Boule De Suif

“Boule de Suif” questions the idea of patriotism. Its wartime setting places the question of national pride and identity front and center, with most of the characters expressing resentment of the Prussian occupation and hope for liberation. They long for “a Du Guesclin, a Joan of Arc” (32)—heroes of the Hundred Years’ War—to save the country, they applaud Boule de Suif for attacking a Prussian soldier, and they are all initially outraged by the Prussian officer’s behavior. However, many of these professions are insincere, while unthinking loyalty to one’s country, though earnest, proves harmful.

The very fact that the coach passengers are fleeing occupied Rouen calls their patriotism into question, as the narrator points out: “They related horrible deeds committed by the Prussians and examples of the courage of the French; all these people who were flying rendering full homage to the courage of those who remained behind” (20-21). For the aristocratic and bourgeois passengers, money is a much more pressing motivator than loyalty to their country, no matter what they say (and even then, many of their criticisms of the occupation stem from monetary concerns). Cornudet embodies a different but no less self-serving form of patriotism. Like his republicanism, with which his patriotism is rhetorically intertwined, it is a form of demagoguery that boosts his own importance. As the narrator sardonically remarks, “[D]emocrats with long beards hav[e] the monopoly of patriotism as the men of the cassock possess that of religion” (20).

Other than perhaps the nuns, who are traveling to Havre to nurse sick soldiers, the only character whose patriotism is sincere is Boule de Suif. Not only does she refuse to have sex with the Prussian officer, but she refuses to have sex with Cornudet simply because there are Prussians in the same building. She is also leaving Rouen to avoid danger rather than mere inconvenience, as her attack on the Prussian soldier has forced her to go into hiding: “I thought at first I should be able to hold out, […] for I had plenty of provisions […]. But when I saw them—these Prussians—it was too much for me. […] I flew at the throat of the first one […]. Of course I had to lie low after that” (20). The personal consequences of this kneejerk reaction are telling, foreshadowing the greater trouble into which her patriotism will lead her by the end of the story. The other passengers successfully reframe agreeing to the officer’s demands as itself an act of patriotism: It will allow her fellow French travelers to escape whatever “violence” might await them in Tôtes, and it will enable the nuns to reach Havre, where French soldiers may be dying for want of their care. The count even links the officer’s desire for Boule de Suif to her nationality, claiming that Prussian women aren’t as pretty. Her patriotism therefore renders her susceptible to manipulation at the hands of people who do not care about either her or their country.

However, the war itself is the greatest example of patriotism’s dangers. As Madame Follenvie wonders aloud, “[I]sn’t it an abomination to kill anybody, no matter whether they are Prussians, or English, or Poles, or French?” (27). The story itself takes much the same perspective, suggesting not only that nationalist fervor too easily leads to killing but also that such conflicts merely pit the exploited classes of different countries against one another. Just as the count, Loiseau, and Carré-Lamadon are principally “brothers in money” rather than in nationality (14), the story frames the French and Prussian working classes as having more in common with one another than with the upper class of either country.