lecture 4, "A Nation? Peasants, Language, and French Identity"
john merriman

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two things today: (1) talk about question of when people in France began thinking of themselves as French, which is a big historical debate (2) specifically, look at the role of the school system in that process.

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question to be resolved: when did the majority of the population start to think of themselves in national terms, rather than in other terms? (in 1789, half the population spoke French; in 1871, about a quarter of the population spoke French(!))

it's a leap of faith to think, of course, that the language you speak entirely informs your identity (Alsace as an example, who thought of themselves as French despite speaking German).

In the view of Eugene Weber (who prof disagrees with), until about 1880, you had an "unawareness" of French identity (in 1864, someone went in to a particular department and students in a school had no idea what France was). A view of "savage" France, where people had to be civilized by the State's institutions into accepting the French canon (the worst of modernization theory, says prof).

Three big agencies of change, according to Weber, transforming peasants into Frenchmen: (1) railroads; (2) military conscription; (3) schools, alongside the increase in literacy in France (such that by 1900, the majority of people in France could read or write).

This basic interpretation became quite compelling (by 1914, you had people going offf to do singing Le Marseilleise)

Language and military is, of course, very interesting question. In Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had roughly 12 national groups, to go anywhere in the army (or to become a teacher, for example), you had to know German.

prof does not agree with this view--hopes to nuance it, and to look also at the role of schools in this argument.

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the whole question of timing is essential: when did French national identity permeate the different departments? (language and nationality, of course, is fascinating: at the time of the unification of Italy, in mid-1800s, the percentage of the population that spoke Italian was 5%!)

was Weber completely wrong, then? no, but you need more nuance, in sum. different histories in different departments. it is silly, prof is arguing, to look for one national identity--everyone has shared identities, different things being emphasized in different contexts.

revolution of 1848, which begins as an urban revolution, and turns into a rural lefty revolution in much of the South of the country. ends in 1851, when Napoleon the Third takes power in a coup d'etat. That gives rise to the largest national insurrection in French history (?), to defend the Republic (and the vast majority of those were peasants, and many of them did not speak French! though they were fighting for a French republic).

in that sense, this movement meant that the people didn't wait till the 1880s. so history was more complicated than the modernization picture, prof is arguing.

and indeed, even on that level--the expansion of roads in the 18th century was very important, as was the economic expansion of 1820s and 1830s (which brought people into towns, which begin to make them aware of Le France).

so yes, railroads were important--but they were not the be-all, end-all of the identity-formation process.

and fast-forward to 1914, did the people from Bretton going to fight for France "feel" French? that, also, prof is arguing, involves a leap of faith (and, conversely, not speaking French did not necessarily sign anti-French "backwardness").

in sum, prof is arguing against the "simplistic" view of the modernizers. "it just is terribly complicated."

(what about since WWII--when did patois disappear? in the 1960s, it was still spoken in many households in parts of France, etc., etc.)

(and universities? they are now more active in teaching these languages--which is a welcome change, of course, from de gaulle's determination to crush the regions)

so: be a little cautious in assuming that (1) the agencies of modernization are what created this French identity, and that (2) this has been uniform, and all subordinate identities have vanished.

not disputing the overall notion, i don't think, but complicating the analysis and chronology of it.

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what about schools?

certainly, weber is correct, schools do make a big difference.

until 1833, three things can be said about the teaching of anything: (1) girls were much less likely to go to school than boys; (2) many schoolteachers were mobile, they were people who would go from town to town, teaching for a month or two; (3) that the catholic church, primarily, dominated formal and informal education. the priest was often, especially in the 18th century, was the only person who could read in a given village (so nuns and the priests dominate education, especially in the highly religous regions).

in 1833, the Guizot law was passed. Guizot was Protestant, and he wanted to wrest education away from the Catholic church. the law mandated that every village have a school--but this matters, because each school teacher has a stamp of official authority. (and the schoolteacher becomes the person who notifies births, deaths, marriages, etc.--he represents the prestige of the state, and is so a challenge, in his very existence, to the Virgin Mary on the wall).

some control is handed back to the Church, later, with a different law under Louis Philippe.

so, you have these competing authorities scrambling to teach your kids: the State, and the Church.

furthermore, many parents declined to send their kids to school, because there were no obvious benefits to schooling. (prof citing statistics on truancy, correlated to harvests). but the state soon made schooling compulsory, as it did elsewhere--saying to parents "you have no choice."

the view is, then, that these primary school teachers (hardly anyone goes to high school until the second half of the 19th century) are the people who are going to teach children french. (patois not allowed!--at least according to the rules, of course).

but, of course, there's a "performance" effect to this: it's clear, prof is saying, regional identity is still very important in schools, as well. it's absurd to think that people weren't teaching in local dialects, just as it's absurd to think that people who didn't know french had some sense of being french. (prof saying that in the south of france this billingualism is certainly more pronounced than in the north).

don't forget, furthermore, that these perceptions of "backwardness" are written by military men or Parisians on trips to these regions (much like the critique of colonial travelogues, etc.).

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what about now?

if these areas in the south (which are tourist-invested) are going to remain more than simply sites for tourists from the north, then schools will have to maintain their traditional role in representing the identity of these communities.

in 1851, 2/3 of the departments in france were larger than they were in 1939--due to the collapsing birth rate and, as local industries collapse and the destruction of common resources, there's a huge withdrawal to urban areas (by 1900, the french population is stagnant, though of course supplemented by massive flows of immigration).

by 1979, says prof, 10,000 one-room schoolhouses close down--local educational system, in other words, is being eroded--regional and village identity giving way (schools being grouped with schools from other villages).

prof arguing, our school has to survive! if regional identity is going to persist, it will have to come through the school.

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in sum: let us realize the complexity of regional and national identities, against the modernizers. and emphasize that schools continue to play an important role, and can save regional identity, in a sense.

notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 1-5

(492): quoting john stuart mill on the dubious utility of technological innovation for "any human being," marx seems to approve of a thoroughgoing skepticism. this, it has to be stressed, is in direct contrast to left, center, right interpretations of marxist developmentalism which ally a misguided appraisal of marx's technological determinism to an alleged 'linear' view of history. against these understandings, both this introduction and the rest of the chapter make clear marx's dialectical ambiguity with respect to the introduction of technology: at once a source of unprecedented revolutions in productivity, but also simultaneously the means for the brutalization of the handicrafts, the exploitative employment of women and children in their place, etc. aside from asserting the generally contradictory nature of "progress," then, the specific morphology of capitalist deployment of technological innovation is critical: the profit-seeking that underlies prodigious advances in technology renders them useless from the point of view of human development. this disjuncture between technological development and human development, one thus understands, is left to be implicitly resolved in socialist society, where collective ownership of the means of technological discovery would orient advances in science towards the liberation of humanity. democratic control, in other words, is critical.

(499): the centrality of the story of the steam-engine to the modern geography of rural-urban relations is critical, both in the historical sense that it explains specifically a momentous revolution in human life, and in the theoretical sense that it affirms a historical materialism that identifies the importance of shifting structures of production in shaping the contours of social life. though, in a basic sense, cities remain parasitic on the agricultural economy (in the sense that their metabolic reproduction is rooted in rural areas), the urban economy, now, for the first time, stands to become a concentrated area of real productive activity. in this sense, cities in industrial england in the 19th century are clearly entirely different from urban formations in earlier centuries.

(508): marx here makes a critical point about the changing basis for the "organization of the social labor process." in pre-machine manufacture, he argues, the organization of labor "is purely subjective." as i understand it, this means that it depends not on the nature of the implements being used, but takes the form of progressive innovations, on the part of the merchants/small capitalists in charge, in the form of organizing the process of production. with the advent of the machine era, however (and particularly, it would seem, with the point at which machines begin making machines (504)), the progressively more alienating organization of the labor process becomes an objective necessity, grounded in the technical requirements of production by machinery. in other words, as man, in general, cedes his sovereignty to machines, in general, specific man, in the form of the labor, loses all possibilities of control over his specific workplace. the machine takes the reigns. (see also page 547.) this attempt to understand the morphology of the factory in terms of prevailing technologies is crucial: perhaps raymond williams et. al. would insist that this not become reified as one of many "moments" (such as the ill-considered argument that 'mental' and 'material' labor become irrevocably split at one point in history)--in other words, that this dynamic, the relation of the division of labor to extant technology, needs to be constantly assessed and re-assessed. yet it does seem indisputable, this notion that the machine era inaugurates something totally unprecedented, in requiring a particular form of bondage in the factory. (i suppose, though, that it's only the williams argument that would make room for emancipation, even if it's hard to anticipate.)

(524-525): much of das kapital is littered with examples of the fallacies of liberal narratives of the industrial revolution (i.e., the ways in which they (a) less sophisticatedly, discount the suffering of the subalterns in favor of extolling the gains; (b) more sophisticatedly, recognize the suffering of the subalterns, but subjugate it, as benjamin insisted, in a narrative of future progress. in other words, the past becomes irrelevant because we live in the future). against all this, marx recovers the timelessness of domination. it is with the persistence of this morphology in mind that one ought to engage capitalist anthropology, the struggles of the working-day, etc. not as moments when capitalism had yet to be civilized, but as examples of the emphatically present requirements of capital accumulation. moments that form as inextricable a part of our present experience as anything that happens today, precisely because they explain, both historically and theoretically, today.

(530): remember--the distinction between the individual pursuit of relative surplus-value, and the way in which it is acquired by capitalism in toto. namely, the distinction between the honeymoon period (which is all the neo-classicals see), which results from the successful implementation of a new technology by one capitalist, and the general cheapening of consumer goods, which benefits all capitalists by cheapening the price of labor-power (and thereby reducing the the amount of necessary labor in a day).

(531): the classic immanent contradiction, which leads to the formulation of the declining organic composition of capital.

(542): 1780s, beginnings of unrest; 1833, 12 hr day; 1847, 10 hr day. needless to say, the presentation of these pieces of legislation as amenable to bourgeois aspirations is a revision, in a sense, of the polanyi picture of a capitalism being tamed (if i remember that right). in other words, these are not quite the fetters on bourgeois rapacity that orthodox explanations of them might attest. while of course it's true that these were welcome gains for workers, it is important not to forget that they were co-opted, in one way another, to fit the enormously plastic tactics of capitalism. to give marx's example, the shift to the 10-hr day, he argues, led to an "intensification" of the working day, which concentrated more labor-time in it than had previously been expended in 12 hours.

(548): a specific use of sisyphus to explain the laborer in machine-production. marx and engels as apologists for liberal modernity? please!

(548): here a reflection on the separation of intellectual labor from manual labor (i.e., the former becomes the duty of capital, and latter the bitter fate of labor). in other words, we see, with machines, the consolidation of alienation. yet, as williams would suggest, perhaps we need to remember that more is going on here? yet is that truly the case? i find it hard to see ways in which mental labor is not being detached from the lives of laborers everywhere. we, of course, need ranciere's reminders here, always. but this should not obscure, i don't think, the emphatically true suggestions that alienation intensifies with the ascent of the machine over handicraft/manufacture.

(549): a reminder, again, of foucault's debt to marx. aside from the talk about disciplining an entire population to accept the dictates and routines of industrial production and urban life (teaching workers to consume, for example), here marx writes of the implementation of specific intra-factory codes. the formation of an autocratically-administered army at the site of production, in the name of discipline and diligence (and, of course, as marx makes explicit at the top of 550, in defiance of the representative 'democratic' tradition laid claim to at the time).

(557-559): marx formulates briefly an argument about how the implementation of machinery creates (and re-creates, as time progresses), an reserve army of labor. specifically, he writes of english hand-loom weavers, and--critically to the caricatures of marx as colonial apologist--of the weavers in india who were devastated by english innovation. these examples, and this general history, is his explanation for luddite rejoinders to machinery. yet, of course, it's not that these open up revolutionary possibilities; in that sense, they are, however regrettably, only birth-pangs of the new order.

al-qaeda and the modernist wall:
I shall discuss an approach I have termed the "modernist wall", which seeks to deconstruct the ethical and epistemological structure of jihadist mentality, with an eye to obtaining a better grasp of what shapes it and how it works.
(...) this process of metamorphosis could not have brewed and regenerated itself in the absence of a major ingredient: the West's extremism in posing itself as the ultimate way of life, denigrating all other alternatives and forcing anyone who differs into having to choose either between identifying with it fully, at the cost of his religious and personal persona, or to turn fully and thoroughly against it.
(...) [dawkins fits here] The predicament of positivists, according to Gray, is that they believe that the more science advances, the more people will share the same values and, by extension, the solider will become the embodiment of the ethics of secularism, enlightenment and peace. Al-Qaeda essentially destroyed this hypothesis, not so much because of Al-Qaeda itself but because the persistence in promoting this hypothesis breeds violent organisations bent on destroying it. Such is the case with "end of history" theories, which implicitly put paid to the notion of cultural coexistence. These have become an important source for generating and fuelling "exclusionist" cathartic movements set upon seizing the helm of history and steering it towards "redemption". All jihadist movements in the Islamic world have been motivated by the sense that the West is relentlessly attacking their history and civilisation with the purpose of effacing them and supplanting them with its own. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Islamist revivalist creed perpetuates itself so easily, feeding as it does on the very substance of Western modernism.

on third world theories of imperialism (thomas hodgkin):
[along what lines have these theorists criticised the presuppositions of western imperial historians and apologists in general?] ...against the classic Western (particularly Western missionary) thesis that imperialism has meant the substitution of ´civilised´for ´barbarous´ systems of government, society, values, etc., these theorists asserted the antithesis that imperialism has in fact meant the destruction of valid African, or non-Western, civilisations and the substitution of new forms of Western barbarism. (103)
(...) A second element in this reinterpretation of the civilisation/barbarism antithesis is the proposition that there is no necessary connection between the level of a people´s technological development and the quality of its civilisation. This is, essentially, the cultural relativist view, which Blyden did much to foster, that terms such as ´higher´and ´lower´can be applied to levels of technological or economic development but not to civilisations that no set of criteria exists on the basis of which one can rationally argue that the civilisation of the French bourgeoisie under the their republic was qualitatively superior to, say, the civilisation of the Segu empire under Ahmadu Shehu... This view can be pushed further and developed into a Narodnik theory of the nastiness and undesirability of ´high´ civilizations in general [see Emile Faure] (105)
(...) [How far do the dominant ideas of these African and third-world theorists fit with the broad lines of Marxist, and more specifically Leninist, theory?] One [of 4 themes of disagreement/contributions] is their emphasis on the communal, anti-capitalist (and not merely precapitalist), cooperative, democratic, fraternal values and institutions of African, or non-Western, precolonial societies, ´systematically destroyed by imperialism´; their rejection of theories which assert or imply the idea of unilinear progress from ´lower´to ´higher´stages of social organisation, and thus of those interpretations (or distortions or vulgarisations?) of Marxism which fall within this category. [see Aimé Césaire] (109-110)
(...) A second theme is the notion of the dehumanising effects of imperialism on the colonised societies and the reimportation of the ideas and attitudes and institutions and techniques which have been used by the bourgeoisie of the colonising countries to impose and maintain their domination over the colonised into the metropolitan societies for use against their own people. This idea, of the specially corrupting effects of imperialism on the social and political life of the imperialists, was of course present and important in Marx and his successors... But for third-world theorists like Césaire and Fanon the idea of the terrible feedback effects of imperialism has a new and pivotal significance. (111)
(...) A third theme is the idea of a necessary, continuing, irreconcilable antagonism (in the context of a world in which imperialism remains a dominant force) between the interests of the advanced, Western, and predominantly ´white´, colonising societies and the interests of the proletarian, non-Western, and predominantly ´non-white, colonial and semicolonial societies. In a sense this means taking the contradiction between the imperialist countries and the colonial peoples and insisting that it has priority over all other contradictions, blurring (from a more ´orthodox´ Marxist point of view) the internal contradictions within both colonising and colonised societies. Thus Sultan Galiyev argued that ´since almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed formerly by the colonialists, all are entitled to be called proletarian... The Muslim peoples are proletarian peoples.´
(...) Towards the [Leninist conception of the essential interdependence of the interests of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries and the exploited masses in the colonial and semicolonial countries]...these third-world theorists have tended to take up and attitude of methodical doubt... [expressing] a belief in the necessity for the colonial and former colonial peoples of the world to recover the historical initiative, and for the direction, character, pace and methods of change within the third world to be primarily their responsibility, not the responsibility of even the most radical or revolutionary sectors of the populations of the advanced countries; a new emphasis on the importance of the idea of creating wider alliances among the peoples of the third world. (113)
[in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, eds. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, 1972]