Revolutionary republicanism, however, crossed national boundaries.
From Herman Melville's _Billy Budd_:
***** It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the commotion at Spithead followed in May by a second and yet more serious outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without exaggeration in the epithet, as the Great Mutiny. It was indeed a demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the French Directory .
To the Empire, the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson. In a crisis when the kingdom might well have anticipated the famous signal that some years later published along the naval line of battle what it was that upon occasion England expected of Englishmen; that was the time when at the mast-heads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours moored in her own roadstead -- a fleet, the right arm of a Power then all but the sole free conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets, to be numbered by thousands, ran up with huzzahs the British colors with the union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion, as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames.
<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/bb/Chapter3.html> *****
Here's Perry Anderson:
***** In retrospect, one of the most striking features of this Enlightenment patriotism was its universalism. That is to say, it assumed a basic harmony between the interests of civilized nations (uncivilized peoples were another matter), all potentially united in a common struggle against tyranny and superstition. Emblematic of this optimistic rationalism was the argument of Kant's essay, For a Perpetual Peace, that rivalry between princes was the only important cause of wars -- and that once royal ambitions were a thing of the past, as republican constitutions spread, the peoples of Europe would have no further cause to fight one another. In this era, then, the ideals of patriotism and internationalism marched together -- on the plane of values, there was no contradiction between them. Not only, indeed, on the plane of values -- but also, in good measure, in lives and actions. We need only think, for example, of the roles played by the French general Lafayette in both the North American War of Independence and in the French Revolution itself, or of the English writer Tom Paine in Philadelphia and Paris, as pamphleteer for the Thirteen Colonies and deputy for the Gironde in the Convention. Further south, even more strikingly, in the zone most affected by the North American and French upheavals, where the Liberators of the Wars of Independence in Spanish America -- Bolivar, Sucre, San Martin -- fought not only for their own native provinces but across a continent, to emancipate distant or neighbouring lands, in a spirit of regional fraternity.
<http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Anderson/anderson-elb2.html> *****
It is the victory of reaction against revolutionary republicanism that created conservative "nationalism" ("as distinct from patriotism," in the words of Anderson) with which we are familiar today. -- Yoshie
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