Conclusion: Ensemblance

At the end of this book, we understand that esprit de corps, in all its ambiguity, is the reflection of our modern evaluative ambiguities towards the collective and the individual. Is the group a cognitive prison, the locus of social control, be it political or economic? Or can esprit de corps be a sphere of resistance and well-belonging? Is the individual the engine of history or a social automaton? From the different analyses proposed in the book, four dynamic types or moments of esprit de corps emerge: creative, autonomist, conformative, and universalist. The author argues that autonomist esprit de corps is a model from which we can learn to answer questions of well- or ill-belonging in times of regimental capitalism. With the evolution of digital networks and big data, new forms of esprit de corps are emerging. But it seems that many still haven’t solved what is perhaps the most important question of our modernity: not ‘to be or not to be’, but rather to belong or not to belong.

Introduction: A Thousand Platoons – The Enduring Importance of Esprit de Corps

The French use of ‘esprit de corps’ is often political and suggests a form of cognitive uniform generated by a more or less conscious adherence to a collective body. However, the phrase is more used today in English than in French because it has gained in the former language a general and often uncritical meaning (signifying more or less team spirit). This chapter gives contemporary examples that demonstrate the ubiquity of ‘esprit de corps’ in today’s global discourses, for example political (Brexit, Trump) or managerial (team spirit). It briefly analyses the rare literature on the matter, explains the systematic and exhaustive method followed in this book (‘histosophy’), and explains why a longue-durée genealogical and transnational approach was chosen and how this was possible thanks to digital archives and primary sources.

Collective Temperament: Esprit de Corps as Sociality and Individuation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Esprit de corps became a key concept in sociology and political thought in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Fourier, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and Tarde. This chapter shows how the first sociologists have often reappraised the idea of community against individualism, using esprit de corps as a core concept. The chapter also narrates how the legalisation of labour unions (syndicats) slowly emerged from the contested notion of the workers corps. The author distinguishes different forms of esprit de corps (conformative or autonomist), a distinction that will be refined in the conclusion of this book (creative and universalist esprit de corps). In particular, Alexis de Tocqueville’s paradoxical defence of esprit de corps is explained. The new democratic form of individualism was, according to him, a process of deindividuation, a gradual loss of self-distinction and identity. Conversely, group or class distinctions maintained a level of individuation that was not incompatible with esprit de corps, but rather produced and enhanced by it.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps

This chapter demonstrates the importance of the idea of esprit de corps, both as a critical concept and as an ideal, in the French process of nation-building. It also demonstrates the ambiguity of Revolutionary thought in what regards the laissez-faire economy and the critique and destruction of communities of labour (‘corporations’). In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the influence of the Encyclopédie and the impact of the campaign against the Jesuits, the phrase ‘esprit de corps’ started to spread in print. A new idea was to grow in influence until the Revolution: a synthesis between the Philosophes’ national-individualism and the Jesuits’ Catholicism, according to which patriotism and devotion to the nation were analogous to a healthier and grander form of esprit de corps, as if passion and partisanship could be redeemed by nationalism.

Musketeers and Jesuits: The French Birth of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the birth of the phrase is evidenced in Montesquieu as well as in military discourse, several decades before what is generally admitted by dictionaries. In the eighteenth century, the notion of esprit de corps developed into a fierce critical weapon, a combat concept bred by social philosophers. Firstly targeting religious groups, chief among them the Jesuits, it would later, in the name of national interest, point at social groups perceived as privileged and biased. The polemical and political notion of esprit de corps blossomed in the first volumes of the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, in three different articles published between 1751 and 1755, which are here analysed. The author also shows how early uses of the phrase suggest that attempts to conceive a national esprit de corps without intermediary bodies or mediating communities might be flawed by a scale error.

The Way of Hilton: Esprit de Corps in the UK and the USA in the Twentieth Century

This chapter shows how and why English uses of the idiom ‘esprit de corps’ in the twentieth century were not only increasingly frequent, but also dominantly laudative. The English version of the phrase tended to forget the pejorative political meaning invented by the Philosophes in the eighteenth century. If esprit de corps continued to thrive in several discourses (military, political, intellectual and theoretical, corporate, sports...), it was with a meaning that was increasingly generic and standard, often close to the idea of team spirit with a bellicose and enthusiastic twist. American managerial discourse reinvented esprit de corps in the twentieth century as an anthem of what the author proposes to call regimental capitalism,an alternative to trade-unionism The chapter also narrates the case of Conrad Hilton, the founder of the international chain of hotels, who explicitly transplanted his experience of military esprit de corps in France during WWI into his philosophy and practice of management.

The Mystique of Esprit de Corps in France in the Twentieth Century

The traditional critique of esprit de corps in the name of egalitarianism and personal freedom never ran dry in France, contrary to the UK or the USA. While the idea of esprit de corps maintained its strong critical aspect for example in Zola’s J’accuse or later in Bourdieu, a certain mystique of esprit de corps emerged in Bergson and later in Deleuze & Guattari. Esprit de corps was a fundamental notion in Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,whichtransposed to philosophical discourse the individualist idea according to which only a few can innovate, while the masses need esprit de corps. Deleuze and Guattari, in Mille plateaux,proposed a ‘revolutionary’ laudative reading of esprit de corps in their influential chapter on the ‘war machine’. The authors opposed nationalist hegemonies and the state ideologies of grands ensembles by advocating a return to the esprit de corps of small-scale autonomist and creative communities.

‘We Must Hang Together’: The English Appropriation of Esprit de Corps in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter narrates the English propagation of the phrase, initiated by Voltaire’s friend Lord Chesterfield. It demonstrates the importance of discussions about ‘esprit de corps’ in the English and American leading societies, for example in the British Parliament or among the US Founding Fathers. At the end of the eighteenth century, esprit de corps was a notion that infiltrated the political debate at the highest level. In the newly born United States of America, the official discourse on esprit de corps reproduced the ambivalence of French utterances. A relatively new idea in the nineteenth-century occidental world, connected with the notions of civil society and public service, was that the rights of a people — and sometimes of humanity altogether — were to be guarded by a ‘universal class’ of enlightened and educated officials. Social control in nineteenth-century English-speaking geopolitical zones relied on religion and ‘science’ to present a version of esprit de corps as a natural and familial quality.