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

Abstract

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.