Nations are born and die like individuals; nations have fathers, in the literal sense, and founders ordinarily more famous than their fathers, although the greatest merit of these founders is to penetrate the character of the infant-people and place it in circumstances wherein it may most fully develop its powers.
Nations have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are. This unity is especially manifested through language.
The Creator has marked out over the globe the limits of nations, and St. Paul has spoken philosophically to the Athenians when he said to them: And (He) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation (Acts, XVII, 26). These bounds are visible, and we always see each people tending to fill completely one of the enclosed spaces between these bounds. Sometimes invincible circumstances hurl two nations into one another and force them to mingle: then their constituent principles interpenetrate, and the result is a hybrid nation which may be more or less powerful and famous than if it were of pure stock.
But several national precepts thrown into the same receptacle may cause mutual harm. The seeds are squeezed and smothered; the men who compose them, condemned to a certain moral and political mediocrity, will never attract the eyes of the world despite a great number of individual merits, until a great jolt, starting one of these seeds germinating, allows it to engulf the others and assimilate them to its own substance. Italiam! Italiam! (1)
Sometimes one nation subsists amid a much more numerous one, refusing to amalgamate because there is not enough affinity between them, and retains its moral unity. Then, if some extraordinary event comes to disorganize the dominant nation, or prompts a great movement, we will be very surprised to see the other resist the general impetus and produce a contrary movement. Hence the miracle of the Vendée. The other malcontents of the kingdom, though in much greater numbers, could not have accomplished anything of this kind, because these discontented men are only men, whereas the Vendée is a nation. Salvation can even come from this, for the soul that presides over these miraculous efforts, like all active powers, has an expansive force that makes it tend constantly to enlarge, so that it can, in gradually assimilating what resembles itself and pressing out the rest, finally acquire enough supremacy to achieve a prodigy. Sometimes the national unity is strongly pronounced in a very small tribe; as it cannot have a language of its own, to console itself it appropriates that of its neighbours by an accent and particular forms. Its virtues are its own, its vices are its own; in order not to have the ridiculous ones of others, it makes them its own; without physical strength, it will make itself known. Tormented by the need to act, it will be conqueror in its own way. Nature, by one of those contrasts that it loves, will place it, playfully, beside frivolous or apathetic peoples who will make it noticed from afar. Its brigandage will be cited in the realm of opinion; at last, it will make its mark, it will be cited, it will succeed in putting itself in the balance with great names, and it will be said: I cannot decide between Geneva and Rome. (2)
Notes:
(1) <The keen vision of one J. de Maistre is not required to recognize with him the disadvantages of the excessive fragmentation of Italy. But the constant adversary of the Revolution, the honest and Christian politician, would with all his energy have disapproved of the methods of a Cavour and a Garibaldi. There was a way to unite the forces and resources of the brilliant peninsula while respecting its righis> [Count Camillo Benso di Cavour described by Benjamin Disraeli as "utely unscrupulous”—sometime Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, convinced King Charles Albert to revert to constitutional monarchy and to go to war against Austria, leading to the king's abdication; he also exacerbated the waning infuence of the Catholic Church by ordering the closure of half of the monastic houses within Sardinian territories. Garibaldi, general, popular hero, and intense anticlerical and social reformer, was privately supported and publicly opposed by Cavour in his expedition against Sicily, later winning Naples and ostensibly leading a private expedition against the Papal States, but with the secret complicity of the Italian government.]
(2) [For Maistre, in the world-historical struggle between the forces of secularism and those of religion, Geneva and Rome stand for the latter; yet Protestant Geneva is only nominally on the same side as Catholic Rome. In his Oeuvres, Maistre characterizes Protestantism as "le sans-cullottisme de la religion", and in Considerations on France, p. 73, states that Protestantism and the French Revolution partake of a common source.]
* Reprinted from Major Works, Vol. 1: Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, Considerations on France, Study on Sovereignty, Joseph De Maistre, Imperium Press, 2021, pp.174-175.
