SUSAN DUNN
AND
ROBERT
F.
DALZELL,JR.
651
people together, and sacrifice was the host in this holy national commu–
nion. The people had become a transcendent collective being that gave
birth to a new religion of nationalism, the equation for which was sim–
ple: Joan
=
the French; Joan
=
Christ; the French
=
Christ.
Thus had Michelet achieved, through the story ofJoan of Arc, the
transformation of traditional Christianity into a new nationalist religion
in which the people, reliving Christ's Passion, became the locus of the
sacred. Curiously, he was also reconceiving the mythology of sacral
kingship, for the French people not only eclipsed Louis XVI as a Christ–
like martyr, they took on other supernatural characteristics of the quasi–
divine monarch. They became sacred, unitary, sovereign. However the
king had only been God's representative on earth, not himself - as the
people now became - a divine object of worship.
And whereas the French Revolution had failed to integrate into its
ideology of virtue a sense of either the unique past of the nation or a
moral code based on Christian values, Michelet's romantic myth ofJoan
of Arc neatly filled the vacuum. Here was a figure who symbolized what
was essential in revolutionary ideology - the dignity and divinity of the
common person - but who also belonged to French history and to the
Christian vision of redemption. Through Joan of Arc, Michelet redefined
civic virtue: it was no longer revolutionary goodness, energy, vengeance,
or even justice, but personal sacrifice, collective suffering, and mystical
nationalism. Meanwhile four thousand miles away, a nation torn by civil
war would also attempt to heal its wounds and find unity through a vi–
sion of redemptive national suffering.
*
*
*
Tragically, none of the safeguards that Madison had hoped would
insure domestic peace in the new American republic proved equal to the
tensions released by slavery. Even as the nation grew larger, it split ever
more deeply along sectional lines. Nor did representative government
appear to offer any cure. For all that politicians like Daniel Webster
continued to celebrate "the character of George Washington" as Amer–
ica's finest achievement, most of those who flocked to the seats of power
in Washington, D.C. seemed less and less inclined to take a broad, na–
tional view of their responsibilities. From time to time legislative com–
promises were attempted, but finally nothing availed. By the end of 1860
the Union stood on the brink of collapse.
The immediate cause of the crisis was the election of Abraham Lin–
coln as President of the United States, and within a month of his
inauguration armed hostilities broke out in Charleston Harbor. In the
years that followed, the precise nature of the conflict thus begun would
itself become the subject of heated controversy. Was it a war, or simply
an insurrection, as Lincoln initially claimed? At different times for
