14. Nation

The kingdom is this body whose head is the body of the king. The person of the sovereign identifies with the state because it is the tightest and most compact agent of the theologico-political reunification, the intersection or cross-stitch of sovereignty meeting the assembly. The head (the body of the king) identifies with the body: he is the state. We shall have to look at the peculiar power of this metaphorical condensation. Of course, it is a metaphor (transporting a sense and a thought), but loaded with a practical and concrete effectivity, and charged with reality (effects). Why? Not every metaphor is charged with this load. The metaphor of the collective body is not a random one: it is the social, mystical body politic of the kingdom, the state, and the church, what we may very provisionally term the common figure of their incorporation. This metaphor proceeds from a determined history, which gives it a physical force: it touches on the nature of the common.⁵⁴ Hence the violence of identification. The royal person fixes the metaphor as a literal meaning and condenses all the effectivity of this incorporation. Should this effectivity turn around, it spits out real murder.

Insurrection strikes at the head: the king’s body. And in this body, it hits the head: the king’s head is the head of this capital body that is the head of the kingdom. The king’s head is the head of the head, the archi-head, which channels the return effect of the Revolution, which decapitates—the state as well as the sovereign. The murder strikes at the theologico-political identity of the kingdom, and the singular person, the anointed, crowned head, and the sovereign and sacred body of the monarch. But as a decapitation, the Revolution comes back and acts at the site of capital identification. Decapitation is the eminent mark of the figural ambiguity of the Revolution, which is to say, of its ambiguity as a figure, of that which finally locks it into the ambiguity (and the ambivalence and equivocality) of the figure. If the king’s head rolls, it is because it identifies the junction of the kingdom’s two natures, the nodal point of its dual constitution: a radical gesture aiming to beat down the state and excise any theological and political identity from royalty. But decapitation puts this radicality into practice as a return to the capital site of the state, as a reinvestment in its locus and the enthronement of its replacement. The Revolution is given figure as the advent of a new sovereignty—but new inasmuch as it is brought back to its recovered and virginal first essence. Under a regime that is older than the old, originary, and more principial than the prince, its newness dismisses and supersedes an usurped sovereignty—which the monarch had captured, stolen, and redirected for his own benefit. And so, the king is essentially criminal; he is a thief who abused the body of the kingdom. It is a matter, then, of making the people into the new king, and giving it back its stolen royalty. The Revolution is the return of the people to the capital sovereign position, a position freed by the removal of the monstrous usurper head grafted onto the body of the kingdom. The sovereignty of the people is the return of the third element and its enthronement at the site of maximal identification; it is the capitalization or the recapitation of the king-people, the crowning of the People’s Front.⁵⁵

The people come back to the sovereign emplacement here. The people constitutively are what assembles and is assembled.⁵⁶ The sovereign people are thus the schema of a radical theologico-political reunification, of an annulment, of a complete erasure of the rift, of sovereignty and the assembly thoroughly joined, each taken in its essential determination, without any delegation or displacement whatsoever. The sovereign people stand or are posited as the perfect reunion of what had been disjoined—the church and the empire absolutely fused. Understandably, such a figure would be endowed with an irresistible power, both revolutionary and millenarian, political and religious—revolutionary in this very determined (millenarian, perhaps) sense that it states the radical restoration, at its roots, of what had been lost at the moment of the constitution of the empire: the First City (fictitiously, on this score, both Greek and Roman), the Republic in its primordial essence, indissociably theological and political inasmuch as it reconstitutes the first unity, of which “the theological” and “the political,” when separated, are unhappy, dismembered, and disunited avatars. The revolutionary republic claims to be the full and quasi-reversed realization of what the project of the kingdom had been: it is full because the theologico-political unity (the unity of the theologico-political) presents itself as re-constituted in a more radical fashion (the “theological” being called up at its inception, by what opens it and makes it possible—the people, the very thing that forms an assembly); and it is reversed because sovereignty is no longer seen as separate, or autonomous in a superior way, as that which subjects the assembly (the church) under its head: the sovereign, now, is the very assembly itself, ecclesiality at its principle, the people. It is sovereignty invested by its other, ecclesiality and popularity. But it is a quasi-reversal, since it is only as the sovereign that the people are in command. To the republic the kingdom bequeaths the key to its setup, sovereignty, as the keystone at the architectonic juncture holding up the building. The revolutionary republic wants to grasp again an essence of the political from before the (theologico-political) split, but it regrasps it in the mode and regime of sovereignty. This is not the end of one’s troubles: what holds everything together is the memory and legacy of the empire.⁵⁷

The Revolution finishes off the kingdom: it elevates the people in lieu of the sovereign, enthroning and crowning them. The Revolution bestows sovereignty on the assembly, thus outlining a new figure, of a hyper-sovereign and an archi-assembly, the chiasm of the king-people, a theocracy of upside-down parallels, headless caesarism, millenarianism in the present tense, now and fulfilled. This figure has a name, nation, which continues to be in the news. The nation is the (theologico-political, overturned) figure of the overthrown kingdom. In it one can read the end of the (hi)story: the reunion of the dis-membered, repairing the unitary body, a body simultaneously political and mystical. One may look there for the closure of the sequence that opened with the breakdown of the polis. Many will go down in this quest and into this mirage—blinded.

Indeed, the fusion is not complete. Some division remains. In its overthrow, the kingdom has transmitted to the nation a part of its heritage: sovereignty, the agency of sovereignty as command, command of everything. And from the start this legacy will weigh heavily upon the national venture, but not only as the reproduction of the general schema of domination—which is no small thing. For what is transferred from the kingdom to the nation (through the revolutionary reversal) is what was constituting it as the kingdom, namely, the succession of the empire—and therefore the trace and the caesura of the theologico-political division. But something else comes along with that: the tracing and the conformation of what made it a fragment, splinter, or piece of broken empire. In other words, what the kingdom passes on to the nation is the power separated, of course—sovereign imperiality—but also the form, the cutout, and the boundaries of sovereignty, where the revolution is going to find itself captive and contained. The limits of the state—the borders.

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Thus a hypothesis and a question take shape.

Hypothesis:

The nation is revolutionary. (h11)

One should read this statement as a conceptual and historical marker, without any attractive or deceptive coloring. The nation mentioned here is neither generous nor cold, nor pregnant with the future—nothing like that. It only has, in its build, a conformation and a type given by the movement of the (French) Revolution, within which it is born. The nation is revolutionary through its genesis and lineage. This determination affects its genealogy as much as what descends from it. It is important to bear in mind that it becomes attached to all the later implementations of its figure, which will all carry—all of them, yes, even the worst ones—something from this initial constitution. Let us first look at the ancestry. While the word is in use before the Revolution, I would like to argue that the modern idea of nation that holds sway over us (thus differing from earlier uses of the term) is the concept built by (and for) the revolutionary enterprise to designate the overthrow of the kingdom. Let me try to articulate and support this hypothesis. Nation is

borrowed (ca. 1120) . . . from the Latin natio, -onis, derived from the supine [Latin verbal noun with the same stem as the passive participle] of nasci (to be born): “birth”; then through metonymy and specialization, a “collection of individuals born in the same time at the same place.” In the Christian era, the word is used in the plural, nationes, to designate pagan populations, in opposition to the “people of God.” In the middle ages, natio also takes on the meaning of a “division of the University of Paris.”

In French . . . the first sense chronologically is that of “pagans” (in opposition to Jews and Christians in the Old Testament [sic]). . . . Based on a different meaning in Latin, nation refers to a set of human beings characterized in their language and culture by their common origin (1175), in contrast to race, gent. In Middle French, following medieval Latin, [the word] is also used for the division of the University of Paris, organized by language (1470) into “English” (including Germans), people from Picardy, Normans, and “French” (including Spaniards and Italians). The term also applies to a colony of merchants residing abroad (ca. 1475). . . . The modern notion of “nation” actually emerges during the eighteenth century: with the Revolution, the nation becomes a political entity identified with the Third Estate (1789, [the revolutionary theorist Abbé] Sieyès), the revolutionary people, and takes on its definition of “legal person constituted by the collection of individuals composing the State” (Decree of July 23, 1789, with the expression crime de lèse-nation [as in lèsemajesté—Trans.], in which the word nation replaces the word royauté [royalty]).⁵⁸

The nation, then, was first a “collection of individuals born in the same time at the same place,” and thus “a set of human beings characterized in their language and culture by their common origin.” Therefore, to be precise, it is a collection of individuals who share a language and a culture because of the fact that they are born at the same place, as the etymology of “nation” notes in relating the term to “birth.” Why, before and after the revolutionary period, has this term come to designate the people as the subject of the uprising and then forming the state? Why was it chosen to designate the community of human beings bound by the exercise of sovereignty, rather than other available terms—such as cité [city], for example? It is because the circumscription of sovereignty, and therefore of the people, was thought as that of a place. Where did this thinking of a boundary [bornage] originate? From the de-limitation of the kingdom, of royalty as sovereignty upon its soil, and thus ultimately from the locality of the state, that is to say, from the breakup of the empire, fragmented into kingdoms as the world is into places. The topos of the nation (as a community and a place of birth) proceeds from this dis-location: “nationals” are born in the same fragment of empire, the same piece of its broken world.

The example of the University of Paris, in fact, shows unequivocally that the determination of these “places of birth” does not stem from an “ethnic,” “geographical,” or even “linguistic” given, in the sense in which we might understand it. The list of the students’ origins expresses an administrative division, and assigning their places follows the reading code of the administration that provides its definition: the Germans are English, the Spaniards and Italians are French, while the people from Picardy and Normandy make up nations, with full rights. The given of the places is the given of the administration. It is the eye of administrative rulings that sees the “countries” [pays] and cuts them up: nations are corporate divisions. Noticeably, even the discrimination of languages, which we consider more perceptible in our naive view today, can only take place under textbook criteria. The Spaniards and Italians speak “French,” but not the people from Picardy. To put it bluntly, our postulate here says that the same goes for the modern political sense of the “national,” which is to say, that nations are prescribed (as communities of origin and pro-venances) by the land management register that the dis-location of the empire draws up.⁵⁹

The process is then as follows. The empire breaks up into kingdoms, and these cir-cumscribe provenances, births, and origins. The Revolution overthrows the kingdom while inheriting its territories (domain, suzerainty, preserve). And the nation, the figure of the overthrown kingdom bequeathed to the sovereign people, is called upon to determine, circumscribe and ultimately define the people destined to wear the crown and sit on the empty throne. It is from this process that one may gain an understanding of three fundamental postulations through which the nation constitutes and asserts itself.

First, the nation is the Third [Estate]. Here we can recognize Abbé Sieyès’s decisive statement [in his 1789 pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? (What Is the Third Estate?)] (destined, as we know, to have wide repercussions), in which the dictionary definition cited earlier justifiably sees one of the stages of the concept’s history. Indeed, the kingdom possessed an essentially dual constitution, an ecclesio-imperial one, expressed in the dyad of the dominant orders, the nobility and the clergy. With a kind of diagnostic genius, Sieyès said that in this regime, the Third Estate is nothing—nothing because it is the third, precisely, and because everything fits in two; the third is excluded. Even where it does have a seat, it is silenced, spoken for by powerful lawyers,⁶⁰ “An excellent custom which, intended to provide representation for the Third Estate, has positively excluded it from representation until this very day!”⁶¹ The Third Estate is denied any existence, excluded from all participation in the “political order.”⁶² The “States-General as we know it at present is simply a clerico-nobili-judicial assembly.” For the nobility has confiscated the representation of the Third Estate, to which it relegates nobles it does not care to admit into its ranks.⁶³ Rejected from the political order and standing for nothing, the Third Estate constitutes itself and seems to itself to be the whole social order. In this all but dialectical reversal, in this negation of the negation, the space proper of the nation opens up. The nation is this whole that the “political order” of the kingdom has nullified.

Who is bold enough to maintain that the Third Estate does not contain within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation? . . . If the privileged order were removed, the nation would not be something less, but something more. What then is the Third Estate? All; but an “all” that is fettered and oppressed.⁶⁴

The nation comes into view: an “all,” in chains and oppressed—an all prevented from being everything, negated as an all, reduced to nothingness by the (theologico-)political order of the kingdom. The nation is the Third Estate, which turns around and remakes itself as everything; “It would be all; but free and flourishing.”⁶⁵

And then, the nation is the common [le commun]. The orders are outside of it because they are separated. The nation does not separate; it abides in the community of its body. The appellation (or concept) of this separation is privilege: private law, for private use, removing itself from the common law.

Anybody who holds a legal privilege of any kind deserts the common order, stands as an exception to the common laws and, consequently, does not belong to the Third Estate. As we have already said, a nation is made one by virtue of common laws and common representation.⁶⁶

Strange tautology: the nobility is set up as an order by the separation that is its privilege. Since the nation is the “all” from which nothing is separated, the nobility is outside of the nation. And the Third Estate, which the noble order excludes and represses, is the all of it all, the whole of what does not separate, the whole of the common.

Is it not obvious that the nobility possesses privileges and exemptions, which it brazenly calls its rights and which stand distinct from the rights of the great body of citizens? Because of these special rights, the nobility does not belong to the common order, nor is it subjected to the common laws. Thus its private rights make it a people apart in the great nation. It is truly imperium in imperio.⁶⁷

The rejection of nobility from the body of the nation is thus the rejection of the rejection, the separation from what separates; it is what re-constitutes the “all,” “free and flourishing.”

Finally, the nation is what assembles itself. It is in this very determined gesture, in this precise moment, that one has to locate the constitutive revolutionary act, the singular operation of the Revolution as such. Even though this sequence of events is so well-known, its appeal is such that its prodigious impact [portée] makes a permanent impression: the Third [Estate] constitutes itself into a national assembly. Excluded from the place of the sessions, finding the door blocked, the assembly transports itself to another—fortuitous, random—place and (re)constitutes itself there.⁶⁸ The Third [Estate] reconstitutes itself as a nation insofar as it forms an assembly and gives its name to it.⁶⁹ The national character of the assembly is exactly equivalent to its capacity to convene, without anyone impeding its reunion, and without anyone or anything except itself summoning it to meet; and the radicality of this status is played out at every moment, in its adamant refusal to accept a delay, an interruption, or any separation. This is sensu stricto what the Tennis Court Oath [Serment du Jeu de Paume] comes down to: the Assembly, as the National Assembly, is inseparable in its essence; the nation is present at the place where the assembly holds its reunion—at least until the constitution.⁷⁰

But with this third characteristic (and already with the second one, as we shall see), the nation begins to occupy a very singular position in the “theologico-political” setup and its history. Constituted inasmuch as it becomes assembled (inasmuch as it brings about the common, the being of what is common), the nation strictly fills the place of ecclesiality, if one recalls that the church is nothing but the transferred name of the assembly as such.⁷¹ The historian Jules Michelet will take note of this: “The cardinal and the archbishop return the same evening to Marly, and fall at the feet of the king: ‘Religion is ruined’ [C’est fait de la religion]!”⁷² Let us retrospectively recognize their theoretical rigor: convening the assembly discharges the religious, relieves the church. It is noteworthy in this tale that the king ordered the meeting hall to be shut, “in order to prevent the clergy from uniting with the Third Estate.” The revolutionaries’ position often expresses this equivocation: while they fight the clergy because of the privileges it possesses, they also call on it to merge with the nation of which it is a part. The separation of the clergy is not essential—it is abusive, according to Sieyès.⁷³ The Revolution overturns the old hierarchy: the kingdom subjects ecclesiality to sovereignty. The assembly becomes sovereign by way of the Revolution. It is commonality that is coming back; it had been expelled from the world since the time of the Roman Empire. The commons comes back to the world: this is the essence of the revolutionary project—and we shall see all that it carries. That is why the Reformation re-surges: it was already forming this project to dissolve the clerical body—merging the separate body in the common body, the church fusing with the assembly, the body of the people fully (re)constituting the priestly body. Everyone baptized, everyone a priest. The Revolution brings back to the world the subjected common, and wants to enthrone it, constitute as sovereign the whole assembly of the people, freed and flourishing, the full body of the reappeared common-being. What the Revolution wants is the re-surrection of the common at the (fragmented and dislocated) place of the empire of the world—the crowning and the consecration of the people turned into the king.

(I earlier proposed to see the consecration as the condensation of the assembly upon the person. The consecration of the king-people would then be the self-consecration of the assembly. Where is the condensation? In that it is as a person, as unified and singular being, as I [un moi], that the assembly consecrates its own enthroning.⁷⁴ The consecration of the assembly is that of the common as a person [personnalité], and as a body. This defines the nation.⁷⁵ Why?)⁷⁶

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Questions (naively asked): why was there not only a re-surgence of the Reformation but a return as well? Why did the reverberating, spreading, extended Reformation not re-surge elsewhere? Why did the repressed return to the place of repression, to the position of sovereignty, to the heart of the state?

In the revolutionary process, this reversion does not seem immediate. That which dominates at the beginning rather evokes a universal without any return—for one is in fact dealing with the universal. A reminder: the (speculative) narrative in the present work seeks to grasp the constitution of French unity as one (of two) hypotheses about the union of Europe broken by the politico-religious rift. Let us recall that we are dealing with Europe as an ambivalence: the expanding movement of the universal on the one hand, and its turnaround toward itself, which is figural, on the other—the return to the soil of a fatherland. On this long road, I have sought to follow the formation and the course of this ambiguity in the de-composition of Romanity, the relative stabilization of European continentality in the late Middle Ages, and its internal fracturing as soon as it has gained this stabilization, as soon as the continent has had its con-formation. Indeed, what was at stake in the statization of France (the constitution of the kingdom), followed by its overthrow and reversal into a nation, was this unity to remake: the regrouping of the universal—fractured, divided, and dualized—but, within the dislocation itself, continuing to drive forward its process, its progression, its course, and its meta-morphic becoming, from one phase to the next, always carrying the equivocation of its expansion, of its onward transport and its figural, continental, and European reversion.

Now, at the start of the revolutionary period, when the concept of nation is laid out,⁷⁷ the return is barely looming, almost absent: the universal prevails, without retreating, practically without a figure. In the first acts and declarations, a very radical universalism asserts itself. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for which the National Assembly voted on August 26, 1789, and which the king accepted on October 3, promulgating it on November 3, did not include the word “France,” or “Français,” in any of its articles. Only the preamble indicated that “the representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, . . . have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind them . . .”⁷⁸ The representatives of the French people state these rights and set them forth. But the rights are those of man and of the citizen—not those of the French. The active concept in the declaration is “nation” (and the concept of society)—not France.⁷⁹ No doubt, the nation, society (or man, or the citizen) are figures, too—identifications, returns. But these figures keep to the limit of any figurality, as it were; they are quasi-abstract; and in them the return does not seem to aim at any place except the locus of essence or essentiality—of the idea, as the idea of universality itself. The nation is all the men, all citizens, as if the question of its boundaries and its framework were irrelevant. Not one nation, then—this nation here, nation among all nations—but, plainly, the Nation.

Let us also note the attitude before the king, as a second sign. As a first step, he keeps his royal function alongside the assembly. We may find this inconsequential and transitory, since the coexistence of two depositaries of sovereignty seems so untenable retrospectively. But when they turn out to be incompatible, the first gesture that touches the king is his deposition. Strictly speaking, the deposition is the displacement of the king from the locus of sovereignty, the double transference of sovereignty onto the assembly, and of the royal person toward the common, ordinary place, that is, the position of the citizen. He who was king becomes a citizen. Deposition is transference; decapitation will be a return. Deposition is doubtless always the most difficult part: a great deal of strength and mobility is required to allow that which has been deposed to live, to be, and to be left alone, at the new place where it finds itself, a common and ordinary place, level with everyone. Deposition is nonregressive, whereas decapitation pays homage to the site of sovereignty, re-investing in its space, and making claims on its body. It is irreverence that deposes and dares look the deposed sovereign in the eye, putting itself at his level. All that decapitation knows is murder—regicide, patricide, deicide; it has been said repeatedly—only to stare down at the mutilated body on the ground, with the fascination owed to prominent corpses,⁸⁰ the mutilated body whose spirit will always come back: since decapitation is a great supplier of revenants, whereas deposition permits the dethroned to grow old and die at the same common level. Considering their stature, we can hardly compare Napoleon and Louis XVI, but we can set Louis XVI side by side with Napoleon III. In his exile, Napoleon Bonaparte leaves no specter behind, only a few partisans here and there. Put to death, the Bourbon king does leave a ghost, which continually returns to haunt us.

Why does the Revolution eventually turn to such violence, then, although so tenuously figural and strongly universal in its beginnings? In its declarations, the nation soon becomes the French Nation: first, to “declare peace”; then to declare war.⁸¹ Deposition becomes decapitation. “Louis must die because the fatherland [la patrie] must live,” says Robespierre.⁸² I am—grudgingly—convinced that the very idea of “revolution” (of a cycle, a complete turn coming back to its first position) might encompass this figural return. But why the revolution, precisely? Why not the deposit, the transfer, or the journey across something? What kind of necessity has made the inheritor of the kingdom capture in the net of its constitution the undertaking that sought to free itself from it? The answer is that the Revolution, the overthrown kingdom, stayed within the bounds of its territory. The borders were its net. In the effectivity of the process, what happened—as a regressive factor, an operator of figurality, a trigger of the return—was the war. It is not as if the tendency could not be spotted earlier, but it remained confused, in competition and in conflict with other tendencies of a universalism that was more dynamic, more open, and more resistant to any reversion. The war came from the borders. Armies seeking to put the king back on his throne poked holes in the envelope of the kingdom. It is indubitable that the French Revolution was eventually expansionistic, aggressive, and belligerent. But it is also certain that until September 1792 and the advance of the armies of the First Coalition, this bellicose ambition had been muted. The war brought the return, just as clouds bring a storm. The figure is played out at the border. It rises up fully armed, at the exact point where the war powerfully turns the universal around, to its retreat.

Now, the hole-poking armies of September came from Germany.