ABSTRACT
Unity between the nation and the army was the core issue in the debate about military policy in the late eighteenth century. Propositions brought forward at the beginning of the Revolution argued the need to assimilate the army into the nation in order to locate public force in society and in public opinion. The difficulty was to determine what this nation was. In its most abstract definition, a nation is essentially unitary, though composed of a plurality of individuals. But what was the origin of this unity? In the first years of the Revolution the most natural solution to this problem was to conceive of unity as emanating from the top, represented by the king or the National Assembly. Revolution, in this respect, is primarily directed against the aristocratic usurpation of power. The third estate and the king have fundamentally the same interests, the conservation of a certain social and economic order that can only be achieved through a reinforcement of the power of the centralized state.56 This unity for a time made it possible for the internal splits regarding the concept of the nation, chiefly between the bourgeois and sub-bourgeois strata, to be overcome (Condorcet 1804). The construction of national unity beyond class boundaries, however, had to be paid for by the deepening of divisions on other levels, above all those of nation and gender. Inclusion, in other words, engendered exclusions in other fields. The ‘other’ was thus, on the one hand, nationally externalized and the nation defined by contrast to other nations. This may seem self-evident today. It is known, however, that the concept of nationhood underwent a major transformation and acquired its current meaning only quite recently; in the English revolutions, for instance, it had functioned as a designation of social difference rather than of difference between one country and another (see Foucault 1997: 87-8). On the other hand, the ‘other’ was also internally excluded through the division between male and female citizen, the latter kept out of the political sphere. Lastly, the split reappeared within the very individual for whom the internal division became ever more unbearable. This last division required a truly ‘tragic emplotment’ of the political conflict, whereas all efforts to overcome divisions inevitably sharpened them. As in any tragedy, the conflict could not be resolved but by the protagonists’ deaths.
