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tion that there in fact existed a French nation. "Before the Maid, there
was hatred for the English; there were sharp hostilities between provinces
and there were political passions; but national feeling had not yet been
expressed.
It
was pronounced for the first time during the battle of Or–
leans by Joan of Arc: 'Never could I see the blood of a Frenchman but
my hair would stand on end!' " Michelet writes that when Joan used the
simple expression
French blood,
"for the first time, one senses that France
is loved like a person." Through joan's love for the "personhood" of
the nation, disparate provinces and isolated individuals were fused into a
collective national being.
Essential to this new sense of French nationhood were deeply
Christian themes, for Michelet also molded Joan into a complex religious
figure, both Mary and Jesus, holy Mother and national Savior. He
compared her to a holy Virgin who gave birth to the nation. But far
more important was her assimilation with Christ. As Michelet depicted
her, she consciously and willingly sacrificed herself for the salvation of
others and, in her suffering and terrifying death, relived Christ's Passion.
Thus, through their identification with Joan of Arc, the French too
could come to share in Christ's Passion, thereby transforming themselves
from egotistical, atomized individuals into a community of citizens
will–
ing to sacrifice for, and suffer with, each other.
For Michelet, the capacity to make sacrifices was the sign of the
full
emotional and spiritual development of the individual. It was also the
sine qua non
of citizenship and nationhood. When, in 1846, he wrote
The People,
his dramatic formulation of French nationalism, he was
acutely aware of a spiritual crisis in France. The cause, he felt, was a de–
cline of the spirit of self-sacrifice, especially among the wealthy, and
searching for a source of spiritual strength he turned to a celebration of
the vitality and warmth of the poorer classes in France. For them sacrifice
- not interest or profit - was a way of life, passed down from generation
to generation.
But while the sacrifices of ordinary citizens furthered the common
good and served the cause of "progress," they were not just sublunary
acts. They retained a suprarational, religious character because, Michelet
reasoned, only for a mystical being or entity greater than the individual
could the individual be persuaded to sacrifice himsel£ And this sacred en–
tity was not God but the Nation. As early as 1831, he had yearned for a
faith in which a sacred nation would replace an elusive and perhaps ex–
tinct deity: "It is from you that I shall ask for help, my noble country:
you must take the place of the God who escapes us, that you may
fill
within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left
there. "
The message was clear: shared suffering was the glue that bound the
