There is a classic expression of [the] negatively oecumenical eighteenth-century êthos in a well-known passage of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy [1768]. Sterne has got as far as Paris, and has been in Paris some days, when, on coming back one evening to his hotel, he is told that he has been inquired after by the police.
“‘The deuce take it!’ said I: ‘I know the reason.’ … I had left London with so much precipitation that it never enter’d my mind that we were at war with France; and had reached Dover, and looked through my glass at the hills beyond Boulogne, before the idea presented itself; and, with this in train, that there was no getting there without a passport. … So, hearing the Count de — had hired the packet, I begged he would take me in his suite. The Count had some little knowledge of me, so made little or no difficulty – only said, his inclination to serve me could reach no farther than Calais, as he was to return by way of Brussels to Paris; however, when I had once pass’d there, I might get to Paris without interruption; but that in Paris I must make friends and shift for myself – ‘Let me get to Paris, Monsieur le Count’, said I, ‘and I shall do very well.’ So I embark’d, and never thought more of the matter.”
According to Sterne’s own story – which may not be true in the letter but is none the less true in the spirit – this eighteenth-century traveller in an “enemy country” did in fact shift for himself quite successfully. After the visit from the French police in Paris, he took a cab to Versailles, called on an unknown French nobleman there on the strength of being a compatriot of Shakespeare, found no difficulty in inducing the nobleman to procure him a passport from the French authorities, and continued his journey across France without further inconvenience. To us, in our generation, this eighteenth-century anecdote reads like a fairy-story. England and France are at war; yet a private nobleman can hire the packet-boat to convey him from Dover to Boulogne; he can take any other private person whom he chooses in his suite; all that is required, in order to travel in an enemy country in war-time, is a passport; our traveller does not even comply with that requirement; yet he is able to reach Paris and stay there some days before the police begin to bother him; whereupon an unknown French nobleman, out of sheer politeness, procures the necessary passport for him! And, with this formality accomplished, our eighteenth-century “enemy alien’s” troubles are over!
In this matter our forebears in the eighteenth century lived up to a standard of civilization from which their descendants in the twentieth century have fallen away far indeed. A state of war exists, but it only affects the fighting forces. Civilians are immune, because War is simply “the sport of kings” and international politics are no concern – for weal or for woe – of these kings’ subjects. The author of the Sentimental Journey is still living in a pre-nationalistic as well as pre-industrial age. But very soon after Sterne’s unmolested passage through France at the tail-end of the Seven Years’ War the spirit of international relations begins to change. [Footnote.] Warfare now is no longer just a jeu de paume among a party of kings; it is a serious conflict between peoples. The peoples themselves are once more at enmity, as they were in the age of sectarian Religious Fanaticism; [footnote] and every civilian, every non-combatant, has to bear the consequences.
This great evil has come to pass, yet the humane eighteenth-century spirit has died hard. Even after the French Revolution, even after the advent of Napoleon, it was regarded as an outrage when, upon the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens and the consequent resumption of war between England and France, Napoleon decreed, on the 22nd May, 1803, that all British civilians between the ages of eighteen and sixty who happened to be travelling in France should be interned. Napoleon defended his action not, as any Government would defend the same action at the present day, on the simple ground that war had broken out. He admitted that the internment of enemy citizens in war-time was a breach of the rules of the game; and he defended his action as reprisals for the alleged seizure of two French merchantmen by the British Navy before war had been declared. Yet Napoleon did not “get away with it”. His action was condemned not only by contemporary public opinion but also by posterity. It is still described as “his unheard-of action, which condemned some 10,000 Britons to detention”, in a book published as recently as A.D. 1904 [footnote] – only ten years before “enemy aliens” were being interned wholesale, as a matter of course, by all belligerent Governments, upon the outbreak of the Great War of our generation in 1914.
During the century and a half that separates the year 1914 from the date of the Sentimental Journey, it is evident that the eighteenth-century standard for the treatment of civilians in war-time has been attacked and undermined with increasing energy by some potent new moral – or immoral – force until at last the old standard has been completely overthrown and swept away. This triumphant antinomian force is, of course, Political Nationalism.
The first of the footnotes shown here says:
Sterne’s exploit was, however, emulated, half a century later, by a distinguished British traveller who visited the United States in peace and comfort during the Anglo-American War of A.D. 1812-15. In 1813 the Scottish law lord, Lord Jeffrey, sailed from Liverpool for the United States, and he walked and talked, unmolested, on “enemy” soil from the 4th October, 1813, to the 2nd January, 1814. During those three months the “enemy” visitor not only achieved his private object – which was to persuade a fellow countrywoman, who was at that time living as an “enemy alien” in the United States, to marry him; the successful suitor also spent two days in discussing the perennial question of Neutral Rights with the Secretary of State, Mr. Monroe, and on the second day he went over the same ground again with President Madison, who had invited him to dinner. Jeffrey’s business with the Secretary of State was the same as Sterne’s with the unknown French nobleman. He wanted a passport (“cartel”); and this was granted to him so promptly that he was able to thank the President for it when he dined with him the day after his first application (see Cockburn, Lord, Life of Lord Jeffrey (Edinburgh 1852, Black, 2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 214-30).
The second:
Volney, who was still living in his eighteenth-century fool’s paradise in A.D. 1791 [he is referring to a passage in Les ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires], was writing in a very different strain a few years later:
“Après nous être affranchis du fanatisme juif, repoussons ce fanatisme vandale ou romain, qui, sous des denominations politiques, nous retrace les fureurs du monde religieux; repoussons cette doctrine sauvage, qui, par la résurrection des haines nationales, ramène dans l’Europe policée les mœurs des hordes barbares.”
This passage of Volney’s Leçons d’Histoire was written by a philosopher who had witnessed the levée en masse and the Terror.
The third gives the reference to the book of 1904:
Rose, John Holland: The Life of Napoleon I (London 1904, Bell, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 426.
A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939
