Diverse republics

Daedalus Winter 2005 At 1⁄2rst glance, a comparison of French and American responses to ethnic and racial diversity may seem arbitrary and unproductive. One response emerges from an old European country with more than a thousand years of continuous existence, the other from a country formed by European settlement and then constituted as a nation scarcely two centuries ago. To avoid turning a historical comparison between France and the United States into a mere set of contrasts, it will be useful to begin with four salient similarities. First and most obviously, both France and the United States revolted against kingly rule to establish republics in the late eighteenth century.1 In the process, they became the world’s 1⁄2rst nationstates of substantial size based on popular sovereignty and government by consent. By abolishing or prohibiting nobility as well as monarchy, they created a presumption of legal and political equality for all citizens. The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen set forth the principle that merely being human entitles individuals to basic natural rights. The kind of nationalism that developed to defend this radical political project is usually categorized as ‘civic’ or ‘territorial,’ as opposed to the ‘ethnic’ or ‘organic’ type that developed in nineteenth-century Europe, especially in Germany.2 The civic type meant that, in theory at least, one belonged to the nation simply by being there; by contrast, membership according to the ethnic type required the right ancestry. As Anthony D. Smith has pointed out, all nations–including France and the United States–have combined “ethnic George M. Fredrickson

Epistemology · Ethnology · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy

• Judicial Diversity in France

  Open Access•Mathilde Cohen•Law & Social Inquiry•2018

  Add to list

• Black History and African American Studies in France

  Nicolas Martin-Breteau, Nicolas Martin‐breteau et al.•The Journal of African American…•2023

  Add to list