Culture and the Nation: Literature, the Public Sphere and Anti-French Relativism

Summary

In previous pages we have seen that a good deal of attention was given to the idea that nations differed culturally and in their ‘national character’; it remains to be traced how this cultural-ethnographicalsense of nationality gained programmatic importance and eventually became instrumentalized into a cultural-political agenda.

So what, finally, is a nation, and where does it begin or end? The French Republic saw, at least in its high-minded beginnings, no obvious demarcation between ‘the’ nation and humanity at large: political usage at the time used the word ‘nation’ mainly in a societal sense, as the mass of the body politic. ‘Nation’ meant much the same thing that ‘society’ means nowadays – thus in Adam Smith's economic classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (1776) – and the more particularly ethnic-anthropological meaning, referring to the cultures, manners and customs by which societies mutually differ, was more current in the realms of philosophy and cultural criticism than in the world of politics.

Literature and the emerging public sphere

A general trend in Europe was to denounce the vices of the nobility and to praise the ‘civic virtues’ of the middle classes. Among these virtues was the patriotic ‘love of the fatherland’: the Patriotic citizen saw himself, ideally, as a useful member of society and of his nation. To this virtue belonged the rejection of ‘foreign’ vanities. It was a privilege of the upper classes and the nobility to have international contacts and to engage in foreign travel; and it was a matter of conspicuous wealth display to buy foreign produce and affect foreign manners. Command of a foreign language, the display of exotic plants or imported antiques, all that was considered a part of aristocratic showing- off, and was disdained by the solid citizen. In England (to name but one example), fashionable young gentlemen who had returned from the ‘Grand Tour’ (an educational journey to the Continent) formed the ‘macaroni club’, in honour of that exotic dish they had tasted in Italy; the word macaroni, still used sarcastically in the Patriot song ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, referred to pretentious showing-off.