16. Looping Back

After the failure of the Reformation to constitute Germany, which repeats the previous failures first of royalty, then of the empire, the Germanic space registers at the heart of Europe as the locus of a shortcoming of politics, constitution, or the state.¹⁰⁵ This lack will give rise to an abundant literature, especially from the end of the eighteenth century onward, when it sparks off countless analyses, commentaries, and regrets—a sign that, once again, the shortcoming is turning into a project. After 1800, the issue of the “constitution of Germany” prevails for quite some time as a structurally relevant theme in politics.

Let us look at the testimony provided by a short essay by Christoph Martin Wieland titled “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus” (On German Patriotism), and published—among many other similar texts—in May 1793:

I have not yet been able to come to a clear and orthodox concept of what one calls a German Patriot . . . In my childhood I was told about many duties, toward God, my neighbor and myself; duties toward parents and teachers; and no doubt in passing a word about duties toward authority, toward His Majesty the Holy Roman Emperor as the highest ruler of the Empire, and especially toward the Honorable Mayor and the Council of the honorable city of N. N., my dear native city [Gm., Vaterstadt—Trans.];¹⁰⁶ but the duty to be a German patriot was so rarely mentioned that I cannot recall hearing the word German [Gm., Teutsch or Deutsch—Trans.] mentioned honorably (Germanity [Teutschheit—Trans.] was still a completely unknown word, then), while I can still vividly remember from my school years that the appellation “German Michel” was one of those only slightly less shameful for a young Alemannic [Gm., Allemannier—Trans.] to acquire than to wear the dunce’s cap.¹⁰⁷

Here the shortcoming in politics, constitution, and state appears under the aspect of a lack of patriotism or feeling. The sense of duty can apply to the city (a fragmentary entity, a multiplicity of which makes up the empire) and its officials; to the parents and teachers—that which Hegel will call the multiplicity of private rights and duties: “a register of the most varied constitutional rights [Gm., Staatsrechte (i.e., rights of the state—Trans.)] acquired in the manner of civil law [Gm., Privatrecht (i.e., private law—Trans.)]”108—as well as to the (Holy Roman Germanic) Emperor; but not to Germany—and this confirms that the empire is not the equivalent of Germany and that the feeling for one does not carry over to the other: the empire does not constitute Germany as such. Wieland goes on,

When the great Persian king Xerxes, at the head of an innumerable army, penetrated into the heart of Greece, it consisted in great part of a multitude of free cities, which were barely larger and more powerful . . . than our imperial cities during their happiest time.¹⁰⁹ . . . These small free cities fared quite well in their independence. . . . However, each Greek city or population had to admit at first glance that it alone—each group by itself—could attempt nothing against an enemy terrifying by reason of their numbers. It was only when they were unified that these Greeks, whom Xerxes would have annihilated in isolation, could reasonably hope to oppose a successful resistance. Therefore they united, and every private passion instantly subsided before the feeling of common distress, as well as every remembered insult or fresh grievance, all jealousy and mistrust: suddenly a burning soul arose throughout Hellas. Athenians and Spartans, Euboeans and Corinthians, Thebans and Plateans—all now felt that they simply were Hellenes and were fighting as brothers for the safeguard and freedom of the common fatherland. This is the reality, as everyone knows. (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” pp. 7–9)

This text fits in with a long series of—earlier and especially later—writings that seek to establish a parallel between modern Germany and ancient Greece.¹¹⁰ The comparison will have various functions, and one of the first will be to posit Germany in contrast to Rome: Germany’s kinship with Greece arises from their common alienation from the Roman world. Greece was smothered by it and Germany can only be born if it breaks away from it, its vocation being to recover a part of what was lost during the collapse (the Romanization) of Hellenism. This will be one of Fichte’s themes.¹¹¹ But Wieland does not make the argument explicit. The comparison here bears on patriotism as the feeling of belonging to a political community, and on the intensity of this feeling. In comparing Germany and Greece, Wieland means to convey that patriotism comes from outside; it is the Persian danger that creates Greek unity. Before this danger, the cities were engaged in “private passions”—jealousy, memories of ancient offenses or recent injuries, various mistrusts—and in a kind of municipal or city patriotism that satisfies them until this external threat springs up: “These small free cities fared quite well in their independence.” Hellenic patriotism, Wieland says, and therefore German patriotism, the object of his comparison, does not find its source in itself, in a kind of self-generated love of self [amour de soi], arising from its internal necessity. Rather (to play with Rousseau’s distinction), it is a self-love [amour-propre] to which outer confrontation, obstacles, and danger give birth. And there is proof:

No sooner had the common danger been removed and the Greeks had enjoyed the first fruits of their victories, than each free state sank back into itself. The common spirit that had worked such great miracles stopped blowing; Hellenes again became Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians, Euboeans, Thebans, and so on. Once again each one thought only of himself. . . . In a word, private patriotism devoured . . . the general patriotism. (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” p. 10)

When the external source of patriotism dries up, it vanishes as (Hellenic or German) “general patriotism” and reverts to “private” municipal patriotisms. But why did each city not lock itself into its local patriotism and the defense of its identity in confronting the external danger? It is obviously—Wieland says—because the enemy is much stronger in number: its size and geopolitical dimensions are much vaster. The process is heavy with consequences: increasing the size of political units because of the war brings changes that will lead to hegemonic alliances, the fall of the city-states, and their replacement, first by the extensive Roman Republic, and then—again by reason of size—by the Roman Empire. For historians it is a familiar observation: the idea of empires comes from the Orient. It is from the confrontation with the Persian “Empire” that the Greco-Roman western world draws the necessity to build an extensive political construct. As if mimetically with regard to its eastern adversary, Greece starts a political process that will become “imperialist.” Wieland notes this effect of the war: after the victory over the Persians, “Athens and Sparta again fought for the honor and the advantages of what they modestly designated the ‘hegemony’ (leadership) of Greece, which in fact was nothing less than an oppressive domination over the members of the confederation” (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” p. 10). The sequence of events that Wieland suggests is thus the following: imperialism forms mimetically in relation to an outside threat, and national patriotism is constituted there, in this struggle, this confrontation, this face-off. Starting with this analogy, Wieland continues his argument about Germany:

Now, would not this last case be ours, in fact? . . . Not only is there, I think, a lack of almost everything that would inspire the nation with such a patriotic common spirit: but one can also find in our constitution and situation some causes with strong contrary effects, which make the existence of such a spirit almost impossible. . . . There are perhaps—or rather, there are without any doubt—patriots of the Mark, of Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and so forth. But German patriots, who love the entire German Reich as their fatherland . . . where are they? Who can show them to us, and name them? (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” pp. 12–14)¹¹²

German patriotism does not proceed from any internal necessity or autonomous finality; it comes from outside. From where?

And so, let us not flatter ourselves too much about our supposed patriotism. . . . As in all ancient hunters’ sayings, there is much truth in this one, “any place, where we feel well is a fatherland to us” (patria est ubi bene est). . . . For example, this is one way (among others) in which I interpret the patriotic stirrings that began to arise—more or less strongly—among many Germanic populations, against the French hordes who had flooded the most beautiful part of our Rhine regions, from the moment when our people apparently started believing—because of the decrees then passed by the nat.[ional] assembly of December 15 and 21, and the actions based on them at the hands of the French army leaders and their hordes—that this disorganization of any civic order [Gm., bürgerliche Ordnung—Trans.] truly did not concern the betterment of our condition, but instead only had to do with spreading the fire of revolt and discord, which had already raged in their bellies for four years. . . .

But even here we do not wish to deceive ourselves. One may ascribe this less to our German patriotism than to the incomprehensible nonsense of the Gallic fanatics and factions; less to the attachment of our people to the common fatherland than to the deep revulsion that the abject murder of King Louis XVI . . . roused in the minds of the German people; less to any conviction, impossible for most, concerning the excellence of our common constitution, than a (perhaps unnecessary) fear . . . to see this enraged mob swinging the burning torch of destruction in our particular fatherland—if there has been a display of such a generally noticeable changed expression in the representation of this matter of the French Revolution, superseding (since last year and especially since January 21 of this year) the ambivalent indifference or wavering opinion among a nonnegligible number of our Germans. (Wieland, “Ueber teutschen Patriotismus,” pp. 14–17)

Wieland’s argument has several stages. (1) The supposed German patriotism relies in fact on the desire to preserve a certain comfort and a certain suitable life, which in the face of danger will turn into the equivalent of “a (perhaps unnecessary) fear to lose the benefits that [our constitution] has allowed us so far to enjoy” (p. 16). There is no positive attachment to Germany as such based on “the conviction that our common constitution is excellent.” Therefore, (2) attachment to the fatherland proceeds from the external threat, from the foreign invasion, from fear—fear of the “French hordes,” which is to say, the invasion of the revolutionary troops starting in 1792 and 1793. Now, what is frightening in this invasion? It is not the foreign irruption as such, whose rejection would suppose the previous existence of a national sentiment, but instead the imported disorder, the exactions, and the fire of riot. Indeed, we know that the French troops were not at first rejected as foreigners when they entered Germany. The reception of the French in the Rhine region (warm or wait-and-see, depending on each case) does not seem to have been marked by any violent rejection; on the contrary, parts of this population looked so favorably on the (initially anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical) politics and liberating intentions of the invaders that attempts at Franco-Rhenish alliances came to light and culminated in a project to attach a part of the Rhenish province to the French Republic—a project conceived and developed by German revolutionary personalities and not by the invaders.¹¹³ The turnaround, as Wieland suggests, takes place in part at least because of the attitude of the occupation forces, which soon give in to the seductions of imperialist behavior: plunder, ransoming of local wealth, the arrogance of the victors, their excessively authoritarian behavior in the name of exporting the principles of the Revolution, and so on. (3) The most troubling point, of course, is the third one: German hostility to the Revolution, says Wieland, finds its discernible trigger in the “the decrees then passed by the nat.[ional] assembly of December 15 and 21,” which contained the order that Louis Capet [the king] appear before the revolutionary tribunal, and the educational reform.¹¹⁴ From the same perspective, Wieland mentions that German public opinion had turned around “especially since January 21 of this year”—since the execution of the king (the king of France).

There is no German patriotism or spontaneous patriotic feeling toward Germany as such.¹¹⁵ German patriotism is born from the French invasion. This invasion provokes a rejection (the birth of patriotic sentiment) because of the imperialist attitude of the occupiers, as well as the accusation and execution of the king. These observations can give rise to the following hypothesis: after the successive failures of royalty, empire, and the Reformation,

It is the French Revolution that brings about the constitution of Germany. (h12)

.   .   .

One may of course find fault with this last hypothesis as highly Francocentric. France has “made” Germany, as it were, and—connecting this hypothesis to the previous one¹¹⁶—the (French) Revolution has made the (German) nation. It is thus an aggressive hypothesis concerning German “identity” as such. I would like to challenge this suspicion and recall how this idea fits within the whole schema that I have proposed. Indeed, if Germany’s constitution derives from the French Revolution, that Revolution is seen as the resurgence of the Reformation, which arose in Germany precisely as a project to constitute Germany as such. What is transferred to France in the second half of the sixteenth century is exactly what has just failed in Germany as a national project. The failure of the Reformation to unify the German lands can be dated to the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, which brought about the religious partition of the empire. This was precisely when the wars of religion began in France, in which the stakes were the politico-religious fate of the kingdom. In those years, and the two following centuries, the repression [refoulement] of the Reformation becomes indissociable in France from the process of the constitution of the French state—the becoming-a-state of what is termed “centralization,” as something specifically French. The (centralist) constitution of the French state merges with the Reformation’s (royal, unifying, and centralized) process of repression, providing all the elements of modern French statehood. What the French state takes on is its own constitution as a state, as the repression of what had failed to constitute Germany: the Reformation of Christianity. This is the state that the Revolution overthrows—and it is this overthrow that comes back to Germany as an invasion.

What loops back into Germany with the revolutionary armies from France is thus its own repressed failure to constitute itself as Germany. Reversed in this way, the hypothesis may now strongly be suspected of Germanocentrism. But these two “centrisms” (German and French) are equally deceptive. The origin of the process cannot be found in Germany or France—a process can never be understood from its origin, but only in its development. And this involves France and Germany—commonly—in a becoming that is specific to each but nonetheless connected—their becoming-national, or becoming-a-nation. And one cannot think of the “nationalizations” of France or of Germany as autonomous destinies; rather, they are specific formations driven by a momentum that carries both of them ahead. Europe is obviously the common appellation of this process, and here we return to what was announced: French unity and German unity are two divergent answers to its politico-religious division. “France” and “Germany” are two hypotheses of European union. Putting it this way calls for a cautionary word: while France and Germany are two European processes, thinkable in the—European, solidary and contradictory—community of their onward movement, one should not carry over to Europe the status of an autonomous self-instituted subject, self-sufficient and exhibiting its own identity—an originary, founding status denied to every nation here. In this phase, Europe is nothing except the name of the universal as a movement, turning itself around at the point where it has halted and failed. Europe is nothing but the figure of the universal, that is to say, its return (to itself, onto itself) from the spot of its stopping and its reversal; and France and Germany are then formed as attempts to respond to the breaking of this figure, the breakup that happens to it, when it is removed from its mold: the wars of religion. France and Germany are attempts (adverse—associated in their adversity) to (re)apportion [(re)membrer] the universal on the terrain of Europe, which is broken. Their (national) “identity” is the imaginary designation of what constitutes them as specifications, as stages in the history of this process. France and Germany are moments (branches or phases) of a historic process that has to be understood as worldwide-European.

That is why the historical account of their two “national questions” seems shackled to the wheel of an incessant back-and-forth movement. In one sense, the constitution of Germany is problematized and theorized—and probably carried out—from the turn of the nineteenth century onward, in response and relation to the French revolutionary invasion and its Napoleonic continuation.¹¹⁷ The hostility to this invasion, the reaction against it, builds up decisively at the death of Louis XVI, though he is king of France, and his execution might seem to concern what we call domestic politics today. Now, this execution has a determining impact on the political consciousness of what has to be called Europe here.¹¹⁸ But in the opposite direction, this double observation immediately needs to be turned around: for it is the entry into France of the counterrevolutionary armies of the (Austro-Prussian) Germanic coalition that provokes the departure of the revolutionary armies from the territory of the kingdom. The avowed motivation of this intervention is to save the king (while he has been neither deposed nor judged—only crippled) and to reinstate him with his prerogatives. And it is this very intervention that acts as a trigger of his dismissal, of the proclamation of the republic, followed by the sentencing and execution of the monarch. And so, in this specular face-off between the French Revolution and European (mostly Germanic) monarchies, effects and causes inextricably mingle, in both directions.

(Let us note that this process confirms that the destiny of French royalty is in no way a question of so-called “domestic politics,” even if this notion had any imaginable meaning in eighteenth-century Europe. The fate of the kingdom [and the king] of France matters to all: it involves the destiny of the theologico-political as such, the universal lineage of the church and the empire. That is why, as many have pointed out, this regicide is a deicide or a patricide. What is called into question, with the king of France, is the intertwining [in the person, singularity, and body of the king] of the theological and the political, the imperial and the ecclesial, which is to say, the structure of all legitimation inherited from Rome, the genealogy and the lineage of the European theologico-political edifice as a whole—all the monarchies, principalities, and empires of Europe, without any exception. And thus, conversely, the king’s sentencing and execution point to the—imaginary and identifying—intertwining of every [German, or more generally national] counterrevolution.¹¹⁹ The death of the king [of France] ties German hostility into an identity. Henceforth, what “Germany” spurns is the deposition and the dismissal of this ancestral legacy, the patrimony of Europe as such—the whole theologico-political constitution of Europeanism. And, in a specular way, this refusal amounts to a self-positioning.)

To go on with this regression, we may recall that the Germans, in a way, in asserting their national legitimacy rebelled against French (linguistic or “cultural”) domination of Enlightenment Europe, a domination especially carried out in Germany: let us recall that Frederick the Great wrote his books of political theory—aimed at Germans—in French.¹²⁰ Whereas, in the opposite direction, France rejected, at the price of a violently murderous civil war, the irruption of the principle of the Reformation, born in Germany. Meanwhile, in one way, Luther himself, in his project to reform Germany, saw in the kingdom of France a model of autonomy with regard to Rome—“national” avant la lettre—something that Germany was tragically lacking and that served as an example.¹²¹ And to this one should add, at last, in the opposite direction, in a certain royalist (or other) imaginary, the idea of the Germanic origin of the noble parts of France’s social body.¹²²

France and Germany thus appear twinned, the doubly mingled branches of a unique arborescence, pertaining to the process that is tearing up and reunifying politico-religious Europe. But beyond the identificatory face-off that this confrontation keeps reproducing between the two nations, it is the constitutive interdependence of the revolutionary and national problematics that makes it possible to understand the processual dependence thus described. Revolution and nation are the two sides of a single question, the two poles of one process. And this does not lessen their antagonism, but rather explains it, and interprets the violence of their conflict. There is no revolution that does not rise to become a national hypostasis, and there is no nation that does not bank on a revolutionary uprising. Nationalism can appear progressive (such as France’s after 1792), or regressive (such as Germany’s a little later), and while this in fact changes numerous characteristics in their description, it in no way affects this kinship: nationalism—every nationalism—finds energy and resources in being charged by the process of a revolution. The counterrevolution is nothing without the revolution that brings it. The counterrevolution wants to crush that which it counters, but it does so by imitating it and identifying with the truth of its destiny, and that makes the counterrevolution something other than a passéist restoration. Restoration concerns the rich, who have been dispossessed and are coming back. The counterrevolution has a different scope: it wants to fulfill what the revolution has missed and to negate it by completing, superseding, and finishing it. The counterrevolution is revolutionary—this is what makes for its seductiveness, its dangers, and its own demonism. It imitates the revolution just as Satan mimics God. And in this imitation something comes across: the limit is not hermetically sealed. The nation is the appellation, in the revolutionary process, of that which returns to itself, is given figure, and closes up, even as an image of the universal—such as the French universalist nation: expansionist, Napoleonic, and colonizing.¹²³ But the Revolution is the engine of every nationalism, even the most ferociously reactive one: it only reacts in the conflict and specular rivalry with a revolution that spawns it—such as the German particularist nation: since the particular is nothing but the reverse of the universal and carries some of the universalist charge from which it results. There is a pact between the greatness of France and the freedom of the world, Charles de Gaulle claimed,¹²⁴ a universalism incarnated in French singularity just as the divine is in the person of Christ. Fichte wrote that the German nation (in the particularity of his time, his place, and his language) marks the rise of a new humanity, a new creation:¹²⁵ the particular taking charge of the destiny of the whole. Such are the two faces of this uprising—divine or diabolical, as one prefers: Janus bifrons, nation and revolution, a monstrous two-faced god. Wishing or thinking oneself in solidarity with revolutions henceforth must not prevent this acknowledgment. Quite to the contrary—all the same, one day, there will have to be an insurrection that does not turn into its monstrous form. That is why we have to keep looking at and describing the double, reversible, and retractable constitution of revolutions and nations; it is after this that we have to think.