The Great Transformation

The man who did more than anyone else to start the Great Transfor­mation was, perhaps, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).^[204] Of petit-bour­geois origins - his father, though full of his own importance, was a watchmaker - he spent much of his life away from his native Geneva as a penniless exile; the more extensive his wanderings the more he harked back to it, painting it in splendid hues and glorifying its supposed vir­tues.

While the transformation of the patrie from the place where one had been born into the highest of all earthly ideals was thus accomplished almost at a single stroke, still Rousseau was no nationalist. As he made clear in the Confessions, to him the essence of the patrie consisted not of some lofty ideals but of the most humdrum aspects of its existence: such as the language its people spoke, the clothes they wore, the customs they observed, the festivals they celebrated, even the streets and houses they built in a style that was uniquely their own and in which they spent their lives.

These were the days when, reacting to the universalistic ideas of the Enlightenment (man, essentially a rational creature, was the same every­where), the first stirrings of nationalism made themselves felt in several countries.¹⁰ The writers in question sought to rescue what was unique in each people's culture from the clutches of the philosophes: particularly as most of the latter spoke and wrote in French. Thus, in Switzerland, Franz Urs Baltheassar's Patriotic Dreams of a Swiss (1758) sang the praise of the simple, virtuous, and free lives supposedly led by the Swiss peasants in their mountain huts. Using as his vehicle the first modern Zurich newspaper, which was published by his friend Heinrich Ffissli, Baltheassar sought to rescue anything that was native and authentic, even going so far as to suggest that Swiss girls choose their husbands for their patriotic virtues rather than for wealth. Less utopian was the founding of the Helvetic Society which represented the first organized manifestation of modern Swiss nationalism and whose most important

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SeeJ. H. Shennan, ‘‘The Rise ofPatriotism in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” History of European Ideas, 13, 6, 1991, pp.

In Germany during those very years a role similar to that of Baltheassar was being played by Justus Moser and his weekly paper, the Patriotic Fantasies. A jurist by trade - he had served as chief judge on the criminal court of his native Osnabrück - and a follower of Montesquieu, Moser before he turned into a social critic had witnessed petty tyranny at first hand. His bete noire was the arbitrary laws which such tyranny had imposed on the German states; his chief demand, that they be changed so as to suit the national spirit or Nationalgeist. However, Moser differed from his French master in that this spirit was not a neutral factor and did not stand merely for the characteristics of each nation as impressed on it by the facts of race, geography, climate, history, etc. What to Montes­quieu had been merely an observable fact that had to be taken into account for the sake of good government was turned into something uniquely precious; like Rousseau, Moser saw in it both the source of the individual’s life and, more pertinent for our purpose, that which held different nations together while separating them from each other.

The most important eighteenth-century representative of what one author has called ‘‘humanitarian’’ nationalism^[207] was, however, another German publicist, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). As an early Romantic, Herder was only incidentally interested in law, that system of dry-as-dust regulations by which each ruler surrounded him­self. Instead his concern was with the Wesen or inner being of each nation which, to him, was no less a thing than a manifestation of the divine. He denounced the Enlightenment emphasis on the rational and the uniform in favor of the unique and the different: ‘‘no individual, no country, no people, no history of a people, no state is like any other.

Again it cannot be emphasized too strongly that, whatever the kind of community in which they lived or which they had in mind, these and other eighteenth-century intellectuals were no nationalists in the modern, political sense. Some, having replaced Christianity with deism, merely studied different cultures as a way of bringing out the beauty of the creation in all its manifold forms - like a garden of separate flower beds each worthy of being admired on its own. Others, slightly more practically minded, were motivated by the need to understand the spirit of each nation as the basis for doing away with antiquated laws and creating a just social order. Some, such as Rousseau, held democratic and even revol­utionary views, whereas others were inclined to accept almost any politi­cal regime so long as it allowed culture to develop freely. Herder himself went on record as saying that nothing was so ridiculous as the pretensions of any one nation to superiority, let alone claims of political domination which, far from advancing culture, would create ‘‘a wild mixture of breeds and nations under one scepter.’’ His attitude was typical for German intellectuals of his day.

It was only in the years after 1789, when some of the intellectuals came to power and when their ruminations were married to the pretensions of the state, that the picture changed. Leaving the study, nationalism took on an aggressive, bellicose character; nowhere was this more true than in Germany, previously celebrated as the country of‘‘poets and thinkers’’ in which close acquaintance with French bayonets, French rule, and French marauders led to a violent reaction from 1806 on. In particular, Napo­leon’s victory over Prussia transformed one philosopher - Johan Gottlieb Fichte, hitherto known mainly as a harmless follower of Kant - into a rabble-rousing orator of remarkable force. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1807-8), Fichte elevated anti-French sentiment almost to the rank of a religious principle; from that point on even to teach one’s daughter French, the common language of the Enlightenment, was to deliver her into prostitution. His work marks the point where German national feeling, long cosmopolitan and inclined toward pacifism, ceased to be so and assumed the militant and chauvinistic character that it was to retain during much of the period until 1945.¹⁴

During the very years that Fichte was thundering away from his Uni­versity of Berlin chair, the marriage of nation and state was consum­mated at the theoretical level by another and greater professor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A native of Stuttgart in southwestern Ger­many, Hegel had been brought up to follow his father as a Protestant pastor; however, during his period of study at the University of Tübingen he met with wine, women, and song, and lost his faith in a personal God. He spent time as a private tutor at Bern - where, like Moser half a century previously, he came to know and detest the petty tyranny that charac­terized city-states at their worst - and Frankfurt before settling down at Jena in 1801.

Though he was in many ways a child of the Enlightenment and thus inclined to believe in rationality as the supreme good, Hegel's loss of faith left him with the question as to whose reason directed the affairs of society and of man. For an answer he turned from the personal God of Christianity to the impersonal Spirit of History or Weltgeist, thus setting up a secular religion whose high priest, needless to say, was Hegel himself. Where Hegel differed from others, however, was that he at­tributed reason - and thus the shaping of history - neither to humanity as a whole nor to the individuals of which it consisted but to the separate political communities or states in which they lived. Composing civil society, individuals merely reproduced themselves without change from one generation to the next. Their principal occupation in life consisted of haggling with each other for petty economic advantage; as they were self-serving and capricious, their doings were scarcely worth noting by the philosopher concerned with higher things. By contrast, states were mighty, hence important and ‘‘world-historical,'' organizations. Each one was not just a system of government but an idea incarnate which manifested itself in that system. Like Hobbes, Hegel saw the state's most important characteristic and the one in which it differed from other organizations as its sovereignty. Unlike Hobbes, he did not see this sovereignty merely as an instrument for imposing law and order but endowed it with high ethical content. Acknowledging no superior, alone

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On Fichte and the origins of German nationalism in this period, see above all H. Kohn, The Mind of Germany (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), pp. 68-98. of all institutions on earth the state possessed the freedom to develop in accordance with its own nature, a freedom which it bestowed on its citizens (so long as they cooperated with it) and which provided it with its justification. From a machine designed to serve this purpose or that, the state was elevated into nothing less than ‘‘the echo of God's footsteps on earth.''¹⁵ History itself was transformed, turning from a formless mass of facts into the record of states rising, growing, clashing with each other, reaching maturity, and decaying in an everlasting search for a more perfect political order that was at the same time a more perfect truth. Moreover, and standing in sharp contrast to Locke as well as the Fathers of the American Revolution, Hegel considered that true freedom for the individual was possible only within the state. Take the state away and man was reduced to nothing at all, a puny biological creature whose life was divorced from the world-spirit and, in this sense, devoid of ethical significance.

Like Fichte, Hegel spent his last years at the University of Berlin where his lectures were much admired but little understood (his greatest work, The Philosophy of Right, took twenty years to sell 500 copies). His death in 1831 marks the end of the Great Transformation that had been started by Rousseau; but whereas Rousseau, harking back to a primitive past, had still spoken of the organized community as his ideal, Hegel was unhesitant in pointing to the state as the community's highest, indeed sole, representative. Embodying freedom and acknowledging no judge above themselves, the one way for states to play out their historical destiny was to pit themselves against other states by means of war, which thus became the principal tool whereby the world-historical spirit unfol­ded itself; without it everything tended to sink into selfishness and medi­ocrity.¹⁶ The result was that each state had to be made as strong as possible. For all that he saw the task of the state as protecting the national culture and creating a suitable environment for its development, Hegel would not have been Hegel had there not been present in his thought a strain that adored power politics as such.

Nationalists coming after Hegel frequently disputed the idea that the Prussia of 1820 or so was the best of all possible states, preferring to bestow that distinction on their own countries instead. Some, such as the Frenchmen Francois Guizot and the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, were dyed-in-the-wool liberals; if not necessarily in favor of popular democ­racy, at any rate they did their best to combine national greatness with personal freedom for the individual. Others, particularly in Germany and Eastern Europe but with strong representation in France also, dis-

¹⁵ Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, tr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 279.

¹⁶ See S. B. Smith, ‘‘Hegel's Views on War, the State and International Relations,''

American Political Science Review, 7, 1983, pp. 624-32. agreed. Fully prepared to do away with personal freedom if it failed to serve national goals, they adopted either an authoritarian and reaction­ary standpoint or else a populist and even revolutionary one.^[210] Whatever their views concerning the kind of regime that was most suitable for their respective national cultures, almost without exception they agreed with Hegel concerning the need for their own states to develop their indepen­dence and power. If possible this was to be done in harmony with others, as Mazzini in particular hoped; but if necessary it could be at the expense of their neighbors and by using as much armed force as it took to achieve national liberation (also of fellow nationals currently living in other states), natural frontiers, a place under the sun, or what other phrase could be made to justify territorial expansion. All this helped fuel the kind of interstate rivalry that was to be such a prominent feature of the period from 1848 to 1945 and which, exploding into flame, ultimately led to two world wars as well as a whole series of smaller ones.

Born in the dreamlike visions of a few intellectuals and subsequently dressing itself in a respectable academic mantle, nationalism could not have acquired the force that it did had it not been able to transform itself into a mass movement as well. The first state to deliberately mobilize the masses for its own purposes was Revolutionary France; the magnitude of the task can be judged from the fact that, in 1789, the country was still divided into eighty provinces, each of which had its separate laws, cus­toms, and political traditions. What patriotic feelings existed among the people at large were almost entirely local; as the French Academy put it, ‘‘a Frenchman’s country [was] merely that part of it in which he hap­pened to be born.’’^[211] To make things worse, it was judged that only between 1 and 13 percent of approximately 27 million Frenchmen who lived within the country’s 1792 frontiers could speak French ‘‘correctly.’’ Even in the region of the langue d’oiil, it was spoken only in the towns, and not always in the suburbs, whereas in the south it was not spoken at all. This was clearly an obstacle to state unity and, in particular, to its more centralized and militant version as envisaged by the Jacobeans. As Henri Gregoire, a clergyman who was at the same time a radical member of the national Convention, put it in his ‘‘Report on the need to eliminate patois and universalize the usage of the French language’’ (1794): only when all citizens speak the same tongue can they enjoy equal access to state citizenship.^[212]

In the event, the rulers of France between 1789 and 1815 took few positive steps to correct the alleged linguistic deficiencies of their coun­trymen (in this they showed better sense than some of their successors who, trying to go further, merely covered themselves with ridicule). What they did do, though, went far enough. Sweeping away the old adminis­trative divisions, they set up a centralized bureaucracy with a uniform structure and branches throughout the country. They also established general military service for all males aged nineteen to twenty-six; a com­prehensive legal code with authority over all Frenchmen regardless of status, creed, or province of residence; and a new state-directed secon­dary and tertiary education system that in many ways was without preced­ent in history. No less important, the turbulence caused by the Revol­ution and the series of wars in which the Republic engaged within three years of its foundation meant that Frenchmen originating in the four corners of the country were brought together for a single purpose and mingled with each other as never before. For the first, but certainly not the last, time war became the crucible of the nation as well as of the state in which it organized itself.

To put muscle behind its claims, the Republic initiated a series of huge popular festivals in which it sought to celebrate itself and which it hoped to substitute for the old religious ones. The first one took place in November 1789 when some 12,000 people from various towns and villages in Languedoc and Dauphine gathered more or less spontaneously at Etoile on the Rhone and swore an oath ‘‘to offer our arms and our wealth to the common fatherland... flying to the aid of our brothers of Paris or of any other town of France which may be in danger.” From January to May of the next year similar gatherings were held at Pontivy and Lyons, culminating in a massive gathering on 14 July 1790, Bastille Day, which was thereby established as the anniversary of the Revolution. At the Champ de Mars, the newly designated parade-ground outside Paris, 300,000 ‘‘patriots” from all over France were assembled for the Fete de la Federation. It was presided over by Talleyrand, an aristocratic member of the National Assembly who had been bishop of Autun under the old regime but had turned his coat (not for the last time) and become one of the most vocal revolutionaries. To the incongruous sound of masses being chanted and cannon being fired, the assembly swore to forego regional differences. From now on there were to be no more sons of the Dauphine, Artois, Vendee, and so on: only Frenchmen who joined together in taking an oath to the constitution. During the next nine years the ceremony was to be repeated annually, often assuming bizarre forms as when Robespierre enthroned the Goddess of Reason, planted the tree of liberty, and the like. It also served as the model for countless smaller ones held in provincial cities.

Not content with occasional ceremonies, the founders of the Republic marked the event by the adoption of a new national flag - the tricolor - as well as a new national calendar starting in the year one. Designed by the poet Fabre d’Eglantine, it deliberately divided the year into weeks of ten days rather than seven; no better way of giving citizens the clearest possible indication of the state’s power to change their working habit and run their lives for them could have been invented. Taking yet another leaf out of the book of the discredited church, France in 1795 became the first country to be blessed with an official anthem for use on public occasions. The Marsellaise, a uniquely stirring marching song, had been written in 1792 by captain of the artillery Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle who, as it happened, was stationed in Strasbourg at the time. It received its name from a contingent of troops whose native city was Marseilles and who sang it as they marched toward Paris. It was banned by Napoleon who feared lest the central message, i.e., the need to fight against ‘‘the bloody banner of tyranny,’’ might be interpreted as referring to his own regime; restored by the Orleanists in 1830, it was banned for the second time by Napoleon III and officially reinstated in 1871. Increasingly surrounded by its opposite numbers in other countries, it has remained in favor ever since, to be sung on public occasions amidst gestures previously reserved for religious hymns.

During the Revolution and the First Empire, poetry, literature, and the plastic arts were all systematically mobilized to glorify la patrie and the emperor who took it over and stood at its head. A special architectural style, known as the architectureparlante, was even developed; from the Arc de Triomphe onward its results can still be seen across the length and breadth of France. Painters such as David celebrated Napoleon’s deeds - even to the point of showing him unshaven to emphasize that he spent nights as well as days in the service of France. Like many other things that the emperor did, the art he promoted tended to be heavy-handed. From beginning to end, there was no place for subtlety in delivering the mes­sage, and even less room for doubt concerning the supremacy of the state.

Whereas France became the first country where the nationalist cause was married to that of the state, elsewhere development often followed a different pattern. Where nation and state did not coincide, as was the case in much of Europe between 1815 and 1860, rulers had cause to fear popular nationalism rather than to encourage it. Consequently it arose without them and, in many cases, against them, incidentally putting an end to whatever still remained of the old idea that rulers and state were one and the same. The outstanding case in point was Germany, stirred to red-hot patriotism during the Wars of Liberation but thereafter once again divided into thirty-eight states - excluding, Austria which, though a member of the Federation or Bund, was in large part non-German.

The early representatives of post-Napoleonic German nationalism were figures such as Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt. Like Hegel, both of them came from a pietist background; like him, they were led by the events of 1806-15 to shake off their earlier political apathy and turn from rather dreamy, religiously minded patriots into burning ad­vocates of the German fatherland. Besides giving nationalist speeches, they started planning and organizing festivals whose purpose was to advocate national unity and celebrate the deeds of the German people ever since the time when their ancestors had triumphed over the Roman legions. The movement was surprisingly quick to take hold; by 1817, when the famous Wartburg Festival was held, crowds attended and an entire liturgy had been created out of thin air. It was modeled on that of the Protestant church, complete with the singing of hymns such as Deutschland über Alles, marching about, and preaching; but differed from it in significant points such as the tendency to hold services in the open air rather than indoors, the display of national flags, and the replacement of bells by trumpets. The one held at Hambach in 1832 was attended by 30,000 students, and this was even before the advent of modern transpor­tation and modern means of communication allowed such meetings to be held on a truly national scale.²⁰

Initially these popular gatherings, in which much beer was drunk and some windows (and heads) might be broken, were regarded with sus­picion by the authorities. They considered them hotbeds of Jacobinism, sent plainclothesmen to spy on participants, arrested leaders, and incar­cerated them. However, from the middle of the century on, the direction of the wind changed. The gatherings were taken over by the increasingly nationalized state, which transformed them and made them serve its ends. Naturally not all attempts at doing so were crowned with success. Plan­ning a festival, and then making it appear spontaneous, is never easy, particularly if the purpose is to show deference to the authorities rather than to express opposition or simply release steam. For example Sedan­tag, instituted by law to commemorate the battle of 1870 and scheduled to take place on the first day of each September, proved too heavy-handed and did not really attract popular enthusiasm. People, even Germans, preferred occasions which granted a greater measure of popular par­ticipation. To fill the void, the state found it necessary to resort to parades and other military displays.

By this time the industrial revolution, having started a century earlier in Britain, had long reached the Continent and was in full swing. Dedicated

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For the history and significance of these festivals, see G. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Fertig, 1975), pp. 73-160. to perpetual economic growth, industrial society meant change and a constant game of musical chairs as people gained or lost new employment and as fortunes were made or lost. But it also led to a vast increase in the individual’s ability to move from one place to another; with the spread of the railroads from the 1830s on, the ties that had hitherto bound the common man to the community of his birth were broken for the first time. Thus industrial society weakened or destroyed the older institutions in which people used to live together on a face-to-face basis: such as the extended family, clans, tribes, villages, and guilds, even the relatively small urban communities which, surrounded by their walls, had existed for centuries but which now took on monstrous dimensions owing to the influx of newcomers from the countryside.^[213] Their demise left people feeling rootless and naked, exposed as never before to the vast ‘‘market forces’’ that seemed to rule their lives and over which they could not exert the slightest control. Against this background, already around the middle of the century ‘‘alienation’’ was being recognized as a cardinal social problem to which all sorts of remedies were offered by revolutionaries and conservatives alike.^[214]

Rising to the challenge, the state, embracing nationalism, deliberately sought to turn the situation to its own advantage and began to sing its own praises by every means at its disposal. Gone were the days when such things as national food, national costume, and national habits could be left to the care of mere patriotic societies; by means of its education system, to be discussed in greater detail in the next section, the state sought to harness not only them but also ‘‘culture’’ in the form of history, painting, sculpture, literature, drama, and music. All these ceased to be either a matter for lone individuals or part of the common human enter­prise. Instead they became compartmentalized into English, French, German, or Russian as the case might be; often coming under the auspices of some ministry of culture (which might or might not be the same as the ministry of education), they were subsidized and studied primarily as a means of glorifying the national heritage.

As one of the greatest expressions of human freedom and spontaneity, sport too became nationalized. Previously it had been organized on a purely local scale as fights, races, and athletic demonstrations were used to enliven popular fairs and as neighboring schools sometimes sent their students to compete against each other; now, however, it was taken over by the state which turned it to its ends, including above all preparations for war.^[215] Furthermore, the spread of the railways made it possible to organize competitions first on a national and then on an international basis with teams representing their various states. The signal was given in 1896 when the first rejuvenated Olympic Games were held in Athens. From then on, the greater the prestige of any single sporting event, the more likely it was to start with a raising of national flags and to end with the playing of national anthems, to say nothing of the displays of national rowdiness that often took place in between.

From Argentina to Spain,^[216] the second half of the nineteenth century also saw the invention of a whole series of new festivals: such as Indepen­dence Day, National Day, Armed Forces Day, Jubilee Day, Flag Day, Heroes' Day, Memorial Day, Victory Day, Great Trek Day (for the Boers of South Africa), or whatever they may have been called. Some of these were grafted upon existing religious and royal feasts. Others, generally less successful in the long run, were literally conjured out of nothing. The central festival was invariably held at the capital with the head of state in attendance, listening to and delivering speeches. But every city, town, and village felt obliged to set up a modest copy of the original; the more important the state dignitaries who condescended to come their way, the greater the reflected glory and the more successful the event. Depending on the occasion there would be a holiday celebrated by parades, prefer­ably by the armed forces^[217] but, since the latter could not be present everywhere, if necessary by some less august body such as the local sharpshooters' association or gymnastic club. Then there would be tat­toos, choruses, speaking choruses, flags, banners, some kind of sacred flame to be ceremoniously lit and carried about and extinguished, and of course the inevitable fireworks. To conclude the proceedings the masses were provided with open-air parties and opportunities for drinking, dan­cing, and carousing, while those able and willing to pay could enjoy dramatic and orchestral performances with stirring patriotic content.

During the last few decades before 1914, the existence of any state without such celebrations had become almost unthinkable. Dreaming about a future Jewish homeland, Theodore Herzl as the founder of Zionism became fascinated with the problem; his diary is peppered with descriptions of imaginary spectacles, the more grandiose the better.^[218] Though all states participated to one extent or another, the real masters of this kind of thing turned out to be the postwar Communist, Fascist, and, above all, Nazi regimes. In their hands the festivals turned into gigantic occasions such as October Revolution Day, May Day, March on Rome Day, Memorial Day to Fallen Heroes, the Nuremberg Party Day, Ger­man Workers' Day, Summer Solstice Day, and the like. Even more than their counterparts in other countries, these occasions quickly lost what­ever spontaneity they may have possessed at the outset. Becoming rit­ualized, they were destined to be repeated with dreadful monotony year after year.^[219] The number of participants, not those who presented them­selves voluntarily but who were shepherded to the spot by the authorities, rose until it reached tens and even hundreds of thousands, all marching and singing and saluting in unison, to say nothing of the additional millions who received the message by means of those new technical media, the state-controlled radio and film. Sometimes, as in the case of Moscow's Red Square and Rome's Piazza Venezia, the festivities made use of existing structures or adapted them to the new purpose. Elsewhere entirely new ones were built, such as the Zeppelinfeld near Nuremberg and numerous ‘‘giantic'' (sic; a favorite expression in 1930s vintage English-language German guidebooks) open-air theaters which the Nazis constructed all over the country.

As these occasions were designed to demonstrate, by this time state­worship had reached the point where the original distinction between it and civil society was itself being abandoned. For all that he held up the state as the idea, Hegel had never regarded it as the sole ideal; on the contrary, he had always insisted on the need for strong private institutions to maintain themselves, balancing both each other and the state so as to make liberty possible.^[220] This part of his message was destined to be ignored, not to say falsified, by his totalitarian successors on both the right and left wings of the twentieth-century political spectrum. Each in their own way, Communists and Fascists sought to abolish civil society; of its institutions, only those that had been put under state control and acted in step (or, to use the Nazi expression, were gleichgeschaltet) with its ends were permitted to survive.^[221] In theory, and sometimes not merely in theory, every stamp-collecting association carried out its activities in pursuit of some political goal and every Hausvater became a miniaturized Führer barking out orders at his unfortunate family. Citizens were sup­posed to address each other in the state-approved way and sign their letters in state-approved words; those who still tried to express any kind of opinion except for the officially approved ones were likely to land in a state-run concentration camp. As Mussolini was to put it in his article on ‘‘Fascismo” in the 1935 edition of the Encyclopaedia italiana (itself, of course, an etatist design) - ‘‘everything inside the state, everything for the state, nothing against the state.” In Nazi Germany, according to Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, the only time the individual was free of state control was in his dreams.

It must be conceded that liberal countries such as France and, in particular, Britain never went nearly as far as their totalitarian opposite numbers. Following the tradition first established by Locke and Montes­quieu, they defined liberty in a different way; nor, in spite of numerous excesses that took part during some of France's revolutionary periods in particular, did they ever completely forget the need to protect individuals and institutions against the arbitrary will of the state. But when everything is said and done the difference was merely one of degree. Not only did twentieth-century France have an influential fascist movement in the form of the Action francaise, but the ‘‘strong'' version of Hegelianism had its followers even in Britain where ‘‘the name of the little territory which encloses Weimar and Jena'' was said to ‘‘stir the imagination of thousands of our youths of both sexes even as the name of Jerusalem moved the hearts of men in centuries behind us.''^[222] Whereas Voltaire had still spoken of patriotism as the scoundrel's last refuge, after 1789 it was only the socialists who doubted that it represented the highest virtue or that loyalty to the state in its capacity as the organized expression of society was the first duty of the patriot. The meaning of the word itself changed, from somebody who ‘‘makes the welfare of mankind his care'' (the definition provided by the Encyclopedic} to a person prepared to fight (some would say, create havoc) on his state's behalf. As treason to the state took the place of lèse majeste as the supreme crime, other forms of treason declined or disappeared. Thus, in Germany, Landesverrat far eclipsed mere Hochverrat; whereas in England petite trahison, otherwise known as murdering one's husband and considered a more heinous offense than simply killing one's wife, ended by being struck off the statute book during the 1830s.^[223]

Of much greater significance to the lives of most people was the fact that, acting in the name of all these lofty ideals, the state now approp­riated for itself the right to claim the highest sacrifice from its members. The danger which Voltaire had feared, namely that an excess of ‘‘pat­riotism'' would lead to war, had been abundantly realized during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. During the last decades before 1914, intense efforts were made by anarchists, socialists, and pacifists in many countries to build international bridges of every sort and thus prevent the most important states from fighting each other. However, when the call for sacrifice came, the barriers that they sought to erect proved to be far flimsier than anticipated by the states themselves and were easily swept aside.^[224] With very few exceptions, potential sol­diers flocked to the mobilization centers, and parliaments, even those in which socialist representation was strong, voted for war credits. The ultimate result of the marriage between nationalism and the state was to be slaughter conducted with an intensity, and on a scale, which the members of previous political organizations could not even have imag­ined. Before we can turn to that story, though, it is necessary to trace some of the more concrete means by which the state came to dominate civil society.