What is a nation?x
Ernest Renan
(Translated and annotated by Martin Thom)
What I propose to do today is to analyse with you an idea which, though
seemingly clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings.
[Consider] the vast agglomerations of men found in China, Egypt or
ancient Babylonia, the tribes of the Hebrews and the Arabs, the city as
it existed in Athens or Sparta, the assemblies of the various territories in
the Carolingian Empire, those communities which are without a patrie2
and are maintained by a religious bond alone, as is the case with the
Israelites and the Parsees, nations, such as France, England and the
majority of the modern European sovereign states, confederations, such
as exist in Switzerland or in America, and ties, such as those that race,
or rather language, establishes between the different branches of the
German or Slav peoples. Each of these groupings exist, or have existed,
and there would be the direst of consequences if one were to confuse any
one of them with any other. At the time of the French Revolution, it was
commonly believed that the institutions proper to small, independent
cities, such as Sparta and Rome, might be applied to our large nations,
which number some thirty or forty million souls. Nowadays, a far graver
mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty
analogous to that of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic
or, rather linguistic groups.
I want now to try and make these difficult questions somewhat more
precise, for the slightest confusion regarding the meaning of words, at
the start of an argument, may in the end lead to the most fatal of errors.
It is a delicate thing that I propose to do here, somewhat akin to vivisection;
I am going to treat the living much as one ordinarily treats the
dead. I shall adopt an absolutely cool and impartial attitude.
I
Since the fall of the Roman Empire or, rather, since the disintegration of
Charlemagne’s empire, western Europe has seemed to us to be divided
into nations, some of which, in certain epochs, have sought to wield a
hegemony over the others, without ever enjoying any lasting success. It
is hardly likely that anyone in the future will achieve what Charles V,
What is a nation? 9
Louis XIV and Napoleon I failed to do. The founding of a new Roman
Empire or of a new Carolingian empire would now be impossible.
Europe is so divided that any bid for universal domination would very
rapidly give rise to a coalition, which would drive any too ambitious
nation back to its natural frontiers.3 A kind of equilibrium has long
been established. France, England, Germany and Russia will, for centuries
to come, no matter what may befall them, continue to be individual
historical units, the crucial pieces on a chequerboard whose squares will
forever vary in importance and size but will never be wholly confused
with each other.
Nations, in this sense of the term, are something fairly new in history.
Antiquity was unfamiliar with them; Egypt, China and ancient Chaldea
were in no way nations. They were flocks led by a Son of the Sun or
by a Son of Heaven. Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens
as such. Classical antiquity had republics, municipal kingdoms, confederations
of local republics and empires, yet it can hardly be said to have
had nations in our understanding of the term. Athens, Sparta, Tyre and
Sidon were small centres imbued with the most admirable patriotism, but
they were [simply] cities with a relatively restricted territory. Gaul, Spain
and Italy, prior to their absorption by the Roman Empire, were collections
of clans, which were often allied among themselves but had no
central institutions and no dynasties. The Assyrian Empire, the Persian
Empire and the empire of Alexander the Great were not patries either.
There never were any Assyrian patriots, and the Persian Empire was
nothing but a vast feudal structure. No nation traces its origins back to
Alexander the Great’s momentous adventure, fertile though it was in
consequences for the general history of civilization.
The Roman Empire was much more nearly a patrie. Roman domination,
although at first so harsh, was soon loved, for it had brought about the
great benefit of putting an end to war. The empire was a huge association,
and a synonym for order, peace and civilization. In its closing
stages, lofty souls, enlightened bishops, and the educated classes had a
real sense of the Pax Romana, which withstood the threatening chaos of
barbarism. But an empire twelve times larger than present-day France
cannot be said to be a state in the modern sense of the term. The split
between the eastern and western [empires] was inevitable, and attempts
at founding an empire in Gaul, in the third century AD, did not succeed
either. It was in fact the Germanic invasions which introduced into the
world the principle which, later, was to serve as a basis for the existence
of nationalities.
What in fact did the German peoples accomplish, from their great
invasions in the fifth century AD up until the final Norman conquests in
the tenth century? They effected little change in the racial stock, but they
imposed dynasties and a military aristocracy upon the more or less extensive
parts of the old empire of the west, which assumed the names of
their invaders. This was the origin of France, Burgundy, and Lombardy,
and, subsequently, Normandy. The Frankish Empire so rapidly extended
its sway that, for a period, it re-established the unity of the west, but it
10 Ernest Renan
was irreparably shattered around the middle of the ninth century; the
partition of Verdun4 outlined divisions which were in principle
immutable and, from then on, France, Germany, England, Italy, and
Spain made their way, by often circuitous paths and through a thousand
and one vicissitudes, to their full national existence, such as we see it
blossoming today.
What in fact is the defining feature of these different states? It is the
fusion of their component populations. In the above mentioned countries,
there is nothing analogous to what you will find in Turkey, where
Turks, Slavs, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Syrians, and Kurds are as
distinct today as they were upon the day that they were conquered. Two
crucial circumstances helped to bring about this result. First, the fact that
the Germanic peoples adopted Christianity as soon as they underwent
any prolonged contact with the Greek or Latin peoples. When conqueror
or conquered have the same religion or, rather, when the conqueror
adopts the religion of the conquered, the Turkish system — that is, the
absolute distinction between men in terms of their religion — can no
longer arise. The second circumstance was the forgetting, by the
conquerors, of their own language. The grandsons of Clovis, Alaric,
Gundebald, Alboin, and Roland were already speaking the Roman
tongue. This fact was itself the consequence of another important feature,
namely, the fact that the Franks, Burgundians, Goths, Lombards, and
Normans had very few women of their own race with them. For several
generations, the chiefs only married German women; but their
concubines were Latin, as were the wet-nurses of their children; the tribe
as a whole married Latin women; which meant that, from the time the
Franks and the Goths established themselves on Roman territory, the
lingua francica and the lingua gothica did not last too long.
This was not how it was in England, for the invading Saxons
undoubtedly brought women with them; the Celtic population took
flight, and, besides, Latin was no longer, or rather had never been, dominant
in Britain. If Old French had been generally spoken in Gaul in the
fifth century Clovis and his people would not have abandoned German
for Old French.
The crucial result of all this was that, in spite of the extreme violence
of the customs of the German invaders, the mould which they imposed
became, with the passing centuries, the actual mould of the nation.
‘France’ became quite legitimately the name of a country to which only
a virtually imperceptible minority of Franks had come. In the tenth
century, in the first chansons de geste, which are such a perfect mirror of
the spirit of the times, all the inhabitants of France are French. The idea,
which had seemed so obvious to Gregory of Tours,5 that the population
of France was composed of different races, was in no way apparent to
French writers and poets after Hugh Capet. The difference between
noble and serf was as sharply drawn as possible, but it was in no sense
presented as an ethnic difference; it was presented rather as a difference
in courage, customs, and education, all of which were transmitted
hereditarily; it did not occur to anyone that the origin of all this was
What is a nation? 11
a conquest. The spurious system according to which nobility owed its
origin to a privilege conferred by the king for services rendered to the
nation, so that every noble was an ennobled person, was established as
a dogma as early as the thirteenth century. The same thing took place
after almost all the Norman conquests. After one or two generations, the
Norman invaders no longer distinguished themselves from the rest of the
population, although their influence was not any less profound because
of this fact; they had given the conquered country a nobility, military
habits, and a patriotism that they had not known before.
Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial
factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical
studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality.
Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took
place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences
have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by
means of brutality; the union of northern France with the Midi was the
result of massacres and terror lasting for the best part of a century.
Though the king of France was, if I may make so bold as to say, almost
the perfect instance of an agent that crystallized [a nation] over a long
period; though he established the most perfect national unity that there
has ever been, too searching a scrutiny had destroyed his prestige. The
nation which he had formed has cursed him, and, nowadays, it is only
men of culture who know something of his former value and of his
achievements.
It is [only] by contrast that these great laws of the history of western
Europe become perceptible to us. Many countries failed to achieve what
the King of France, partly through his tyranny, partly through his justice,
so admirably brought to fruition. Under the Crown of Saint Stephen, the
Magyars and the Slavs have remained as distinct as they were 800 years
ago. Far from managing to fuse the diverse [ethnic] elements to be found
in its domains, the House of Hapsburg has kept them distinct and often
opposed the one to the other. In Bohemia [for instance], the Czech and
German elements are superimposed, much like oil and water in a glass.
The Turkish policy of separating nationalities according to their religion
has had much graver consequences, for it brought about the downfall of
the east. If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find
there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and
which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is
that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have
forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a
Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen
has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,6 or the
massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are
not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin,
and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence
of countless unknown alliances which are liable to disrupt any
genealogical system.
The modern nation is therefore a historical result brought about by a
12 Ernest Renan
series of convergent facts. Sometimes unity has been effected by a
dynasty, as was the case in France; sometimes it has been brought about
by the direct will of provinces, as was the case with Holland,
Switzerland, and Belgium; sometimes it has been the work of a general
consciousness, belatedly victorious over the caprices of feudalism, as was
the case in Italy and Germany. These formations always had a profound
raison d'etre. Principles, in such cases, always emerge through the most
unexpected surprises. Thus, in our own day, we have seen Italy unified
through its defeats and Turkey destroyed by its victories. Each defeat
advanced the cause of Italy; each victory spelled doom for Turkey; for
Italy is a nation, and Turkey, outside of Asia Minor, is not one. France
can claim the glory for having, through the French Revolution, proclaimed
that a nation exists of itself. We should not be displeased if
others imitate us in this. It was we who founded the principle of
nationality. But what is a nation? Why is Holland a nation, when
Hanover, or the Grand Duchy of Parma, are not? How is it that France
continues to be a nation, when the principle which created it has disappeared?
How is it that Switzerland, which has three languages, two
religions, and three or four races, is a nation, when Tuscany, which is
so homogeneous, is not one? Why is Austria a state and not a nation? In
what ways does the principle of nationality differ from that of races?
These are points that a thoughtful person would wish to have settled, in
order to put his mind at rest. The affairs of this world can hardly be said
to be ruled by reasonings of this sort, yet diligent men are desirous of
bringing some reason into these matters and of unravelling the confusions
in which superficial intelligences are entangled.
II
If one were to believe some political theorists, a nation is above all a
dynasty, representing an earlier conquest, one which was first of all
accepted, and then forgotten by the mass of the people. According to the
above-mentioned theorists, the grouping of provinces effected by a
dynasty, by its wars, its marriages, and its treaties, ends with the dynasty
which had established it. It is quite true that the majority of modern
nations were made by a family of feudal origin, which had contracted a
marriage with the soil and which was in some sense a nucleus of centralization.
France’s frontiers in 1789 had nothing either natural or necessary
about them. The wide zone that the House of Capet had added to the
narrow strip of land granted by the partition of Verdun was indeed the
personal acquisition of this House. During the epoch when these acquisitions
were made, there was no idea of natural frontiers, nor of the rights
of nations, nor of the will of provinces. The union of England, Ireland,
and Scotland was likewise a dynastic fact. Italy only tarried so long
before becoming a nation because, among its numerous reigning houses,
none, prior to the present century, constituted itself as the centre of [its]
unity, Strangely enough, it was through the obscure island of Sardinia,
a land that was scarcely Italian, that [the house of Savoy] assumed a royal
What is a nation? 13
title.7 Holland, which — through an act of heroic resolution — created
itself, has nevertheless contracted an intimate marriage with the House of
Orange, and it will run real dangers the day this union is compromised.
Is such a law, however, absolute? It undoubtedly is not. Switzerland
and the United States, which have formed themselves, like conglomerates,
by successive additions, have no dynastic basis. I shall not discuss
this question in relation to France, for I would need to be able to read
the secrets of the future in order to do so. Let me simply say that so
loftily national had this great French royal principle been that, on the
morrow of its fall, the nation was able to stand without her. Furthermore,
the eighteenth century had changed everything. Man had returned,
after centuries of abasement, to the spirit of antiquity, to [a sense of]
respect for himself, to the idea of his own rights. The words patrie and
citizen had recovered their former meanings. Thus it was that the boldest
operation ever yet put into effect in history was brought to completion,
an operation which one might compare with the attempt, in physiology,
to restore to its original identity a body from which one had removed
the brain and the heart.
It must therefore be admitted that a nation can exist without a dynastic
principle, and even that nations which have been formed by dynasties can
be separated from them without therefore ceasing to exist. The old principle,
which only takes account of the right of princes, could no longer
be maintained; apart from dynastic right, there is also national right.
Upon what criterion, however, should one base this national right? By
what sign should one know it? From what tangible fact can one derive it?
Several confidently assert that it is derived from race. The artificial
divisions, resulting from feudalism, from princely marriages, from
diplomatic congresses are, [these authors assert], in a state of decay. It is
a population’s race which remains firm and fixed. This is what constitutes
a right, a legitimacy. The Germanic family, according to the theory I am
expounding here, has the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the
Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined
together again. The right of the Germanic order over such-and-such a
province is stronger than the right of the inhabitants of that province
over themselves. There is thus created a kind of primordial right
analogous to the divine right of kings; an ethnographic principle is
substituted for a national one. This is a very great error, which, if it were
to become dominant, would destroy European civilization. The primordial
right of races is as narrow and as perilous for genuine progress as
the national principle is just and legitimate.
In the tribes and cities of antiquity, the fact of race was, I will allow,
of very real importance. The tribe and the city were then merely extensions
of the family. At Sparta and at Athens all the citizens were kin to
a greater or lesser degree. The same was true of the Beni-Israelites; this
is still the case with the Arab tribes. If we move now from Athens,
Sparta, and the Israelite tribe to the Roman Empire the situation is a
wholly different one. Established at first through violence but subsequently
preserved through [common] interest, this great agglomeration of
14 Ernest Renan
cities and provinces, wholly different from each other, dealt the gravest
of blows to the idea of race. Christianity, with its universal and absolute
character, worked still more effectively in the same direction; it formed
an intimate alliance with the Roman Empire and, through the impact of
these two incomparable unificatory agents, the ethnographic argument
was debarred from the government of human affairs for centuries.
The barbarian invasions were, appearances notwithstanding, a further
step along this same path. The carving out of the barbarian kingdoms
had nothing ethnographic about them, their [shape] was determined by
the might or whim of the invaders. They were utterly indifferent to the
race of the populations which they had subdued. What Rome had
fashioned, Charlemagne refashioned in his own way, namely, a single
empire composed of the most diverse races; those responsible for the
partition of Verdun, as they calmly drew their two long lines from north
to south, were not in the slightest concerned with the race of the peoples
to be found on the right or left of these lines. Frontier changes put into
effect, as the Middle Ages wore on, likewise paid no heed to ethnographic
divisions. If the policies pursued by the House of Capet by and
large resulted in the grouping together, under the name of France, of the
territories of ancient Gaul, this was only because these lands had a natural
tendency to be joined together with their fellows. Dauphine, Bresse,
Provence, and Franche-Comte no longer recalled any common origin.
All Gallic consciousness had perished by the second century AD, and it
is only from a purely scholarly perspective that, in our own days, the
individuality of the Gallic character has been retrospectively recovered.
Ethnographic considerations have therefore played no part in the
constitution of modern nations. France is [at once] Celtic, Iberic, and
Germanic. Germany is Germanic, Celtic and Slav. Italy is the country
where the ethnographic argument is most confounded. Gauls, Etruscans,
Pelasgians,8 and Greeks, not to mention many other elements, intersect
in an indecipherable mixture. The British isles, considered as a whole,
present a mixture of Celtic and Germanic blood, the proportions of
which are singularly difficult to define.
The truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend
upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera. The noblest
countries, England, France, and Italy, are those where the blood is the
most mixed. Is Germany an exception in this respect? Is it a purely
Germanic country? This is a complete illusion. The whole of the south
was once Gallic; the whole of the east, from the river Elbe on, is Slav.
Even those parts which are claimed to be really pure, are they in fact so?
We touch here on one of those problems in regard to which it is of the
utmost importance that we equip ourselves with clear ideas and ward off
misconceptions.
Discussions of race are interminable, because philologically-minded
historians and physiologically-minded anthropologists interpret the term
in two totally different ways.9 For the anthropologists, race has the
same meaning as in zoology; it serves to indicate real descent, a blood
relation. However, the study of language and of history does not lead to
What is a nation? 15
the same divisions as does physiology. Words such as brachycephalic or
dolichocephalic have no place in either history or philology. In the
human group which created the Aryan languages and way of life, there
were already [both] brachycephalics and dolichocephalics. The same is
true of the primitive group which created the languages and institutions
known as Semitic. In other words, the zoological origins of humanity are
massively prior to the origins of culture, civilization, and language. The
primitive Aryan, primitive Semitic, and primitive Touranian groups had
no physiological unity. These groupings are historical facts, which took
place in a particular epoch, perhaps 15,000 or 20,000 years ago, while the
zoological origin of humanity is lost in impenetrable darkness. What is
known philologically and historically as the Germanic race is no doubt
a quite distinct family within the human species, but is it a family in the
anthropological sense of the term? Certainly not. The emergence of an
individual Germanic identity occurred only a few centuries prior to Jesus
Christ. One may take it that the Germans did not emerge from the earth
at this epoch. Prior to this, mingled with the Slavs in the huge indistinct
mass of the Scythians, they did not have their own separate individuality.
An Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. However,
the type of what is quite improperly called the Anglo-Saxon race10 is
neither the Briton of Julius Caesar’s time, nor the Anglo-Saxon of
Hengist’s time, nor the Dane of Canute’s time, nor the Norman of
William the Conqueror’s time; it is rather the result of all these
[elements]. A Frenchman is neither a Gaul, nor a Frank, nor a Burgundian.
Rather, he is what has emerged out of the cauldron in which,
presided over by the King of France, the most diverse elements have
together been simmering. A native of Jersey or Guernsey differs in no
way, as far as his origins are concerned, from the Norman population of
the opposite coast. In the eleventh century, even the sharpest eye would
have seen not the slightest difference in those living on either side of the
Channel. Trifling circumstances meant that Philip Augustus did not seize
these islands together with the rest of Normandy. Separated from each
other for the best part of 700 years, the two populations have become
not only strangers to each other but wholly dissimilar. Race, as we
historians understand it, is therefore something which is made and
unmade. The study of race is of crucial importance for the scholar
concerned with the history of humanity. It has no applications, however,
in politics. The instinctive consciousness which presided over the
construction of the map of Europe took no account of race, and the
leading nations of Europe are nations of essentially mixed blood.
The fact of race, which was originally crucial, thus becomes increasingly
less important. Human history is essentially different from zoology,
and race is not everything, as it is among the rodents or the felines, and
one does not have the right to go through the world fingering people’s
skulls, and taking them by the throat saying: ‘You are of our blood; you
belong to us!’ Aside from anthropological characteristics, there are such
things as reason, justice, the true, and the beautiful, which are the same
for all. Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a
16 Ernest Renan
stable thing and, if today you use it against others, tomorrow you may
see it turned against yourselves. Can you be sure that the Germans, who
have raised the banner of ethnography so high, will not see the Slavs in
their turn analyse the names of villages in Saxony and Lusatia, search for
any traces of the Wiltzes or of the Obotrites, and demand recompense for
the massacres and the wholesale enslavements that the Ottoss inflicted
upon their ancestors? It is good for everyone to know how to forget.
I am very fond of ethnography, for it is a science of rare interest; but,
in so far as I would wish it to be free, I wish it to be without political
application. In ethnography, as in all forms of study, systems change; this
is the condition of progress. States’ frontiers would then follow the fluctuations
of science. Patriotism would depend upon a more or less
paradoxical dissertation. One would come up to a patriot and say: ‘You
were mistaken; you shed your blood for such-and-such a cause; you
believed yourself to be a Celt; not at all, you are a German.’ Then, ten
years later, you will be told that you are a Slav. If we are not to distort
science, we should exempt it from the need to give an opinion on these
problems, in which so many interests are involved. You can be sure that,
if one obliges science to furnish diplomacy with its first principles, one
will surprise her many times in flagrant delit. She has better things to do;
let us simply ask her to tell the truth.
What we have just said of race applies to language too. Language
invites people to unite, but it does not force them to do so. The United
States and England, Latin America and Spain, speak the same languages
yet do not form single nations. Conversely, Switzerland, so well made,
since she was made with the consent of her different parts, numbers three
or four languages. There is something in man which is superior to
language, namely, the will. The will of Switzerland to be united, in spite
of the diversity of her dialects, is a fact of far greater importance than
a similitude often obtained by various vexatious measures.
An honourable fact about France is that she has never sought to win
unity of language by coercive measures. Can one not have the same
sentiments and the same thoughts, and love the same things in different
languages? I was speaking just now of the disadvantages of making international
politics depend upon ethnography; they would be no less if one
were to make it depend upon comparative philology. Let us allow these
intriguing studies full freedom of discussion; let us not mix them up with
matters which would undermine their serenity. The political importance
attaching to languages derives from their being regarded as signs of race.
Nothing could be more false. Prussia, where only German is now
spoken, spoke Slav a few centuries ago; in Wales, English is spoken; Gaul
and Spain speak the primitive dialects of Alba Longa; Egypt speaks
Arabic; there are countless other examples one could quote. Even if you
go back to origins, similarity of language did not presuppose similarity
of race. Consider, for example the proto-Aryan or proto-Semitic tribe:
there one found slaves spealung the same language as their masters, and
yet the slave was often enough a different race to that of his master. Let
me repeat that these divisions of the Indo-European, Semitic, or other
What is a nation? 17
languages, created with such admirable sagacity by comparative philology,
do not coincide with the divisions established by anthropology.
Languages are historical formations, which tell us very little about the
blood of those who speak them and which, in any case, could not shackle
human liberty when it is a matter of deciding the family with which one
unites oneself for life or for death.
This exclusive concern with language, like an excessive preoccupation
with race, has its dangers and its drawbacks. Such exaggerations enclose
one within a specific culture, considered as national; one limits oneself,
one hems oneself in. One leaves the heady air that one breathes in the
vast field of humanity in order to enclose oneself in a conventicle with
one’s compatriots. Nothing could be worse for the mind; nothing could
be more disturbing for civilization. Let us not abandon the fundamental
principle that man is a reasonable and moral being, before he is cooped
up in such and such a language, before he is a member of such and such
a race, before he belongs to such and such a culture. Before French,
German, or Italian culture there is human culture. Consider the great
men of the Renaissance; they were neither French, nor Italian, nor
German. They had rediscovered, through their dealings with antiquity,
the secret of the genuine education of the human spirit, and they devoted
themselves to it body and soul. What an achievement theirs was!
Religion cannot supply an adequate basis for the constitution of a
modern nationality either. Originally, religion had to do with the very
existence of the social group, which was itself an extension of the family.
Religion and the rites were family rites. The religion of Athens was the
cult of Athens itself, of its mythical founders, of its laws and its customs;
it implied no theological dogma. This religion was, in the strongest sense
of the term, a state religion. One was not an Athenian if one refused to
practise it. This religion was, fundamentally, the cult of the Acropolis
personified. To swear on the altar of Aglauros11 was to swear that one
would die for the patrie. This religion was the equivalent of what the act
of drawing lots [for military service], or the cult of the flag, is for us.
Refusing to take part in such a cult would be the equivalent, in our
modern societies, of refusing military service. It would be like declaring
that one was not Athenian. From another angle, it is clear that such a cult
had no meaning for someone who was not from Athens; there was also
no attempt made to proselytize foreigners and to force them to accept it;
the slaves of Athens did not practise it. Things were much the same in
a number of small medieval republics. One was not considered a good
Venetian if one did not swear by Saint Mark; nor a good Amalfitan if
one did not set Saint Andrew higher than all the other saints in paradise.
In these small societies, what subsequently was regarded as persecution
or tyranny was legitimate and was of no more consequence than our
custom of wishing the father of a family happy birthday or a Happy
New Year.
The state of affairs in Sparta and in Athens already no longer existed
in the kingdoms which emerged from Alexander’s conquest, still less in
the Roman Empire. The persecutions unleashed by Antiochus Epiphanes
18 Ernest Renan
in order win the east for the cult ofJupiter Olympus, those of the Roman
Empire designed to maintain a supposed state religion were mistaken,
criminal, and absurd. In our own time, the situation is perfectly clear.
There are no longer masses that believe in a perfectly uniform manner.
Each person believes and practises in his own fashion what he is able to
and as he wishes. There is no longer a state religion; one can be French,
English, or German, and be either Catholic, Protestant, or orthodox
Jewish, or else practise no cult at all. Religion has become an individual
matter; it concerns the conscience of each person. The division of nations
into Catholics and Protestants no longer exists. Religion, which, fiftytwo
years ago, played so substantial a part in the formation of Belgium,
preserves all of its [former] importance in the inner tribunal of each; but
it has ceased almost entirely to be one of the elements which serve to
define the frontiers of peoples.
A community of interest is assuredly a powerful bond between men.
Do interests, however, suffice to make a nation? I do not think so.
Community of interest brings about trade agreements, but nationality has
a sentimental side to it; it is both soul and body at once; a Zollverein12
is not a patrie.
Geography, or what are known as natural frontiers, undoubtedly plays
a considerable part in the division of nations. Geography is one of the
crucial factors in history. Rivers have led races on; mountains have
brought them to a halt. The former have favoured movement in history,
whereas the latter have restricted it. Can one say, however, that as some
parties believe, a nation’s frontiers are written on the map and that this
nation has the right to judge what is necessary to round off certain
contours, in order to reach such and such a mountain and such and such
a river, which are thereby accorded a kind of a priori limiting faculty? I
know of no doctrine which is more arbitrary or more fatal, for it allows
one to justify any or every violence. First of all, is it the mountains or
the rivers that we should regard as forming these so-called natural frontiers?
It is indisputable that the mountains separate, but the rivers tend
rather to unify. Moreover, all mountains cannot divide up states. Which
serve to separate and which do not? From Biarritz to Tornea, there is no
one estuary which is more suited than any other to serving as a boundary
marker. Had history so decreed it, the Loire, the Seine, the Meuse, the
Elbe, or the Oder could, just as easily as the Rhine, have had this quality
of being a natural frontier, such as has caused so many infractions of the
most fundamental right, which is men’s will. People talk of strategic
grounds. Nothing, however, is absolute; it is quite clear than many
concessions should be made to necessity. But these concessions should
not be taken too far. Otherwise, everybody would lay claim to their
military conveniences, and one would have unceasing war. No, it is no
more soil than it is race which makes a nation. The soil furnishes the
substratum, the field of struggle and of labour; man furnishes the soul.
Man is everything in the formation of this sacred thing which is called
a people. Nothing [purely] material suffices for it. A nation is a spiritual
principle, the outcome of the profound complications of history; it is a
What is a nation? 19
spiritual family not a group determined by the shape of the earth. We
have now seen what things are not adequate for the creation of such a
spiritual principle, namely, race, language, material interest, religious
affinities, geography, and military necessity. What more then is required?
As a consequence of what was said previously, I will not have to detain
you very much longer.
Ill
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are
but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past,
one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of
memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together,
the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in
an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation,
like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours,
sacrifice, and devotion. O f all cults, that of the ancestors is the most
legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past,
great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social
capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories
in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed
great deeds together, to wish to perform still more —these are the essential
conditions for being a people. One loves in proportion to the
sacrifices to which one has consented, and in proportion to the ills that
one has suffered. One loves the house that one has built and that one has
handed down. The Spartan song — ‘We are what you were; we will be
what you are’13 — is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every
patrie.
More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers
conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious
heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme
to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped
together. These are the kinds of things that can be understood in spite
of differences of race and language. I spoke just now of ‘having suffered
together’ and, indeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does.
Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than
triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.
A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling
of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is
prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized,
however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly
expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if
you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s
existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. That, I know full well, is less
metaphysical than divine right and less brutal than so-called historical
right. According to the ideas that I am outlining to you, a nation has no
more right than a king does to say to a province: ‘You belong to me,
I am seizing you.’ A province, as far as I am concerned, is its inhabitants;
20 Ernest Renan
if anyone has the right to be consulted in such an affair, it is the inhabitant.
A nation never has any real interest in annexing or holding on to
a country against its will. The wish of nations is, all in all, the sole
legitimate criterion, the one to which one must always return.
We have driven metaphysical and theological abstractions out of
politics. What then remains? Man, with his desires and his needs. The
secession, you will say to me, and, in the long term, the disintegration
of nations will be the outcome of a system which places these old
organisms at the mercy of wills which are often none too enlightened.
It is clear that, in such matters, no principle must be pushed too far.
Truths of this order are only applicable as a whole in a very general
fashion. Human wills change, but what is there here below that does not
change? The nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings
and they will end. A European confederation will very probably replace
them. But such is not the law of the century in which we are living. At
the present time, the existence of nations is a good thing, a necessity
even. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would be lost if
the world had only one law and only one master.
Through their various and often opposed powers, nations participate in
the common work of civilization; each sounds a note in the great concert
of humanity, which, after all, is the highest ideal reality that we are
capable of attaining. Isolated, each has its weak point. I often tell myself
that an individual who had those faults which in nations are taken for
good qualities, who fed off vainglory, who was to that degree jealous,
egotistical, and quarrelsome, and who would draw his sword on the
smallest pretext, would be the most intolerable of men. Yet all these
discordant details disappear in the overall context. Poor humanity, how
you have suffered! How many trials still await you! May the spirit of
wisdom guide you, in order to preserve you from the countless dangers
with which your path is strewn!
Let me sum up, Gentlemen. Man is a slave neither of his race nor his
language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction
taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in
mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we
call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its
strength by the sacrifices which demand the abdication of the individual
to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the right to
exist. If doubts arise regarding its frontiers, consult the populations in the
areas under dispute. They undoubtedly have the right to a say in the
matter. This recommendation will bring a smile to the lips of the
transcendants of politics, these infallible beings who spend their lives
deceiving themselves and who, from the height of their superior principles,
take pity upon our mundane concerns. ‘Consult the populations,
for heaven’s sake! How naive! A fine example of those wretched French
ideas which claim to replace diplomacy and war by childishly simple
methods.’ Wait a while, Gentlemen; let the reign of the transcendants
pass; bear the scorn of the powerful with patience. It may be that, after
many fruitless gropings, people will revert to our more modest empirical
What is a nation? 21
solutions. The best way of being right in the future is, in certain periods,
to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion.
Notes
(Notes followed by an asterisk are the translator’s.)
1* A lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une
nation?’, Oeuvres Completes (Paris, 1947—61), vol. I, pp. 887—907. An earlier
translation, which I have consulted, is in A. Zimmern (ed.), Modern Political
Doctrines (London, 1939), pp. 186—205.
2* I have left patrie in the original French because it seems to me that to translate
it into another European (or, indeed, non-European) language would be to
eliminate the kinds of association the term had, in a very large number of
countries, throughout the epoch of liberal-democratic nationalism. Patrie
draws with it a whole cluster of complex and interlocking references to the
values of the patria of classical republicanism. For an observer like Marx, these
values were destroyed forever in the black farce of 1848. In another sense, as
Marx’s arguments in The Eighteenth Brumaire allow, they continued to
influence the leaders of liberal, nationalist revolutions throughout the nineteenth
century — although, obviously, if one were to phrase it in Italian
terms, the Cavourian moderate rather than the Mazzinian or Garibaldian
radical wing. It may be worth noting that, in the domain of scholarship,
Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City (1864), a study which profoundly
influenced Emile Durkheim and which Renan himself had very probably read,
shattered the vision of classical republicanism which men such as Robespierre
and Saint-Just had entertained.
3* The doctrine of natural frontiers was given its definitive formulation in the
course of the French Revolution, and was subsequently applied to other European
countries, such as Germany or Italy; it was this doctrine that fuelled the
irredentist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. Justification
of territorial claims often rested upon the interpretation of classical texts,
such as Tacitus’s Germania or Dante’s Commedia.
4* The partition of Verdun (AD 843) ended a period of civil war within the
Frankish Empire, during which the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought
each other. T w o of the newly created kingdoms, that of Charles the Bald
(843—77) and that of Louis the German (843—76), bear some resemblance, in
territorial terms, to modern France and modern Germany. Furthermore, much
has been made of the linguistic qualities of the Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn
by Louis and Charles to each other’s armies, in Old French and Old High
German respectively. This has often been regarded as the first text in a
Romance language (as distinct from Latin) and, by extension, as the first
symbolic appearance of the French (and German) nations.
5* Gregory of Tours (c. 539—94) was a Gallo-Roman and Bishop of Tours from
573 to 594. His History of the Franks is an account of life in Merovingian Gaul.
6* Upon the occasion of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, in 1572, many
thousands of Huguenots were killed. This was an event with momentous
repercussions for the history of France in general, and for the development
of political theory in particular.
7 The House of Savoy owes its royal title to its acquisition of Sardinia (1720).
8* The Pelasgians were believed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to
have been the original inhabitants of Italy.
22 Ernest Renan
9 I enlarged upon this point in a lecture, which is analysed in the Bulletin of
the Association scientifique de France, 10 March 1878, ‘Des services rendus aux
Sciences historiques par la Philologie’.
10 Germanic elements are not more considerable in the United Kingdom than
when they were in France, when she had possession of Alsace and Metz. If
the Germanic language has dominated in the British isles, it was simply
because Latin had not wholly replaced the Celtic languages, as it had done
in Gaul.
11 Aglauros, who gave her life to save her patrie, represents the Acropolis itself.
12* Zollverein is the German word for customs union. Both participants in
bourgeois, national revolutions and later commentators emphasize the
relation between the nationalist cause and free trade within a single territory.
However, E.J. Hobsbawm’s comments, on pp. 166—8 of The Age of Revolution
(London, 1962), shed some light upon Renan’s aphorism, in that the
vanguard of European nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s was not so much
the business class as ‘the lower and middle professional, administrative and
intellectual strata, in other words, the educated classes’. At another level,
Renan’s observation reflects his shock at the defeat of France by Prussia in
the Franco-Prussian war, which is expressed in both major and occasional
writings.
13* Such epitaphs were part of the habitual repertoire of early-nineteenthcentury
nationalism, as Leopardi’s ‘patriotic’ canzoni make plain.