Chapter 1 - Race, Blood, and Lineage

Summary

Chapter 1 explores the relationship between ideas of race and the understanding of the past in the first half of the eighteenth century. The emphasis is placed on the notion of race as a way of defining a group’s cultural heritage. It is argued that, for many authors, its meaning was akin to that of lineage or genealogy and therefore distant from the modern, ‘biological’ meaning. The significant aspect is that race was understood as a product of history, slowly changing through time mainly thanks to education; but it was also a frame for a collective narrative inasmuch as it implied the passing down of memories, myths, and symbols from one generation to the next, thus creating a historical community. Investigating and dissecting the ethnic narrative of the nobility, the chapter goes on to argue that this was made to coincide with the French national narrative through a rhetoric of sacrifice. It was the reference to the sacrifices made in the name of the nation that confirmed, at least for its advocates, the identity of the interests of the nobility with those of the nation at large. Attention is brought to the complex game of rejections and borrowings between the opposing groups and to the similarities in the underlying mechanism of representation/identification with the nation.