obscured even further the emotional and political connections to the republic homeland. By this means, it facilitated the consolidation and dissemination of a universal monotheism—with ties to specific holy places—that would come to be based on different psychological mechanisms and different intellectual associations.
The founders of the Christian Church would attempt to shift this loyalty from the republican homeland to the heavenly kingdom. As all people are equal before God, the old devotion to the Greek polis and the Roman Republic of slave owners would ostensibly be replaced by devotion to the eternal life that would follow life in this world. As early as Augustine, we see expression of the idea that citizenship, in the true and pure sense of the word, could be found only in the city of God. If it was appropriate to die for the homeland, its appropriateness derived from being a sacrifice by a faithful believer in God’s heavenly kingdom.25 This approach to love for the patria aeterna would reverberate throughout large circles within the Church and serve as a central foundation of Christian faith.
The civilian armies of the Roman Republic disappeared with the expansion of the empire; mercenaries carried the flag of Rome not only throughout the Mediterranean basin but deep into conquered Europe. This historic encounter triggered change on the dormant wooded continent, although the weakness and disintegration of the empire is what ultimately freed the European tribes and localities from the Roman yoke. Only then do we see the beginning of the long, gradual process that concluded in the creation of a new civilization with a completely different structure of social relations. Emergent European feudalism had no citizens, invited no heroic patriotic death, and produced no loyalty to a political-territorial homeland. Nonetheless, elements of the Mediterranean conceptual world trickled into the culture and languages of Europe via a variety of channels, primarily through the works and the increasing power of the Christian Church.
As effectively described by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies, the Athenian and Roman Republican concept of homeland faded away completely in societies in which loyalty and personal dependence were hegemonic.26 Although patria became a commonly used word, it was typically employed to refer to a person’s place of birth or residence. “Homeland” became synonymous with the concept of “little country”—pays in the French dialects and heimat in the German dialects—the region in which one’s home was located, in which children were born and raised, and in which the extended family continued to live.
Kings and princes employed the term differently. Elite segments of society applied the concept to a variety of political entities, turning kingdoms, dukedoms, earldoms, and jurisdictions of taxation and judicial activity into “homelands.” The papacy also did not refrain from making use of it, periodically calling for the rescue of the home-land in order to defend Christian harmony and the security of all the faithful.
Typically, the willingness of knights to die was a sacrifice on behalf of either the feudal lord, the Church, or, later, the king and kingdom. The formula pro rege et patria (for king and country) grew increasingly popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and would survive until the modern revolutions. But even in the more organized kingdoms, there was a persistent tension between loyalty to the heavenly homeland and loyalty to the national identities that were always subordinated to hierarchical structures. In addition, the military ethos of premodern European societies encompassed devotion to the homeland in the form of substantive values such as honor, glory, and appropriate financial remuneration for one’s willingness to sacrifice.
The slow decline of feudal society and upheavals within the Church also resulted in reinvigoration of the beleaguered concept of patria. The gradual rise of the medieval city, not only as a commercial and financial center but as an active force in the regional division of labor, caused many in Western Europe to regard it as their primary homeland. According to Fernand Braudel, these cities were the site of crystallization of a primal form of nascent patriotism that informed later national consciousness.27
At the same time, Renaissance society’s fondness for the classical tradition of the Mediterranean resulted in another widespread, albeit unoriginal, invocation of the ancient “homeland,” as various humanists attempted to apply the concept to the new city-states that emerged as oligarchic republics.28 At an extraordinarily prophetic moment in history, Machiavelli was even enticed to apply it to the entire Italian peninsula.29 Nowhere at this point, however, did the idea of homeland reverberate the way it had in ancient Athens or the Roman Republic, not to mention in the territorial contexts of the later nation-states.
Nor were the evolving absolutist monarchies capable of producing the expressions of loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the homeland that would become familiar after these monarchies’ demise in the late modern period. For example, let us consider Montesquieu and Voltaire. These eighteenth-century thinkers clearly understood why kingdoms were not perceived as homelands, and explained it to their readers. In his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu, who possessed broad historical knowledge, asserted:
The state continues to exist independently of love of the homeland, desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay.30
Voltaire, whose historical knowledge was as broad as that of Montesquieu, addressed the value of “homeland” in his witty Philosophical Dictionary of 1764:
A fatherland is a composite of several families; and as we usually stand by our family out of self-love when we have no conflicting interest, so because of the same self-love we support our town or village which we call our fatherland. The bigger the fatherland the less we love it, because divided love is weaker. It is impossible to love tenderly too numerous a family which we hardly know.31
In fact, though incisive in their analyses, both thinkers were firmly rooted in an era on the verge of vanishing. They were quite familiar with the term’s application to the relationship between people and their places of birth and the areas in which they grew up, but had no way of knowing that this array of personal mental connections would be transformed and transferred to broad political structures. The monarchies established on the eve of the modern era lay the foundation for the rise of nationalism by setting into centrifugal motion the administrative languages that would soon emerge as national languages. Most important for our discussion here is the fact that, though lacking the territorial sensitivities that would accompany the rise of national democracies, they began to draw what, in some cases, would become the future borders of the homeland.
Both Montesquieu and Voltaire were liberal pioneers and consistent and courageous advocates of human freedoms. However, both men also exhibited a clearly antidemocratic temperament; they had no interest in the illiterate masses as political subjects and thus were incapable of imagining mass collective identification with a kingdom or political homeland.
It is no coincidence that the first theoretical patriot to emerge from the European Enlightenment was in many ways also its first anti–liberal democrat. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not address the concept of homeland in a systematic manner and found it virtually unnecessary to clarify his intended meaning when he made use of the term, as he did abundantly. However, some of his writings contain explicit exhortations to preserve patriotic values, employing rhetoric more characteristic of modern statesmen than of eighteenth-century philosophers.
In his moving “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva,” which he wrote
