Mass Politics and Nationalism as Military Revolutions: The French Revolution and After

The Revolution represented the political breakthrough of the notion, increasingly widespread among the pre-1789 French intelligentsia, that France was not a dynastic unit but an ethnic-linguistic identity, la nation. Revolution swept away the old nation of king, nobles, and Church, and created with startling bloodshed a new nation of citizens theoretically free and equal under the law and the guillotine. Asserting equality within and sovereignty without plunged the new nation into war with most of Europe and forced the decapitation of the king - and of the old society he had personified - in January 1793. The war of 1792 to 1814/ 15 thus became - first unilaterally by France and then by the belated and usually hesitant response of France's victims - the first modern war, the first war between nations. Far more than the religious struggles before 1648 it was a type of war potentially unlimited in both aims and methods, for nations by their very nature recognize no higher power. [Author]