ABSTRACT
Nationalism was at first a left-wing ideal: against the principles of dynastic inheritance and the divine right of kings which underlay absolute monarchy, it opposed the freedom of a sovereign people to choose its own government. For Jacobins, France had a unique mission to spread the values of the Revolution, in particular those enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to the whole world. Perhaps the defining event of this type of nationalism was the Battle of Valmy in September 1792, when France’s citizen army defeated the invading Prussian grenadiers – sent, in the not altogether inaccurate popular view, by a league of European despots to destroy the Revolution: the First Republic was proclaimed two days after the victory. A similar nationalism was displayed by the Left in 1870, when republicanism went hand in hand with a determination to pursue the war against Prussia even after the crushing defeat at Sedan. The Communists, born as a pro-Soviet party opposed to all wars between nations (though not between classes), prospered only when they captured this part of the Jacobin legacy, first through their hostility to Nazism before 1939, and then during the Resistance after 1941. The Jacobin conception of citizenship was a broad one: it stressed both the rights to citizenship of all individuals born in France whatever their parentage (a principle of nationality, the jus solis, that predated the Revolution by over two centuries) and the duty of citizens of non-French origin to integrate into the nation, in effect leaving their non-French origins behind them.
