ABSTRACT
All nineteenth-century radicals identified militant republicanism as an essential element of French national identity. For politicians nurtured on Michelet and Hugo, the republic and the fatherland were indissolubly joined. No one better personified this union than the radical leader Camille Pelletan. In an 1899 campaign speech Pelletan passionately defended the genuine-in other words republican-patriotism of radicals and socialists against the false nationalism of the republic’s latest critics. He was proud of his old beliefs which promoted the traditions of 1792. His ‘blood boiled’ to hear those who were the political heirs of the aristocratic emigrés criticize the loyalty of true patriots, sons of the revolution. Not unlike Barrès he paid homage to ‘a material fatherland of native soil which has given us our life…and to which we owe the last drop of our blood’. But the fatherland was not only a physical reality; in addition there was a patrie of ideals in which all humanity shared. ‘France is also…that glorious country which has given the world its men of genius…great literary figures…those who struggled against theocracy… It is the country of the eighteenth century… It is the country which revealed itself…with the sublime explosion of the French Revolution…and our sublime motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.1 This union of la république et la patrie found itself attacked in the first years of the twentieth century.
