embodying sentiment, whereas that was not the case with nation before the Revolution.

The attempt to investigate the concept of patrie as it applied to the parlementaires involves some interesting problems. In fact, although the concept of patriotism is extensively applied to the magistrates, the word patrie is relatively rare in the official discourse of the magistrates. As Frédéric Bidouze has shown, the language of some courts, like that of Pau, reveals little commitment to new theories, and in Pau la patrie tended to mean Le Béarn as opposed to an idealized national community.23 This general absence (there are some examples) even in the more militant courts no doubt stems from the role of the Parlements as legal bodies whose activities were based upon tradition and precedence, in which legal language was expected to observe the traditional conventions. The courts, in their arrêtés, speeches and remonstrances were employing rhetorical techniques that show magistrates to have been well aware

20 Joseph Fauchet, Le Despotisme des parlements, ou Lettre d’un Anglois à un François, sur la revolution opérée dans la monarchie françoise par l’enregistrement de la Déclaration du 23 septembre 1788, fait dans les divers parlements du royaume, (London and Paris, 1788).

21 It could be argued that the association between the magistrates and patrie has a much longer history, going back to the sixteenth century, and this is true. However, the nature of patriotism changed around 1750, so there are important differences and the long break in the use of the language during the seventeenth century is significant, for the eighteenth century saw a reappropriation.

22 R. Bickart, Les parlements et la notion de la souveraineté nationale au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1932).23 F. Bidouze, ‘Discours parlementaire et culture politique. Le parlement de Navarre’, Dix-

huitième siècle, 30 (1998), 347–59; idem, Les Remontrances du parlement de Navarre au XVIIIe siècle (Biarritz, 2000). The magistrates above all defended the local constitution, from which they benefited.

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of the possibilities and limitations of arguments and language. For example, there were self-imposed limitations on the usage of terms and concepts in the remonstrances, both because of their traditional format but also because legal arguments required proper legal concepts and vocabulary. Many remonstrances were written by committees over a period of several weeks and are obviously carefully crafted rhetorical compositions.24 For there to be any possibility of winning an argument against the king’s council, the courts needed to engage with royal language. Nevertheless, as the remonstrances increasingly took on the nature of published appeals to the public, non-legal concerns did begin to find a place. And, indeed, the change in their rhetoric over time largely parallels the rise of the public sphere. A classic case would be the increased appeal to the nation and the emergence in their remonstrances of ideas of national sovereignty and contract studied by Bickart and more recently by historians of Jansenism. But the idea of patrie could certainly be used in the mercuriales, which were for the ears of the magistrates and lawyers only, and here it was closely related to the republican virtue of justice.25 A magistrate was said to possess dignity, stoic virtue, and love of his honourable station and of the laws, and love of the patrie, just like Cicero.26 Magistrates were wary of new ideas of natural virtue, and the magistrate in court was hardly likely to exploit rhetorically the emotional side of the patriotic concept rooted in natural virtue that others might adopt. Lawyers pleading in the public sphere could be more fashionable, as Sarah Maza has shown.

If the language of patrie is relatively absent from the remonstrances and official statements, it does find a place in other rhetorical forums. It was used by magistrates and lawyers, and applied to the parlements and to the magistrates especially when they and their institution were under attack from the ‘despotic’ ministry. In this area there are numerous statements and a large body of pamphlet literature that evoke the idea of a patrie and patriotism in association with the magistrates. So, we have a situation where the parlements were apparently defending a patrie, magistrates who were ‘patriotes’, but neither the courts nor the magistrates fully exploited the concepts directly in their own

24 An early attempt to stress the importance of rhetoric in the courts is M. Levinger, ‘La rhé-torique protestataire du parlement de Rouen (1753–1763)’, Annales ESC (1990), 589–613. On rhet-oric: S. Léonie, ‘Une redécouverte restreinte: la rhétorique française du 18e siècle’, Dix-huitième Siècle, 30 (1998), 179–93.

25 The mercuriales were speeches on the duties of their charge given by the solicitor general to the magistrates on the Wednesday following St Martin’s day, thus at the beginning of the parlemen-tary year in November.

26 ‘De l’amour de la patrie’ nineteenth Mercuriale, 1715, Oeuvres choisies du Chancelier d’Aguesseau (1863), 161–9. Daguesseau’s mercuriales have been used by Olivier Chaline and Frédérique Pithou to recreate the notion of the parfait magistrat: O. Chaline ‘L’aristocratie parle-mentaire normande au xviiie siècle: un système de représentations. Godart de Belbeuf ou le parfait magistrat’, Histoire Economie et Société, 12 (1993), 263–72, especially 269, where he observes that the hero of the parfait magistrat becomes ‘le héros patriote victime du despotisme’; F. Pithou ‘L’idéal du parfait magistrat au temps des Lumières’ forthcoming in Les Parlements et les Lumières, ed. Olivier Chaline (2010, online); and Coulomb, Pères de la patrie, 321–32 in which she shows how this notion is remodelled in accordance with the Lumières.

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official statements. On the other hand, some writers (and occasionally lawyers and magistrates writing anonymously) apply the label patriote to the magistrates. Such a difficult topic whose perimeters are hard to define can remind us of the ambiguities that get smoothed over in more rigidly defined topics, and can challenge our more positive assertions. The subject of patriotism and the Parlements can be seen as a case study throwing light on the rhetorical complexity of ancien régime politics.

How then should we address this thorny problem of the particular relationship between the concept of patrie and the parlements? There are three possible approaches that we might employ to contextualize the role of patriotic concepts in the arguments of the parlementaire magistrates and lawyers. First, we might look at statements over time and ask whether patriotism amounted to a parlementaire programme in the eighteenth century. Secondly, we might look at individuals and groups over time and consider whether patriotism should be considered as the preserve of an identifiable parti sharing the same opinions. As we shall see, there is a grain of truth in both of these answers. Thirdly, and most importantly here, we might look at how the language was used, and consider the possibility that the language of patrie and patriotism was part of a complex and still very ambiguous rhetoric that is exploited by all sides. It was used in a debate that developed over time and in which the appeal to patriotism was intended to legitimisze interventions in a closely policed public sphere. To take aim at the language of patriotism is like shooting at a moving target—which of course provides a good part of the excitement of the chase. Thus patriotisme was for a period both associated with the Parlements, and with a wider programme (though far from exclusively), yet its wider possibilities and developments ended up with magistrates sidelined as unpatriotic. How did we get there?

I I

If we stress the elements within the language of patrie that relate to classical republicanism, then we could, for example, regard patriotism as a programme or a parti within the courts, akin to ‘republicanism’, with sympathizers. Although there are some problems with this interpretation, it is nevertheless an interesting first line of enquiry. We need to be cautious, because the republican discourse itself was neither a clear programme against a monarchy, nor was it clearly secular. It was moulded by concerns about, and loyalties to, both royal state and religion. Nevertheless, we are confronted with the curious situation in which the key elements of what would later be called the ‘patriotic’ programme, are actually in evidence in the 1730s.

In 1730, Chancellor Daguesseau left a commentary on the Mémoire des quarante avocats (which was written by a Jansenist lawyer) highlighting their language. ‘Le roi est donc réduit à la qualité de chef de la nation, et la France devient la Republique de pologne ou d’angleterre’, he noted. When he sees

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the phrase ‘le parlement est le dépositaire de l’authorité publique’, he notes, ‘le parlement n’a jamais parlé ainsi’. The magistrates and peers were called the ‘Patrices et les assesseurs du trone’. Says Daguesseau: ‘Nous voilà encore en Pologne et le Roy n’est que le chef de la Republique.27

As recent historiography has shown, this quarrel was to be the beginning of a big debate with important long-term consequences for the monarchy.28 Let us add a further document to this commentary. In 1732, d’Argenson wrote a secret report to the minister Chauvelin on the various groups in the Parlement. He identified plenty of right-thinking magistrates, but also pointed to the ‘jansénistes outrés’, and ended by saying that there was some republican sentiment.

Enfin, on ne peut se dissimuler qu’il se trouve aussy des Parlementaires outrés qui s’embarassent peu des affaires de la religion, ne veulent s’en servir que pour favoriser des vües bien etendües et qui tendroient manifestement a diminuer beaucoup l’autorité Royale.

According to them

Tous les gouvernements, si on les croit, sont originalement les mêmes, la France est tombée dans le despotisme sous le ministere du Cardinal de Richelieu et sous le regne de Louis XIV, mais voicy le tems de s’en tirer et de faire revivre les droits de la nation; on pousse deja les choses jusqu’a dire que le Roy n’a pas le droit d’imposer et de lever sur ses sujets si ce n’est en vertu d’edits enregistres librement

ou du consentement des Etats. . .29

The first point to note is that the broad ideas expressed in the 1730s do seem to correspond very closely to the more obviously political elements in the parti patriote’s ideology of the 1780s. We have the idea of the king as the head of the nation, whose will would be expressed through the Estates; France in effect becomes a well-ordered res publica in which the Parlement safeguards the laws. So, first, there is no suggestion that monarchy was in question. What is also left out in the 1730s is the moral vision of politics, which very soon came to underpin this programme—which as we have noted was a key element of later patriotism. Some of this ‘republican’ perspective goes back some way, with the ideas of the circle of the Duke of Burgundy probably being influential as well as a long current of ideas in the Paris Parlement itself going back to the sixteenth century and which related to the tensions around the ambiguities of the constitution. The third point to note is that at this time the language of patrie, with which this programme would be associated later, is missing. We have the paradox that patriotism appears to pre-date patriotism! Is later patriotism nothing

27 Bibliothèque de Port-Royal, Collection Le Paige, LP. 17.28 Among the numerous works of D. Van Kley see especially The Damiens Affair and the

Unraveling of the ancien régime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, 1984).29 Relation du parlement, no. 2, A.A.E., Mém. et Doc., Paris, France, 1279, fol. 19.

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more than a re-labelled ‘republicanism’, in the sense of a properly limited monarchy? Although this is a tempting idea, our second approach would suggest therefore that it was not.

I I I

If the basic ideas of a ‘patriotic’ role for the parlements were available before the concept came into vogue, perhaps it is more fruitful to consider patriotism as a body of opinion that included ‘republican’ sentiment but which was not congruent with it—a body of opinion that found an appropriate term once the notion of patriotism became available in the 1750s. Perhaps patriotism was a preferred term under the monarchy because of the obvious difficulty of claiming to be a ‘republican’ who was loyal to the monarchy. Was claiming to be motivated by love of the patrie in fact not a proto republican position, but rather a deliberate avoidance of it, after mid century? Thus self-styled patriotes should not be seen as necessarily anti-monarchical: in the French case they merely wanted to temper the monarchy’s excesses by promoting the bien public as the ultimate good. More than a necessary ‘republicanism’ in the language of patrie, it was the contingent activities of the monarchy—attacking fiscal privileges, siding with religious persecution and finally exiling magistrates and remodelling the courts—that brought out into the open a side of the language of patrie that was latent and might have remained dormant. Over time a patriote position developed that came to seem much more anti-monarchical given the changed political context.

There was henceforth more potential for debate on the nature of ‘true patriotism’ as it was termed. Although by no means all who used the language of patrie were this sort of patriote, there would therefore appear to be some merit in the idea of a parti patriote espousing a shade of patriote political opinion. However, the term parti is ambiguous, as it could mean a group of people or, more usually, a body of opinion. The parti patriote, if it existed, might thus be supposed to have been both a wide body of opinion espoused by a loose grouping of individuals, linked perhaps by activity but certainly by a shared set of opinions that came into existence at the end of the 1760s and linked to the parlementaire position. Pidansat de Mairobert observed that:

Le jansénisme ayant perdu son grand mérite, son intérêt véritable, par l’extinction des jésuites en France, s’est transformé en parti du patriotisme. Il faut rendre justice à celui-ci [le jansénisme], il a toujours eu beaucoup d’attraits pour l’indépendance, il a combattu le despotisme papal avec un courage invincible; le despotisme politique n’est pas une hydre moins terrible à redouter, et il faut diriger aujourd’hui vers cet ennemi toutes les forces désormais inutiles dans l’autre genre de combat.30

30 Journal historique de la révolution opérée dans la constitution de la monarchie fran-caise. . . 7 vols (London, 1774–6), ii, 351 [20 jan. 1772]. Contemporaries might have noted that the metaphor of a hydra was now applied to despotism, and not to Hercules defeating chaos and an-archy, as under Henri IV.

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This much cited passage is nevertheless not entirely clear. Does he really mean that the Jansenists, having won their anti-Jesuit case in 1762, by manipulating the courts over their defence of jurisdiction against ‘despotism’, then recycled themselves as ‘patriots’ (although they had a less than clear relationship to the philosophes) to attack political despotism? Or, being aware that many pamphlets were written by Jansenists, is he trying to include them in a struggle that he himself sees as no longer essentially Jansenist but much wider (and which they themselves in fact still saw as a continued struggle against the Jesuit or dévot faction behind Maupeou)? We might note that it was in the interests of Jansenists to identify their own struggle with the popular opposition, as they had earlier hidden behind or frankly exploited a kind of ‘parlementaire constitutionalism’ (as it has been termed by Dale Van Kley). They did not necessarily espouse a patriote ‘ideology’, nor were they themselves completely united on political views, but they certainly exploited it.31 Whatever the nuances, the activities and publications of what contemporaries actually called the parti patriote seem to have played an important and often central role in the development and dissemination of the anti-despotic discourse that was the main issue in the early 1770s in response to the coup Maupeou. Prefigured in the attack on the Jesuits of 1762, it again proved itself important in the later 1780s and the early days of the Revolution. This is well known and there is an important historiography related to this view both on the Maupeou era and later. Dale Van Kley has explored the way that the parti patriote developed from the parti janséniste of the 1750s and 1760s, and he is currently interested in tracing an international patriotism based on religious affiliations.32 Several other historians have worked on the anti-Maupeou campaign to which we shall return below. For the 1780s, Augustin Cochin argued that the sociétés de pensée or sociétés patriotiques were an ‘ancien régime’ or corporate reflection of the new ‘democratic’ mentality, and that they had a great influence on the elections in 1789, as well as forming the model for Jacobinism, an argument further explored by François Furet.33 Many of their adherents were Jansenists, and the Jansenist lawyer Le Paige continued to inspire and coordinate some of them right up to 1788.34

So the constitutional position of many patriotes owed a great deal to the revival and transformation into secular terms of an anti-despotic,

31 M. Cottret, Jansénisme et Lumières, ch. 5, ‘Contre Maupeou’, (Paris, 1998), 143–78.32 D.Van Kley, ‘Religion and the age of “patriot” reform’, J Mod Hist, 80 (2008), 1–44, and for his

work on the parti patriote see n. 31 below.33 A. Cochin, Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Révolution en Bretagne (Paris, 1788–1789), 2 vols

(1925). This argument has of course been given much wider credence in the works of F. Furet, es-pecially Penser la Révolution (Paris, 1978).

34 This has been revealed in D. Van Kley, ‘Du parti janséniste au parti patriote, 1771–1775’, in Jansénisme et révolution, ed. C.-L. Maire, 15–30, and a longer version, ‘The religious origins of the patriote and ministerial parties in pre-revolutionary France: controversy over the Chancellor’s constitutional coup, 1771–1775’, Historical Reflections/Réflections historiques, 18 (1992), 17–63. See also ‘The Jansenist constitutional legacy in the French Prerevolution, 1750–1789’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 13 (1986), 393–453.

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pro-parlementaire Jansenist discourse from the 1730s to the 1760s. The pamphlet war and public debate that took place during the successful Jansenist struggle against the Bull Unigenitus and the Jesuits, culminating in a trial of their ‘despotic’ constitution up to 1762, probably did more than the Contrat social, which was also published in 1762, to politicize the reading public and the Parisian bourgeoisie.35 The parti patriote of which Pidansat speaks was composed in his eyes of the opponents of Maupeou, who by opposing his ‘despotic’ coup were defending the parlements as the necessary defenders of the rights of the nation. This was more than a simple modification of a long-term stance by the courts, because under the umbrella of patriotism was to be found a new philosophic opposition as well (whose views, incidentally, were significantly hostile to the Jansenists’ religious agenda). By 1788 the liberal aristocratic Society of Thirty was propagating a modified form of the constitutional arguments developed earlier by this so-called parti patriote.36 The Society met in the house of Adrien Duport, the leading opposition magistrate of the parlement de Paris. It was attended by a group of overwhelmingly younger sword nobles, many of whom were of old lineage, and by youthful magistrates and lawyers. Thus we have something of a continuous position expressed in pamphlets and some evidence that specific groups of patriots existed, notably connected to J.-P. Brissot and to the magistrate Adrien Duport.37 Yet we must also ask whether there were links between the groups from 1771 to 1788. This is more than plausible, because we are after all dealing with a period spanning no more than a single adult lifetime, from the 1750s to 1789, and in Paris at least a restricted political class. There is some evidence that there were indeed connections: the list of personages who were involved in both the pamphlets of the Maupeou era and the pre-revolutionary crisis is too long to reproduce.

35 Extending the work of D. Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie 1690–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1997), N. Lyon-Caen has added a new dimension to the social history of ideas in his thesis, ‘Marchands de miracles. La bourgeoisie janséniste parisienne au XVIIIe siècle’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris I, 2008).

36 D. Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-intentioned Men: The Society of Thirty and the French Revolution (New York and London, 1987): especially ch. 12, ‘The collective ideology of the pat-riot party’. D.Van Kley, ‘New wine in old wineskins: continuity and rupture in the pamphlet de-bate of the French Prerevolution, 1787–1789’, Fr Hist Stud, 17 (1991), 447–65; and K. Margerison, ‘Political pamphlets, the Society of Thirty, and the failure to create a discourse of national reform during the French Pre-Revolution, 1788–1789’, Hist European Ideas, 17 (1993), 215–44. Adrien Duport and Duval d’Eprémesnil both used the same rhetoric in 1787–88, but were on different sides in 1789.

37 On this milieu that included Bergasse, Brissot, Carra and Gorsas, see especially R. Darnton, ‘Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788)’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1964); G. Michon, Essai sur l’histoire du parti feuillant Adrien Duport (Paris, 1924). See also S. Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London’s French libellistes, 1758–92 (Manchester, 2006). On Genevan exiles: J. Bénetruy, L’atelier de Mirabeau. Quatre proscrits Genevois dans la tourmente révolutionnaire (Geneva, 1962) and on the Dutch exiles, A. Jourdan, La Révolution batave entre la France et l’Amérique (Paris, 2008), esp. ch. 2: ‘La revolution des patriotes’. For an analysis of their diverse positions: J. Egret, La Pré-Révolution francaise, 1787–1788 (Paris, 1962), 148–56.

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This is not the place to develop at length these ideas, because the subject merits a focused study in its own right. There is excellent work by François Moreau, Robert Darnton and Jeremy Popkin in particular, each with a different perspective, but we still know too little about the networks of pamphleteering, and about nouvellistes in so far as they relate to specific points of view (except Jansenism, and the Brissot group).38 We can, however, identify Jansenists; Choiseulists; Orleanists; and would-be philosophes as separate interests expressing patriotic opinion (but the adherents of these interests might have multiple connections, as Jansenists in Choiseul’s affinity). To these we must no doubt add a certain number of magistrates and lawyers who for various reasons—career, ambition, temperament and philosophic inclination—became involved in the publication of patriotic pamphlets as individuals. It is important not to focus exclusively upon those in opposition, for many pamphlets were published by defenders of royal policy, both for reasons of conviction and certainly more for reward, be it career progression or money. Yet there is no doubt that royalists like Moreau and Voltaire believed what they wrote about royalist politics (though perhaps not what Moreau wrote about patriotism, given his transparently propagandist L’Observateur hollandois). In short, there is some evidence to suggest that there would not have been a single ‘parti patriote’ but several groupings making use of the language in a similar fashion. This would also have been true of 1787–88. The next question we need to ask is this: why did they choose to use the language of patriotism? Did they believe in a patriotic agenda, or did they have other aims in mind that ‘patriotism’ concealed?39

I V

To answer that question, we come to a third approach, which is perhaps the most fruitful: a study of the language as rhetoric. To do this we might try to identify the steps in the expression and diffusion of the concepts of patrie and patriotism during the eighteenth century. We must ask how the language was used, what were the associations within the field of discourse, who claimed to be a patriot, in what precise contexts and to what purpose in terms of interests and strategies. Having done so, we would surely conclude that the language of patriotism is a discourse that carries with it both the history of former meanings and a more modern bricolage of related concepts, all of which themselves underwent development in the eighteenth century.

38 We do know about the parti janséniste with especially Le Paige and Durey des Meinières; the Bachaumont circle including Pidansat de Mairobert is studied by R. S. Tate, Petit de Bachaumont: his Circle and the ‘Mémoirs secrets’: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 65 (Geneva, 1968); F. Moreau (ed.), Répertoire des nouvelles à la main: dictionnaire de la presse manuscrite clandestine, xvie–xviiie siècle (Oxford, 1999) and S. Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolu-tion: London’s French Libellistes, 1758–92 (Manchester, 2006).

39 D’Eprémesnil is a good example of a patriotic leader whose patriotic oppositional role was the product of a complex range of personal and intellectual reasons. H. Carré, ‘Un précurseur incon-scient de la Révolution. Le conseiller du Val d’Eprémesnil, 1787–1788’ (Paris, 1897).

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In the eighteenth century, notwithstanding the growth of the public sphere in France, a key point remains that no public space was legitimate for discussing royal policy. So censorship drove authors to authorial strategies that took advantage of the idea of a patriotic citizen. A major characteristic of patriotic claims was to protect and legitimize the intervention by writers in areas of the public sphere that were policed by church and state. Patriots claimed they felt impelled to intervene in the public sphere not out of rebelliousness, pride or ambition but for the good of the community. Even so, to be on the safe side, many if not most texts using this defence were still published anonymously under a foreign imprint, including most of those by the ministry-sponsored Gournay Circle, and many with the hope of attracting attention and getting a job in the administration. A second characteristic is the exploitation of ambiguities in order to be less exposed to criticism, for both sides in a debate laid claim to patriotism. The rhetorical concerns are so much in evidence that it is thus hard to believe that before the 1770s patriotism had been internalized as a genuine sentiment of either national loyalty or indeed ‘republicanism’.40 There is an impression of diverse groups sheltering under an ideological umbrella of patriotism but actually expressing different aims.

For a variety of reasons, usage widens enormously from 1771 to 1789. As Daniel Mornet says: ‘Pour se convaincre de l’extraordinaire diffusion de cette morale sociale et patriotique, il suffit de feuilleter les journaux, tous les journaux, ceux de province et ceux de Paris. Tous recueillent “traits d’humanité” ou de “bienfaisance”, annoncent et décrivent avec complaisance les projets, les sociétés, les fondations. Presque tous leur font même une large place.’ He cites the Affiches de Dauphiné in 1774: ‘À mesure que l’esprit philosophique se répand dans les sociétés, il semble échauffer les âmes en faveur de l’humanité . . . Bienfaisance est le mot de ralliement de tous les bons citoyens; tous les cœurs sont échauffés pour le patriotisme, et l’on sent plus que jamais ce que l’on doit à la mère commune.’41 By 1789, according to Beatrice Hyslop’s survey of the general cahiers, 447 out of 522 mention patriotism, but Régine Robin found no mentions in her sample of parish cahiers in the Sémur-en-Auxois region.42 It is therefore a discourse more or less confined to the educated classes—or at the very least to the urban literate and the theatre-goers (parterre), thus to perhaps two or three million people. Although everyone was familiar with patriotism as social morality, the expression of patriotism as political criticism of despotism came in two waves, both closely related to the parlements.

The first great ferment of critical political patriotic literature began in 1771. But the outpouring of pamphlets in opposition to Maupeou’s coup was not an

40 For a different view see in particular Edmond Dziembowski’s fine study, Un nouveau patriotisme.41 D. Mornet Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (Paris, 1954), 258–66, at

p. 264.42 B. Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789 according to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934)

and R. Robin, La Société française en 1789 (Paris, 1970), 319–29.

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expression of republican ideology. This view may be held by intellectual historians who thrive on that rarefied atmosphere of pure political theory above the actual politics of France. However, fragments of republican sentiment, in highly modified forms, seeped into the political debates, and it was a strong cultural influence.43 But, notwithstanding the frequent references to the patrie and patriote, the basic tenor of the anti-Maupeou writings was not at all republican in the sense of anti-monarchical.

The remonstrances of the parlements in 1771–72 argued, as did anti-Maupeou pamphlets, that an evil minister and factional intrigue had misled the good king into a despotic series of actions. His acts were despotic not according to a republican tradition, but according to the mainstream view that absolute monarchy was a legitimate monarchy in which the king had to respect the public law he and his predecessors had made and which were registered in the parlements. The remonstrances wanted the monarchy to be more virtuous and to act for the public good, but the ideas of the public good and virtue are as Christian as they are ‘republican’, so we must be careful not to oversimplify or schematize. The parlements cast themselves in the role of intermediary powers defined in a variety of ways: they defended the crown against surprises against its interests in the form of poorly advised legislation by the particular king; they were intermediaries between the nation and the king, in the absence of the Estates General; and they shared some sort of legislative or taxation power with the king, this last being a position that was radical and on which no one could really agree because of its practical consequences. The actions of the monarchy itself provoked magistrates and their supporters to denounce these actions as despotic, yet their proposed solutions (in so far as they had any), were of two sorts. They were either essentially conservative in advocating a return of the parlements and the dismissal of an evil ministry; or, if the writers felt things had gone too far, they called for the Estates General as the traditional body that had authority to redress the situation. But this body was only intended to restore the former role of the parlements, and everyone knew Maupeou would never call it. So it was not yet a radical position advocating an Estates General that would replace the parlements and have a legislative role in the polity.

In his indispensable study of the Maupeou pamphlet literature, Durand Echeverria supports this reading. He states that ‘Patriote literature may be roughly classed in three types: morale boosters, satirical libels, and works of political philosophy’. In the last category he considers only the remonstrances by Malesherbes for the cour des aides and those of parlement of Besançon to be significant. ‘The clear political objectives of all Patriotes did impose definite limits on their ideological spectrum . . . it is possible to perceive in their writings

43 Republicanism in theoretical writings in this period should generally be seen more as an at-tempt to encourage modification and amelioration of royal institutions than as a model for more radical changes. It was a mirror held up to society. I share with Goulemot the belief that in ancien régime French politics, republicanism was not regarded as a practical ideology. J.-M. Goulemot ‘Du républicanisme et de l’idée républicaine en France au XVIIIe siècle’, in Le Siècle de l’avènement républicain, ed. F. Furet and M. Ozouf (Paris, 1993), 25–56.

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what might be called a patriote political philosophy dictated by the exigencies of practical politics and by the need for the widest possible public support.’ Although this patriote expression tended to defend liberty against despotism on the basis of both an ancient constitution and natural rights, it was highly unsystematic and ambiguous. National sovereignty was claimed as a principle: ‘Yet the intent was not to reject monarchism but rather to subordinate the king to the absolute sovereignty of the nation, to replace at the top of the political structure the roi by the patrie.’44 This suggests that the language of patrie did indeed operate as a sort of linguistic umbrella under which various groups with diverse interests could shelter, taking advantage perhaps of its ambiguities.

The significance of the literature is less the expression of new ideological positions than the political education it provided. J.M. Augeard, a farmer general and the author of the Correspondance secrète, recalls how ignorant of constitutional matters were even he and those lawyers he knew: he tells how he, Blonde, and Target had to do a month’s swotting in Lamoignon’s library to master the issues.45 However, Le Paige and the Jansenists did not fall into this category and they were responsible for perhaps half of all the anti-Maupeou or ‘patriote’ writings. They saw ‘state Molinism’ as the enemy and were in favour of the separation of church and state and, like Daniel Bargeton in 1751, an end to clerical immunities in taxation.46 They were influenced by a wide variety of arguments both ecclesiological and secular, and tended to call for the Estates General as sort of transposed national ecumenical council.47 Naturally, these kinds of reform were not those that Maupeou laid claim to, and a significant aspect of the ‘patriotic’ is the portrayal of Maupeou as not really interested in genuine reform of abuses, hence exposing the falsehood of his claim to be acting for the bien public as a patriote. This strategy comes out most clearly in Augeard’s Correspondance secrète. On balance, the patriotic literature of 1771–74 is not very ‘republican’, and too much typicality is implied for Saige’s work of 1775.48

The second wave of patriotic political pamphlets came in 1787–89. Unfortunately, we arrive at a conjuncture in terms of the available research in

44 Echeverria, Maupeou Revolution, 30, 43, 73 for the quotations. A rich article on the complex-ities of interpreting these remonstances is F. Bidouze, ‘Les remontrances de Malesherbes (18 février 1771): discours “national” de ralliement et discours parlementaire’, in Lemaître, Le Monde parte-mentaire au XVIIIe siècle, 57–88.

45 J. M. Augeard, Mémoires secrets de J.M. Augeard (1866), 44–5 and S. Singham, ‘The Corre-spondance secrète: forging patriotic opinion during the Maupeou years’, Historical Reflexions/Ré-flexions historiques, 18 (1992), 65–100.

46 D. Bargeton, Lettres ne repugnate vestro bono et hanc spem, dum ad verum pervenetis, alite in animis. . . (London, 1750). On Bargeton and the circumstances of publication: M. Marion, Mach-ault d’Arnouville. Étude sur l’histoire du contrôle général des finances de 1749 à 1754 (Paris, 1892, repr. Geneva, 1978), chs 10 and 11, but esp. 262–302: ‘La campagne de brochures, l’opinion publique’; and E. Testu de Balincourt, Daniel Bargeton, Avocat au Parlement 1678-1757 (Nîmes, 1887). On Bargeton’s use of patriotic language: Campbell, ‘Language of Patriotism’, 31–2.

47 Van Kley, ‘The Jansenist constitutional legacy’ and ‘The religious origins of the patriote and ministerial parties’; Cottret, Jansénisme et Lumières.

48 On Saige: K. M. Baker, ‘A classical republican in eighteenth-century Bordeaux: Guillaume-Joseph Saige’, in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), ch. 6, 128–52.

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which it is impossible to advance any but the most tentative of suggestions, for lack of systematic studies of the language of patriotism. In the absence of fuller studies, we can do no more than refer to works sketching out some general tendencies. The language of patrie is used on the occasion of the parlement de Paris in exile in 1787, during the parlementaire troubles of the winter of 1787–88 after the ‘despotic’ royal session of 19 November, and then surrounding the ‘despotic’ May Edicts in 1788. It is impossible to say whether there is a clear programme beyond envisaging the Estates General as a solution to the problem of ministerial despotism as in the anti-Maupeou campaign. We have no systematic study of the language of patriotism in 1787 (the year of the Chalons prize essay competition on the best way to encourage patriotism in a monarchy), and very little in1788. In this period, patriotism continued to be identified in politics with the defence of the nation against ministerial despotism. We are better served for later 1788 and 1789. According to Aira Kemiläinen, the distinguished Finnish historian, of roughly 2,000 pamphlets in series Lb39 published in 1788–89 well over 100 have the words patrie or patriote in the title.49 A majority of political works with patriotic claims espoused the defence of the parlements in 1788 and what we might call a moderate liberal programme in 1789. Even though many works exploiting the same concepts do not have these words in the title, we might agree that her corpus of texts is representative.

A similar way of considering the patriotic literature, namely focusing on arguments rather than the rhetorical way they are constructed, is employed by Daniel Wick in his study of the Society of Thirty in 1788–89 and by Kenneth Margerison who also studied the pamphlet production of the Society in more detail.50 Wick treats the patriotic content of the programme as if it were an ideology, while Margerison emphasizes the Society’s political aim of bringing about a union of the orders in the National Assembly without concern for privilege. He stresses the diversity of views and the fact that some in the Society were still inspired by ‘parlementary constitutionalism’.51 Broadly speaking, during the pamphlet debate of 1787–89 it seems that the language of patriotism became even more widespread, and was used in the service of diverse arguments, most of which were in favour of liberty and regeneration.

In the light of these suggestive studies, we have to ask whether the definition of patriotism changes in the 1780s, or just the arguments that are made with it. My reading of numerous texts shows that the meaning of the concept of

49 A. Kemiläinen, ‘The idea of Patriotism and the French Revolution’, in Aufklärung und Fran-zosische Revolution III, eds M. Kusch, J. Manninen and E. Urpilainen (Ooulun Yliopisto, Oulu, 1989), 65–132. She comments that ‘patriotism was not an ideology as were many other words end-ing in –ism, but rather an attitude which could be understood in the sense of activity, even political activity’, 72.

50 Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-intentioned Men; K. Margerison Pamphlets and Public Opinion (West Lafayette, IN, 1998).

51 Jeremy Popkin and Dale Van Kley have outlined the chief phases of the pamphlet debate: ‘The pre-Revolutionary Debate’, in The French Revolution Research Collection, Section 5, ed. C. Lucas (Oxford, 1990), 1–44.

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patriotism in the 1780s seems to have been not very different from in the 1770s. For example, the Catéchisme français à l’usage des gens de campagne states of patriotism that it is ‘l’attachement que l’on a pour ses parens, pour sa famille, pour son pays, et pour tous ceux qui y demeurent, qui sont nos frères’.52 In his prize-winning essay, Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour’s only modification (if it can be called that, as it goes back to Eudamidas and the Horatii) is to insist that there is a difference between a natural love of one’s native area (the original usage of patrie) and patriotism, which he reserves for the expression of moral virtues in the interests of the bien public:

L’amour de la patrie est ce penchant naturel et général qui attache tous les hommes au sol qui les a vu naître. . .le patriotisme, plus rare parce qu’il est désintéressé, est un désir ardent de servir nos compatriotes, de contribuer à leur bien-être, et d’assurer leur repos et leur bonheur. Ce désir tient à l’amour de la patrie, mais il en est en quelque sorte le complement, ou plutôt c’est l’amour de la patrie pour elle-même, comme éprouvent les âmes nobles et pures: et tandis que les égoistes les plus vils n’aiment leur patrie que pour leur intérêt, les vrai patriotes sont toujours prêts à sacrifier pour elle et leurs intérêts les plus chers, et jusqu’à leur vie. . . . [Le patriotisme] tient à toutes les vertus sociales, et qu’il en est, pour ainsi dire, le mesure et le garant.53

In texts too numerous to cite, patriotism still has wide moral connotations, the same set of associations with the same key words we have noted above. Of course, the American, Genevan and Dutch revolutions added new contextual possibilities to the language that would each require a specific study to investigate. One sub-theme that does emerge that has antecedents in the Maupeou era, as well as a significant posterity, is the renewed concern with defining a ‘true patriote’ and, as a consequence of bitter divisions, the expression of patriotic pleas for unity.54 This assumption of unity within the community will become very significant during the Revolution.

From 1788 to 1789 (and of course later during the Revolution) the definition of patriotism develops rapidly as the political terrain shifts. The interaction of discourse and events creates new discursive possibilities and the events themselves are discursively (re-)constructed. It is a vast subject beyond the scope of this article, but it should be noted that the development does not take place though major works of theory. The possibility of true originality is limited by the tendency of most authors of pamphlets to recycle ideas culled from

52 Catéchisme français, p. 1.53 C.-J. Mathon de la Cour, Discours sur les meilleurs moyens de faire naître et d’encourager le

patriotisme dans une Monarchie (Paris, 1788), 14–15. Like most writers who touch on the subject in relation to patriotic virtues, including Fénelon and Duguet, he is against le luxe.

54 E.g. Le vrai patriote aux François [1788]. Mathon de la Cour also distinguishes between real and false patriots, and uses an argument perhaps culled from Pierre Nicole that the effects of false virtue might be beneficial.

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older works, because pamphlets were for the most part rapid sketches written for quick publication. The major reason for the development in ideas is simply a fundamental shift in the context: in 1788–89, because of the very uncertain political and financial situation, and the perceived decadence of the political system, pamphlets could now focus on the future, often in terms of regeneration. After forty years of patriotic discourse, a patriote can now advocate, with some real hope of it being achieved, an imaginary polity in which citizens are educated in civic virtues, in a state ruled by good laws that protect equality and liberty. Patriotic pamphlets thus can have a programme that goes well beyond the defence of the parlements against despotism. So, in late 1788 and 1789, the vocabulary that had once underpinned expressions of ‘parliamentary constitutionalism’ was now used to signify a very different regime, with a variety of solutions, but in which the Parlement had to give way to the nation in the Estates General (or in some cases a restoration or reform of the provincial estates). Even the Society of Thirty believed that the Estates General had constitutional priority, and merely preserved a role for the courts in a future constitutional regime.

In this reading, far from providing a single ideology of opposition, the notion of patrie continued to operate as a field of discourse in which debate took place about what the patrie implied. Thus the very ambiguities continued to be exploited as a rhetorical strategy by the participants. Many different views of the present and future could be expressed in terms of patriotic citizenship. But at some point we have also to come to terms with the fact that in the later 1780s some educated participants in the debate do seem to be using love of the patrie not just as a legitimizing strategy, but may actually be expressing some degree of belief that informed their action.

Perhaps the rhetoric of the 1750s to 1770s had taken on a life of its own through repetition, in fêtes de la rosière, eulogies, innumerable sermons on bienfaisance, and secular acts of charity and artistic representation. Perhaps the rise of sentiment enabled the concept of patriotism and love of the patrie to move from being essentially a rhetoric that justified intervention to something still more complex, a rhetoric that had a basis in genuine motivation or self-definition. It is easy to imagine that the experience of ‘ministerial despotism’ in the form of exiles or tax assessments by intendants that could not be appealed, left a deep imprint in the minds of the magistrates and their supporters. The embastillement of writers, publishers and distributors of patriotic literature evoked sympathies and created resentments. Age, too, may be very significant: the majority of the magistrates, lawyers and indeed of the whole population in the 1780s was younger than before and if educated was steeped in patriotic rhetoric, in classical republican texts and in patriotic fashion in art and literature that increased markedly from the 1750s. This new generation of those under forty in 1789 had grown up deeply influenced by the defeat of France in 1763, the Maupeou coup of 1771, the American Revolution of 1776, the Genevan of 1782, and the Dutch in 1783–87. For them, perhaps, patriotism was a way of making sense of the political world. Thus, by the later 1780s, we undoubtedly still have patrie used strategically as an ambiguous discourse, but perhaps also a far

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greater number of expressions of what we shall call ‘genuine patriotic sentiment’. Plausible though this impression is, the extent of patriotic motivation is hard to measure and only biographical studies can bring us closer to an answer.55 Those studies we do have retain a place for the importance of self-conscious strategies.

V

Most of this study has focused on the context in which the language of patrie existed and its possibilities in relation to the courts. We have seen that although the discourse was broad in meaning and usage, the parlements, especially that of Paris, played a role in its evolution. Further elucidation of the relationship between the judicial world and patriotism is possible. The pre-existing social ideology of the parfait magistrat, longstanding notions of the dignité of the magistrate as embodying the classical republican virtue of justice, made it easier to adopt and conform to the rhetoric of patriotism. The arguments developed about the role of the courts as intermediaries in a state that had no effective national representative institution, and the related but nebulous idea of the courts as defenders of the nation, added plausibility to this notion of the magistrates as pères de la patrie—a senate. This was the image, but it is nevertheless doubtful if a wider set of patriotic considerations could be said to have deeply motivated more than a handful of magistrates and lawyers. Other motives are much more in evidence. For example, we now know that the chief concern of the Parisian magistrates from the 1730s to 1787 was to defend the jurisdiction of their corps when attacked by the clergy or king’s council. This concern was apparent to observers after the recall of the parlements in 1774–75, as they soon appeared to side more with the interests of the nobility and were involved in upholding the increasingly contested seigneurial rights in their jurisdictions. However much pamphleteers might exalt the role of magistrates as patriotes struggling against despotism, the real public in the 1780s was clearly sceptical. Seigneurs were despots as well and magistrates were noble seigneurs, so in some realms of activity they lived up to neither the private nor public virtues expected of a patriote. For example, présidents à mortier almost all owned seigneurial hautes justices.

We have seen that magistrates were cautious in using the rhetoric of patrie partly because they already had a legal voice, and partly because the language was sentimental. Nevertheless, there is a tendency for them to refer to the patrie in 1787–88 more than ever before. This is probably because the remonstrances in question are not directed at the king but at the public. For example, given the uncompromising tone and the arguments themselves in the remonstrances of the Parlement de Bordeaux on 15 April 1788, and those in

55 Three examples sensitive to the interplay of circumstances and ideas are Jay Smith’s focus on J.-M.-A. Servan, ‘Between discourse and experience: agency and ideas in the French pre-revolution’, Hist and Theory, 40 (2001), 116–42; H. Leuwers, Un juriste en politique. Merlin de Douai (1754–1838) (Arras, 1996); A. Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, 2005).

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the remonstrances of the Parlement de Paris on 11 April 1788, it is clear no positive response from the king could be expected.56 In these widely published documents, the magistrates are clearly representing themselves as patriots in an attempt to get the support of public opinion to strengthen their beleaguered position. Because of the associations in the language in the semantic field, it was not always necessary to actually state that one was a patriote. In the aforementioned Parisian remonstrances of 11 April, the first two pages are almost a patriotic declamation, which, however ,does not use the word patrie. On the other hand, the Bordeaux remonstrances makes explicit use of the words patrie and patriote. By separating king and patrie, as many references do, they could make the point that they were loyal to the patrie, to the bien public, even if they appeared disobedient to the king’s specific will.

There is also an attempt to court the public by seeking to move the reader, in true rhetorical style. Shortly after the Lamoignon Edicts of 8 May the sentimental side of the appeal to the patrie is in evidence.

Mais si l’équilibre est rompu, si la Justice cesse de diriger les actes de la Force, si la Force ne sert qu’à contraindre ou interrompre la Justice, tous les noeuds se relachent: la Justice, dépouillée de son autorité protectrice, n’inspire plus de respect; la Force, séparé de la Loi qui en consacre l’usage, n’inspire plus que la terreur. Les sentimens se glâcent, les moeurs s’alterent, les coeurs s’isolent, l’amour de la patrie s’éteint. Les malheurs publics ne touchent plus des hommes qui n’ont plus intérêt d’être Citoyens. . .57

Magistrates could hardly call themselves patriotic to the king’s face, but they could call other magistrates patriotic, as in the case of Bordeaux above, and many instances in the protests of 1771. This is similar to the very aware way they exploited the rhetoric of virtue.58 The sort of patriotism they laud could be defined as the defence, at great personal cost, of the bien public against the policies enunciated by the king’s council, in which the king had plainly been misled by surprise or intrigue. The argument is repeated again and again.

It was reinforced by the way the magistrates represented themselves non-verbally.59 The way they went into exile, respected the despotic orders of the

56 See the Remontrances du parlement de Paris, 11 April 1788, 1–2; Remontrances du parle-ment de Bordeaux, du 15 Avril 1788, Sur l’enlèvement de M. de Catellan, Avocat-Général au parlement de Toulouse: ‘Le magistrat qui porte la parole au nom du Roi, au nom de la Patrie, au nom de la Loi, seroit indigne du ministère auguste qui lui est confié, si la crainte ou l’ambition pouvoient enchaîner son zèle, le porter à trahir le témoignage de sa conscience, & à sacrifier, par foiblesse, les intérêts du Monarque & ceux de la nation’ (p. 10).

57 Remontrances, in Recueil (1788), p. 10858 M. Linton, ‘The rhetoric of virtue and the parlements, 1770–1775’, Fr Hist, 9 (1995), 180–201.59 See a fascinating study of non verbal representations of the parlementaire remonstrances by

Pierre Wachenheim, ‘Les remontrances représentées: donner à voir les remontrances au XVIIIe siècle’, in Lemaître, Le Monde partementaire au XVIIIe siècle, 89–119.

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king’s minister, bore their well publicized hardships uncomplainingly, sacrificed their income and fortunes for their belief in the rule of law, all conveyed the image not just of the parfait magistrat but of a true patriot.60 All these actions spoke louder than words, and they were claiming ‘we are patriots, Roman senators made the victim of despotism, of arbitrary government, ministerial intrigue, and our only desire is to uphold the laws for the bien de l’état’. That this tactic was successful is especially clear in the case of d’Eprémesnil on 5 May 1788.61

To further refine our analysis, we must also distinguish between the official utterances actually made by the courts or lawyers, and those more numerous writings that attributed patriotism to the parlementaires and which were not produced by them. This is one of the sub themes of 1771–72. In Bordeaux in 1788 the local diarist Bernadau defined patriotism as support for the exiled Parlement.62 Moreover, the plight of the parlements became an opportunity for the expression of more radical views, for those who used the language about the courts and magistrates might sometimes have views going farther than those of the magistrates. They could attribute views to them, or use their fate as a justification for views, and even upstage the parlements by appealing to the Estates General. By 1789 the political association of patriotism with the defence of the parlements that were seen to be attacked by a despotic ministry had come to a thundering halt, as hardly anyone now regarded the parlements as patriotic.63 This is because the crisis of 1787–88 had changed things more dramatically than had the Maupeou coup. The reform plans of 1787 and Lamoignon’s coup in 1788 suggested to many that French absolute monarchy really had degenerated into despotism. This contingency helped writers to envisage a patriotic programme that went beyond defence of the parlements to the exploration of what historians might wish to interpret as ‘republican’ solutions like a constitutional monarchy. The parlements, through their activities, had of course played a crucial role in enabling this element of the ambiguous discourse to emerge under a monarchy. Ultimately however, the pères de la patrie proved themselves to be an insufficient defence against despotism, and so the solution of a national body became the preferred patriotic

60 On their conduct in exile: J. Swann, ‘Disgrace without dishonour: the political exile of French magistrates in the eighteenth century’, P&P, 195 (2007), 87–126.

61 Recueil, 1788, 78–81. On the occasion of the enforced registration of the edict on provincial assemblies in the exiled parlement de Bordeaux in Libourne, 24 Dec. 1787, Pierre Bernadau noted that ‘Le premier president a déployé dans cette occasion toute la fermeté et le patriotisme qu’on lui connaît. Il disait en pluerant la honteuse defection de ses frères, qu’il n’embrassait jamais un parti sans l’avoir bien médité, et que l’exil ni la mort ne lui ferait sacrifier les intérêts du people et de la vérité.’ M. L’Héritier, Les Débuts de la Révolution à Bordeaux, d’après les tablettes manuscrites de Pierre Bernadau (Paris, 1919), p. 7.

62 Les Débuts, p. 10.63 On 18 October, Bernadau noted in Bordeaux, ‘L’opinion public qui avait soutenu les parle-

ments, tant qu’ils ont paru soutenir les intérêts de la nation, pourrait bien les abondonner, si elle voit qu’ils abusent de l’autorité pour s’ériger en tyrans du people.’ Part of the reason was that the Parle-ments defended an aristocratic conception of liberty, not a national one or one based on natural rights.

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model. As the debate on the powers of the Estates General gathered way, those who supported the idea of a national assembly with the power to make law (thus usurping the role of the parlements) now claimed the patriotic mantle. Although the courts and other publicists associated patriotic virtues with the magistrates, after September 23 1788 public opinion put its faith in the Third Estate in the forthcoming Estates General, and the parlements appeared as members of a noble conspiracy against liberty.64 In common with the reactions of, for example, the Breton nobility, the resistance of the parlements to the ministers was now interpreted as motivated by an esprit de corps that should be subordinated to the interest of the patrie.65 Hence the substitution of the term ‘parti national’ for ‘parti patriote’. In 1789, if the language of patrie was now associated with the parlements, it was in a purely negative sense. This was of course because the language of patriotism was now subsumed into the language of revolution.

64 On conspiracy: P. R. Campbell, T. E. Kaiser and M. Linton (eds), Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester, 2007).

65 Target, Les Etats-Généraux convoqués par Louis XVI (1789), p. 20, cited in B. C. Shafer, ‘Bourgeois nationalism in the pamphlets on the eve of the French Revolution’, J Mod Hist, 10 (1938), 31–50, at 34. The Gloses et remarques Sur l’Arrêté du parlement de Paris du 5 décembre 1788 (London, 1789), by Servan, is notable for its vehemence against the Parlements and magistra-ture, which are seen as allied with the upper clergy and nobility against the nation: ‘Vous vous placez sans cesse dans votre arrêté, entre la nation et le roi: retirez-vous MM; ces deux puissances augustes n’ont plus besoin de vous’ (p. 49). It does, however, reflect the dramatic shift in public opinion.

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