[Menydh]

Notes


(Notes followed by an asterisk are the translator's.)

A lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882. 'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation%', Oeuvres Completes (Paris, 1947-61), vol. I, pp. 887-907. An earlier translation, which I have consulted, is in A. Zimmern (ed.), Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939), pp. 186-205.

2* I have left patrie in the original French because it seems to me that to translate it into another European (or, indeed, non-European) language would be to eliminate the kinds of association the term had, in a very large number of countries, throughout the epoch of liberal-democratic nationalism. Parrie draws with is a whole cluster of complex and interlocking references to the values of the patria of classical republicanism. For an observer like Marx, these values were destroyed forever in the black farce of 1848. In another sense, as Marx's arguments in The Eighteenth Brumaire allow, they continued to influence the leaders of liberal, nationalist revolutions throughout the nineteenth century - although, obviously, if one were to phrase it in Italian terms, the Cavourian moderate rather than the Mazzinian or Garibaldian radical wing. It may be worth noting that, in the domain of scholarship, Fustel de Coulanges' The Ancient City (1864), a study which profoundly influenced Emile Durkheim and which Renan himself had very probably read, shattered the vision of classical republicanism which men such as Robespierre and Saint Just had entertained.

The doctrine of natural frontiers was given its definitive formulation in the course of the French Revolution, and was subsequently applied to ocher European countries, such as Germany or Italy; it was this doctrine chat fuelled the irredentist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. Justification of territorial claims often rested upon the interpretation of classical texts, such as Tacitus's Germania or Dame's Commedia.

4* The partition of Verdun (AD 843) ended a period of civil war within the Frankish -Empire, during which the grandsons of Charlemagne had fought each other. Two of the newly created kingdoms, that of Charles the Bald (843-77) and chat of Louis the German (843-76), bear some resemblance, in territorial terms, to modern France and modern Germany. Furthermore, much has been made of the linguistic qualities of the Oaths of Strasbourg, sworn by Louis and Charles to each ocher's armies, in Old French and Old High German respectively. This has often been regarded as the first text in a Romance language (as distinct from Latin) and, by extension, as the first symbolic appearance of the French (and German) nations.

5* 'Gregory of Tours (c. X39-94) was a Gallo-Roman and Bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. His History oJrhe Franks is an account of life in Merovingian Gaul.

6* Upon the occasion of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, in 1572, many thousands of Huguenots were killed. This was an event with momentous repercussions for the history of France in general, and for the development of political theory in particular.

7 The House of Savoy owes its royal title to its acquisition of Sardinia (17?0).

8* The Pclasgians were believed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to

have been the original inhabitants of Italy.

9 I enlarged upon this point in a lecture, which is analysed in the Bulletin of the Association scienrifique de France, 10 March 1878, 'Des services rendus aux Sciences historiques par la Philologie'.

10 Germanic elements are not more considerable in the United Kingdom than when they were in France, when she had possession of Alsace and Metz. If the Germanic language has dominated in the British isles, it was simply because Latin had not wholly replaced the Celtic languages, as it had done in Gaul.

11 Aglauros, who gave her life to save her patrte, represents the Acropolis itself.

12* Zollverein is the German word for customs union. Both participants in bourgeois, national revolutions and lacer commentators emphasize the relation between the nationalist cause and free trade within a single territory. However, E.J. Hobsbawm's comments, on pp. 166-8 of The Age of Revolution (London, 1962), shed some light upon Renan's aphorism, in that the vanguard of European nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s was not so much the business class as 'the lower and middle professional, administrative and intellectual strata, in ocher words, the educated classes'. At another level, Renan's observation reflects his shock at the defeat of France by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, which is expressed in both major and occasional writings.

13* Such epitaphs were part of the habitual repertoire of early-nineteenuhcentury nationalism, as Leopardi's 'patriotic' canzoni make plain.