<i>Patrie, peuple, amitié</i>: Sand and Michelet on the Politics of Friendship

Abstract

In his 1846 study of the People, Jules Michelet championed the peasant as the beating heart of the French nation. His libidinal attachment to a particular place, indeed to a particular soil, encapsulated the fundamental ties that tethered an entire people to their land: “cette terre, où l’homme a si longtemps déposé le meilleur de l’homme, son suc et sa substance, […] il l’aime comme une personne” (1974: 84). To describe this territorial devotion, Michelet deploys different metaphors: the land is variously mistress and wife, in a kind of “légitime mariage” (80). But where Michelet seeks to characterise the ties between French citizens, it is instead the epithet of friendship that best appeals to the historian’s imagination: “C’est une grande gloire pour nos vieilles communes de France, d’avoir trouvé les premières le vrai nom de la patrie. Dans leur simplicité pleine de sens et de profondeur, elles l’appelaient l’Amitié” (199). Patriotism, Michelet glosses, is rooted in individual bonds of friendship; and these are not only contracted within the nation, but also underwrite what he calls “la grande amitié” – a kind of supra-friendship, whereby “L’ami devient tout un peuple”.