Historicising the French Revolution, Edited by Carolina Armenteros, ‘Tim Blanning, Isabel DiVanna and Dawn Dodds ‘This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, New tle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Carolina Armenteros, Tim Blanning, Isabel DiVanna and Dawn Dodds and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-640-8, ISBN (13): 9781847186409Pagessy < > am ~ FROM ROYAL TO BOURGEOIS: AUGUSTIN THIERRY’S NATIONAL NARRATIV MATTHEW D’AURIA M. Thierry seeks to discover in our history all the debris, all the monuments, all the proofs of our ancient liberties. He believes, without a doubt, to be offering to the new liberty an important service by reattaching it to the past. by reminding it of its cradle. by prolonging our institutions and our rights to their first origin: he is right. If the French Revolution has been understood as the conflict for the nation’s political representation, then the Restoration may be seen as the quest for its historical representation. The end of the Old Regime, the monarchy’s definitive desacralization, and the Napoleonic epic had left the French people few certainties about the unity and political future of their nation. While the men and women of the Revolution strove to create a new society discounting the understanding of the past as a source of political legitimacy,” the Restoration posed, im a way, quite an opposite need, namely that of re-discovering the immutable and righteous order of society enshrined in history. In stark opposition to the Revolutionary period, the| Tecourse to history, or rather 1s constant and mindlul use to mlorm, order and justify social reality, may be the main facet of the political struggles of post-Revolutionary France.* From this perspective, insofar as the Restoration represents, intellectually, a reaction to the Revolution’s “ML Thierry s ‘applique @ découvrir dans notre histoire, tous les débris, tous les monumens, toutes les preuves de nos anciennes libertés. Il croit sans doute rendre a la liberté nouvelle un service important en la rattachant au passé, en lui rappelant son berceau, en prolongeant nos institutions et nos droits yusque dans leur premiére origine: il a raison.” Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis Ja Restauraiion, 206. All translations are mine. ? Arendt, On revolution * Much has been written on the political uses of history during the Restoration. See Reizov, L’historiographie romantique francaise, Mellon, The political uses of history, Omodeo, Studi sull'eta della Restaurazione, Lefebvre, La naissance de Uhistoriographie moderne.PagessS~ € > ay excesses, then it was above all a response to the downplaying of history and of the nation’s historical identity As is often the case after times of social and cultural upheaval, politicians, historians and men of letters turned to history to find the grounding of social unity in the face of the deep ideological divisions that had torn France apart. It was in such a climate that each party, in an effort to imagine the political unity of France on the basis of its own ideological assumptions, sought to represent the unity of the nation’s history The publication in 1814 of De Ja monarchie francaise by the Count of Montlosier inaugurated a seminal phase in the development of French historiography. Retrieving the old quarrel that alternatively attributed Frankish and Gallic origins to the French nation, Montlosier offered a new interpretation that tried “to justify the rights of one race/class against the rights_of_another_race/class.“* According _to_the Count, the Frankish invasion of Gaul at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire saw a gradual mixing of the two racial groups, and the elevation of all freemen to the rank of “Frank,” while the rest of the Gauls remained instead subdued to the new ruling class. Over the centuries, the heirs of these two groups gave birth to the nobles and the bourgeois. The latter, with the aid of royal authority, and taking a path that began in the enfranchisement of the communes in the twelfth century, slowly but constantly gained economic influence, finally seizing political power through the Revolution. In Montlosier’s historical scheme, then, the Revolution itself was simply the culmination of an unjust usurpation of the ancient rights of the French nobles by the bourgeois, As a consequence of the ideological arguments put forward and of the importance of the claims made, De la_monarchie francaise_became_a rallying text for the conservatives, while stirring new ideas and posing new Challenges to their political opponents. Given the intent of his work, fontlosier touched on a number ol issues of capital importance both Tor istorians and for politicians, such as the status of the monarch, the uestion of political representation, the place of the nobles in society, the| tondition of the communes in the nation’s history and, not least, the conomic origins of French society and the historical roots of property rights. All these concerns soon became central to political debate, since all ultimately aimed at attesting or discrediting the social order of Restoration France. But perhaps what possessed the greatest relevance in the disputes f the time was the rise of a bourgeois national narrative opposed to the Id royalist narrative, which had long provided the dominant way of ‘Gruner, “Political historiography in Restoration France,” 347ragesGe NS 4 ae representing the French past. And clearly, what was at stake in the opposition between the two narratives was not only the rapport between nation and monarch but also, and more importantly, the possibility that the nation might be conceived independently of the king The need to depict a bourgeois national narrative was, and remained, one of Augustin Thierry’s main concems, a concern which influenced a large part of his historical writings throughout his entire career_In “Les. ‘Lettres sur "histoire de France” d'Augustin Thierry,”” his contribution to Pierre Nora’s celebrated Les lieux de mémoire, Marcel Gauchet analyzed this specific aspect of Thierry s work. Gauchet interpreted Thierry s ational narrative as an attempt to overturn the object of concern of national histories from the king to the nation. Claiming that Thierry pursued an “extension of the historical object” closely entwined with “the democratic process,”’ Gauchet’s interpretation also implied that Thierry’s conceptual toppling finally considered the nation as an entity whose unity, hic’ zed thanks to the Revolution.* national this object istorique should be considered ‘less as a shift of the objec history, than asa problematic reworking of the way in n which the following analy. sis, then, what will emerge is that the need to redefine he way in which the nation was represented required recourse to imagined kocial groupings—such as class and race—that possessed a conceptual Lomplexity underplayed in Gauchet’s analysis. Furthermore, by shifting he focus from the object to the mode of the nation’s representation, it will also be possible to highlight some of the difficulties inherent in Thierry’s. bourgeois national narrative that are still of great interest for understanding the way Restoration France perceived its own past. I shall hence devote the present es to the symbolic ¢ froma royal to a bourgeois national narrative, a seemingly Timited and yet highly relevant aspect of Thierry’s political and historical thought. Like many other young intellectuals of his time, Augustin Thierry believed that the study of history could provide the answers for which French society longed. As he eloquently wrote, recalling the beginning of his intellectual career: “In 1817, preoccupied with a strong desire to contribute to the triumph of constitutional opinions, I began to look in > Gauchet, “Les ‘Lettres sur |"histoire de France’ d’Augustin Thierry.” ° A similar understanding is also shared by Fiorentini, Augustin Thierry, 109-110. ” Gauchet, “Les ‘Lettres sur "histoire de France’ d’Augustin Thierry,” 809. * Tbid., 819-35PageeTy << > a - historical books for proofs and arguments which would support my political beliefs.” Clearly, Thierry’s interest in history was far [rom disinterested. His réforme historique, as he himself would later call it’° was not simply an intellectual search for a new understanding of the nation’s past. It was rather, and more importantly, a political project meant to further the cause of liberalism in France. More specifically, ‘Thierry’s first clear aim was to offer the French a new history that would no longer be centered on the kings and their deeds, but on the bourgeoisie, their work and their courage. This daunting task, which he strove to accomplish throughout his life, was conceived, first and foremost, as a thorough refutation of the old royal biographies that pretended to represent the —————————————— history of the entire nation. Disappoinied by his scrutiny of the historical writings of the time—a rather sour discontent he shared with his early mentor Saint-Simon— Thierry believed that although the eighteenth century had opened with great promises for a history of culture and national customs," it had not fulfilled them. According to Saint-Simon, most historical writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century was still a “biography of power in which nations appear merely as instruments or preys.”'~ Saint-Simon, who thought that the second half of the eighteenth century had been a time of great historiographical development during which the classical canons of national history had been duly and rightly criticized, had to admit that a new historical method had failed to impose itself. A new historical method, leading to a national narrative describing the masses upon whom the burdens of everyday history fell, was still to be designed.'? The prevalence of the old national narrative centered on the royal figure was such that, recalling his years as a young student, Thierry despondently had to admit that: “French, throne, monarchy were for me the beginning and the end, the bottom and the shape of our national History.”'’ His ° m@ - disappointment with such narratives, which were all but meant to account for the true history of the people, is even more striking in a letter of 13 July 1820 addressed to the Courrier frangais, which Thierry would later consider as his manifesto of historical reform The history of France, such as has been written by modern historians, is not the true history of the country, the national history, the history of the people: such a history is still buried under the dust of contemporary chronicles [...]. The best part of our annals, the most serious, the most instructive one is still to be written; we lack the history of citizens, the history of subjects, the history of the people.’> If it may be 5 were quite unfair to ily argued that Thierry’s remark all those who had called for such a history—Turgot, Voltaire and Condorcet being the best known!’—it may be said that while cighteenth- century historians repeatedly criticized the old historiographical assumptions and often pleaded for a history of the people, they failed to write a national history that was really detached from the royal figure. On the point. a meaningful and enlightening example of the seemingly inescapable contrast between the intentions and the actual outcomes of eighteenth-century historians is offered by one of the greatest writers of the Enlightenment. In a text initially written as the introduction to his famous Essai sur les moeurs, Voltaire lamented that “[I]t seems, when reading history, that the world is made but for a few kings and for those who have served their passions; everything else is neglected. Historians, in such respect, imitate some of the tyrants of whom they speak: they sacrifice humanity to one man. Aren’t there but princes on earth?”!’ While remarked that: “If Guizot, de Sismondi and de Barante find their enthusiast readers, Velly and Anquetil had on them the advantage of a much more numerous clientele.” For Thierry, hence, the Revolution was far from accomplished for “the masses of the public.” Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques. xxx. 'S <7 histoire de France, telle que nous l'ont faite les écrivains modernes, n'est point la vraie histoire du pays, UVhistoire nationale, histoire populaire: cette histoire est encore ensevelie dans la poussiére des chroniques contemporaines |... La meilleure partie de nos annales, la plus grave, la plus instructive reste a écrire; il nous manque l'histoire des citoyens, l'histoire des sujets, l'histoire du peuple.” Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques. 324. ‘© Turgot, “Second discours, sur les progrés successifs de l’esprit humain,” 597- 611; Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrés de l'esprit humain, 324-325; Voltaire, “Introduction de Pabrégé de l’histoire universelle,” 9. I “Ii semble, en lisant les histoires, que la terre n’ait été faite que pour quelques souverains, et pour ceux qui ont servi leurs passions, tout le reste est négligé. Les historiens imitent en cela quelques tyrans dont ils parlent: ils sacrifient le genrePagesQy << > my Voltaire’s urgent appeal for a history of the people, of the citizens and of the subjects is quite striking, in the Essai it is equally clear that the history told still remains largely an account of wars, diplomatic intrigues, and the deeds and lives of great kings. As Henri Duranton has written, the L’ssai sur les moeurs, despite Voltaire’s intentions, was still “essentially the history of those kings which his theory refused to consider as privileged testimonies.”!® The contradictions between Voltaire’s historiographical intentions and his historical works were common among other cighteenth-century intellectuals. The difficulty of creating a new way of organizing the nation’s past had various causes. Among thi Thierry himself acknowledged, was simply the fact that since eighteenth-century intellectuals relied on the works of previous historians rather than on primary sources, their writings facilitated the reproduction and perpetuation of the classical canons of national dynastic histories.’” Nevertheless, another more relevant and more intriguing explanation of the difficulties of creating a national narrative detached from the royal figure lies in the complexity of the social structure of eighteenth-century France. The diversity of the provinces and the variety of dialects, customs, and Taws of the kingdom was such thai the majority of the French people shared little more than an allegiance to the same king. From such a standpoint, it easily may be argued that only through the medium of the royal symbolic body could the unity of the nation be represented,”° thus allowing a bond to be created among individuals who would otherwise remain strangers to be imagined.” To the extent that the king, through his symbolic body, created the sole meaningful representation of the nation, he also was, by necessity, the sole actor in the national narrative. In terms of a complex representational interaction, it may be said that it was the unity of the royal lineage and the uninterrupted succession of the kings’ immortal bodies that represented the nation’s continuity and gave historical unity to civil wars, religious conflicts, acquisitions and losses of territories that otherwise would have been a bundle of incongruous and disjointed facts. If the nation was a (representational) product of the royal symbolic body, then the national narrative was itself a (representational) creation of the kings’ mortal and immortal bodies, the interaction of which Jumain & un seul homme. N'y a-t-il donc eu sur la terre que des princes?” Voltaire, “Introduction de Pabrégé de histoire universelle,” 271 '8 Duranton, “Voltaire historien de I’ histoire de France,” 221 19 See Thierry’s Letires sur l'histoire de France, \6. 2° Baker, “Representation redefined,” 224-51 *"T draw here on Anderson’s classic Imagined communities.Page 70 + < > cadenced the national narrative—at least until the irreversible Revolutionary crisis. As necessary as it might have been for imagining the community of the nation in its historical as much as in its actual wars, Thierry hastened to refute the representational identity of king and nation within the national narrative. In his letter to the Courrier frangais of 1820, Thierry had already castigated historians’ stubborn refusal to attribute any spontaneity to the masses. “If new customs are established,” he wrote, “itis some legislator who imagines them and imposes them, if a city organizes itself, it is always a prince who creates it. Always the people and the citizens are stifled by the thoughts of a single man.”~ A few years the Germanist a anist theses that had been so central to both historiographical and political debates from the seventeenth century onwards,” Thierry explored its relevance for the French idea of nation, He insisted that his work was meant to be “the history of all, written for everybody; it embraces, it puts together all the traditions that the country has preserved: but it places above everything the history of the greatest number, that of the national mass.” 2 “$5 de nouvelles coutumes s'établissent, c'est quelque législateur qui les imagine et les impose; si une cité s'organise, c'est quelque prince qui lui dorme I'étre: et toujours le peuple et les citoyens sont de I'étoffe pour la pensée d'un seul homme.” Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques, 348 3 <1 ‘objet essentiel de cette histoire est d'envisager la destinée des peuples, et non celle de certains hommes célébres, de raconter les aventures de la vie sociale, et non celles de la vie individuelle.” Thierry, Histoire de la conquéte de I'Angleterre par tes Normands, 127. “To my knowledge, the standard account of the historical development of this debate remains Barzun’s The French race: theories of its origins and their social and political thesis (1932), a work deeply influenced by Thierry 3 “P'histoire de tous, écrite pour tous; elle embrasse, elle associe toutes les traditions que le pays a conservées; mais elle place en avant de toutes, celles du plus grand nombre, celles de la masse nationale.” Thierry, Considérations sur l'histoire de France, 208.Page72~ << | > % not only destroyed the identification of king and nation but also, and more importantly, solved Thierry’s problem of finding a substitute for the king. For, in having proven that the king could be replaced by a new political actor, the Revolution had also implied that the latter might also play the king’s role in organizing the nation’s past. From this perspective, the true understanding of the nation’s history could only begin after 1789.7? when an actor had emerged who could be represented independently of the king and whose history, furthermore, could be traced back to the Middle Ages. As Thierry wrote in 1838, “the events of the last fifty years have taught us how to understand the revolutions of the Middle Ages, to see the bottom of things under the letters of the chronicles, to pull out of the writings of the Benedictines what those learned men had not seen, or what they had een in a partial and imperfect manner.” The Revolution, in its agnitude, hence became a prism through which Thierry interpreted all ational history, radically replacing the medium through which its Imaginary unity was achieved—from the symbolic body of the king, to the also symbolic) body of the French people. According to Thierry, the actor f the national narrative was the French bourgeoisie, Clearly following the leachings of Sieyés and the men of 1789, Thierry assumed that the nation was actually represented by tradesmen, lawy and shopkeepi since hese made the greatness and the wealth of France. Its unity was then the roduct of the imagined common interests of the industrious part of bociety, rather than the reflex of loyalty towards the same monarch.*! By the same token, concluded Thierry, the bourgeois was not only a ation in himself, but “a complete nation.” In keeping with this interpretation, Thierry s writings also attempted to identify the true image of France and to develop from it a national narrative that Thierry believed should coincide with an all-encompassing bourgeois history. Identifying the historical unity of the bourgeois hence became tantamount to ® Thierry, Considérations sur Vhistoire de France, 193 “Ce sont les événements des cinquante derniéres années, qui nous ont appris & comprendre les révolutions du moyen-dge, a voir le fond des choses sous la lettre des chroniques, a tirer des écrits des bénédictins ce que ces savants hommes n'avaient point vu, ce qu'ils avaient vu d'une fagon partielle et incomplete.” Wbid., 192 On the importance that Thierry’s “industrialism” had for the formation of his own concept of the nation, see Thierry’s “Des nations et de leurs rapports in Saint Simon and Enfantin’s @uvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, 19 Iso Fiorentini, Augustin Thierry, 33-49. *? On this idea, see Fiorentini, Augustin Thierry, 110; also Bann, “L*histoire et lePage 73) <> 2 symbolising the true national narrative of France. Quite obviously, the emerges in his Essai sur l’histoire de la formation et des progres du Tiers Etat, Vhierry himself admitted that his task was formidable: I took it upon myself to write an history which, properly speaking. had no body; it was a matter of shaping one for it, of disentangling it, by means of abstraction, from everything that was not it, and it was necessary to give to a succession of insights and of general facts the movement and the interests of a narration.” Aware of the difficulty of replacing the king’s symbolic body with a new principle of national historical unity, Thierry first sought a solution to the conundrum the Revolution had posed to liberal historians. in his Histoire véritable de Jacques Bonhomme,*' an imaginary biography of a typical I'rench_peasant from the creation of France to the Revolution: Jacques, conquered, tricked and continually oppressed by those in power, often tries to throw off his yoke, but, whenever he is close to succeeding, returns to his oppressed condition. His simple and tireless figure represents, in Thierry’s intentions, the unity of all farmers, tradesmen and guildsmen who, by means of their work, contributed to the wealth and the greatness of France and who, nonetheless, were unjustly subjugated by nth a cs b rmanis d Gallo-Romanists. According to him, the original conquest and the subjugation of the ancestors of the modern bourgeois shaped the ensuing hostility between the oppressor and the oppressed, thus determining the path of French history. It is through the “genius of conquest” that, in Thierry’s own words, “the distinctions of castes have succeeded those of * “Yentreprenais d'écrire une histoire qui, a proprement parler, manquait de corps; il s‘agissait de lui en former un, en la dégageant par abstraction de tout ce qui n'était pas elle, et il fallait donner a une succession d'apergus et de faits généraux le mouvernent et l'intérét d'un récit.” Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrés du Tiers Etat, xiii *'Tn Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques. 301-11Page74~ SS 7? sal the blood, the distinctions of order those of castes, the distinctions of titles those of orders. In this scheme—which highlights the important fact that the divisions based on race slow! ly tured into legal and then economic distinctions—the 135 permanent condition of subjection gave unity to the nation’s (bourgeois) history, all change could only take place thanks to the struggles of the oppressed class—a principle that Thierry considered to be the only true law of French history.*’ Clearly then, the unity of Thierry’s narrative, as much as its cadence, no longer derived from the interaction between the king S immortal and natural bodies. On the contrary, Jerry s bourgeois and liberal history flowed from the thirst for freedom that moved the oppressed class, and from a struggle that in itself became the unifying principle of the nation, while meaningfully defining its historical moments. One may readily remark that many elements of Thierry’s scheme recall a Marxist philosophy of history and its underlying idea of class struggle as the true engine and principle of historical unity. It should come as no developments is based, in fact, on a very clear racial assumption The upper and lower classes, who today look at each other with distrust and fight against one another for systems of ideas and of government, are in several countries, but the conquering and the enslaved peoples of an Les distinctions des castes ont succédé 4 celles du sang, celles des ordres & celles des castes, celle des titres 4 celles des ordres.” Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques, 297 Yous sommes les fils de ces serfs, de ces tributaires, de ces bourgeois, que des conquérans dévoraient a merci: nous leurs devons tout ce que nous sommes.” Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques, vi . * ‘Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrés du Tiers Etat, 132. 8 Marx, Selected correspondence, 1864-1895, 71 * For a complex rendition of Thierry’s race theory, see Seliger, “Race-thinking during the Restoration,” 273-82ieee 75 YG | > y carlier period. [...] The race of invaders remained a privileged class from the moment it ceased to constitute a separate nation.” In this passage, taken from one of his earlier works, the concepts of race and class seem to overlap. While this may confirm that these terms were often used synonymously, their overlapping may be explained by the fact that, in Thierry’s scheme, both concepts performed the same function, representing and offering an imagined and unified political and historical identity to individuals who would otherwise remain alienated from one another. From such a perspective, it may be argued that Thierry’s racial theory mostly lacks biological or ethnic implications. In fact, by admitting that a conqueror race could easily become a conquered one, Thierry also believed that if political inequality disappeared. then all racial distinctions. would become worthless. Far from being a principle of legitimacy, the concept of race, devoid of any moral connotations, hence acquired its actual relevance depending on politics rather than on ethnic considerations. Consistent with the pre-modern historiographical tradition, the Meaning he gave to race, lacking any cihical inflection or any biological understanding, was instead quite close to the one we would give today to “descent” or “genealogy.” Boulainvilliers, Du Bos, and, to some extent, Montlosier, all used the concept of race in an historical rather than a biological sense,” making of it simply a thread with which their histories could be weaved. It is only in a historiographical sense that the idea of race occupied a central place in Thierry’s thought, playing a role similar to the one it had in the old royal and noble genealogical histories. Given his theory of conquest, similar observations pertain to Thierry’s idea of class. Both concepts, conceived as non-deconstructible principles, were hence used to give an allegedly unquestionable unity to the bourgeois—this being a necessary condition for depicting the unity of the French nation. In 40 ‘Les classes supérieures et inférieures, qui aujourd'hui s'observent avec défiance ou luttent ensemble pour des systémes d'idée et de gouvernement, ne sont autres, dans plusieurs pays, que les peuples conquérants et les petiples asservis d'une époque antérieure |...| La race des envahisseurs est restée une classe privilégiée, dés qu'elle a cessé d’étre une nation @ part.” Thierry, Histoire de la conquéte de l'Angleterre par les Normands, ix. “| Besides the difference in meaning wrought by the passage of time. the reader should also bear in mind that the word “race” in French does not carry the same strong biological connotations that it does in English. Indeed, it may be argued that in the former language “race” refers more to culture and consciousness, than it does to biological traits. ” Seliger, “Race-thinking during the Restoration,” 273Page 76 + < > this regard, it may be argued that, in Thierry’s theoretical scheme, the us wf race and class as ultimate categories of analysis sharpened, before cfinitively shunning, the actual distance between the nation and th ourgeoisie. ‘This was because, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie was class that had been subdued by an idle group that unjustly controlled political power. On the other hand, since this situation resulted from the Franks’ conquest of the Gauls, the members of the subdued class also sumed non-deconstructible nature of class and race— would the unity of the bourgeoisie finally coincide, in representational terms, with the unity of the entire nation. Thierry’s réforme historique, with its dismissal of the national histories embodied by the royal lineage and with its use of class and race struggles 10 represent a unifying narrative, still bears great interest for both historians and political theorists. By conceiving of the internal unity of the bourgeoisie in both racial and class terms, Thierry could clearly imagine nd depict a future French nation that was both sociologically and istorically unified, and offer a seemingly coherent narrative detached from the royal figure. If, in the aftermath of the regicide, France’s unity no because of the a fonger could be conceived through the kings symbolic body, some other sort of national unity had to be sought. For Thierry, this could be achieve lonly once the bourgeoisie had gained political power, obliterating all social, economic and cultural differences, and restoring, by the same} token, the righteous political order of French society, Only through such a| process could the bourgeoisie represent the nation, thus assuring the alters narrative unity. What is remarkable is precisely that Thierry’s ation was no longer, as the king-nation had been in the pre-Revolutionat eriod, a standing political reality, but a well-defined political project— Ibeit one deeply rooted in history. By using the concepts of class and race, and by assuming that they did not, but that they must, collapse onto he concept of nation, Thierry replaced a principle of unity with a principle the same token, Thierry provided Sieyés” nation with what the abbé had so bluntly ignored—the historical legitimacy indispensable to the creation of a national identity. At the same time, amplifying the difficulties of Sieyés’s bourgeois nation, he was forced to grant a central narrative role toPage77~ << > a the concepts of race and class, namely to the very concepts on which opponents of bourgeois individualism would ground their own ideologies. If focusing on such difficulties is what makes Thierry’s thought still so fascinating, the study of its seeming ambiguities may still have much to tell us about the contradictions of French bourgeois nationalism in the way it was conceived in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution and, more importantly, on the way France imagined its own past from then onwards. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1983 Ankersmit, Frank. Historical representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 Arendt, Hannah. On revolution. 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