Tradition is the past delivering its treasures accumulated over centuries to the present. Nationalist thought begins by saying that everything is natural, so there would be no social constructions but natural laws. We owe everything to our ancestors and to the society that led us to our current standard of living. We must take into account what has been done before, listen to what the dead have to say. It is the century of enlightenment that went so far as to hide reality, the natural construction for an artificial ideal. Nationalism is a reactionary thought to the revolution because it was natural. The opposite of nationalism is universalism, making being French an abstraction. If we say that being French is sharing the ideas of the revolution then everyone can be French, the game would no longer be the land of our dead but the land of ideas. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Enlightenment, we are more attached to a land but to ideas. Nationalism would therefore be the desire to put the interests of the country before everything else while universalism wants France to be treated like all the others. At the time, this applied to the regions of France: Lorraine, Provence, Brittany, etc. The French Republic created its culture by sacrificing its cultures, the idea of France created by the revolutionaries took precedence over the realities of France founded by time and nature. Revolutionary patriotism is artificial and patriotism already existed before. By destroying the province, the revolution destroyed the natural love of men for their land in favor of the love of an idea. Not considering one's country as more important than others is unhealthy. "He who does not love his mother more than other mothers and his homeland more than other homelands loves neither his mother nor his homeland." said Paul Déroulède. Revolutionary patriotism is a struggle for a nation where everyone can become a citizen. This has produced a widespread uprooting. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said "Nature has made Man happy and good, society depraves him and makes him miserable" while traditionalist thought thinks the opposite, namely that Man is imperfect by nature and is perfected thanks to society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thinks that society prevents individuals from being free and individualism comes to achieve this freedom. For traditionalists, society is the framework that allows an existence to unfold, within the limits of nature and its possibilities. For individualist revolutionaries, society is something from which one must emancipate oneself. Man is above all the fruit of a cultural and social environment shaped by his milieu. Determinism and individualism do not have to be opposed by taking the example of Maurice Barrès who, to understand who he was, looked for where he came from, and concluded with "I saw that I was only an instant of a long culture, a gesture among 1000 gestures of a force that preceded me and will survive me." He understood that he is his country and that a nationalist is a Frenchman who has become aware of his training, that it is France that made him, that he is French before being himself. We can oppose revolutionaries and traditionalists on several points: individualism against traditionalism, utopianism against pragmatism, reason against emotion. Revolutionaries make the mistake of thinking that Man is a rational creature when he is an emotional being. Reason is not the only principle at work behind the actions of Men when we are also emotional and irrational. The revolutionary speaks of Man as he would like him to be, the traditionalist speaks of Man as he is. All the progress touted by the revolution is only the fruit of technological advances that would have taken place without the revolution. The revolution has harvested seeds planted before it but can afford to write history because it has won. Family remains the last bastion of resistance to the revolution because Man is not freed from it but he will be tomorrow by the establishment of free union and the abolition of the authority of the father of the family and an education provided by the state.
Léon de Montesquiou