AS the results of the first round of the French Presidential elections emerged on April 23, Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted to be “for the patriots facing the threat of nationalism”. That same night, his opponent, Marine Le Pen, celebrated her passage into the second round by tweeting “I appeal to all patriots, no matter where they come from”.

How two presidential candidates with diametrically opposing visions for France’s future could attempt to rally “patriots” in the second round revealed two conflicting definitions of patriotism. When, in his victory speech on May 7, Mr Macron sent his “republican greeting” to Marine Le Pen, he was partly appealing for unity before June’s elections to the National Assembly, which will determine how workable his presidency will be. Yet he was also addressing the deep political and cultural rift that the election has exposed within French society.

It is not just that the challenges confronting politicians and citizens alike – security, unemployment, immigration – are so divisive. It is also that the competing versions of what it means to be a French patriot are deeply rooted in the nation’s past. The election gave vent to what some historians have called the “Franco-French war”, the political and cultural conflict that has split the country since the French Revolution of 1789.

The clue is provided by the conflicting uses of the word “patriots”. For Mr Macron’s supporters, one can be both a patriot and an enthusiast for the European Union. After Mr Macron’s first-round victory, Michel Barnier – the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator for the Brexit talks – tweeted that as a “Patriot and European” he would support Mr Macron, for “France must remain European”.

Mr Macron’s En Marche! movement embraces a concept of patriotism that dates to the French Revolution. In 1789, to be a “patriot” was not to define French identity against foreigners. It was a civic virtue that put the interests of the people as a whole above class interest, above personal privilege and over the old provincial loyalties. It was a patriotism that sat comfortably with cosmopolitan ideals: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 ascribed civil rights to the very nature of humankind, not to the birth right of a particular nationality.

From the 19th century, with the onset of large-scale immigration from other parts of Europe and the French colonies, republicanism took pride in the tradition of “assimilation”, the claim that the embrace of republican principles and the willingness to live under French law could enable foreigners to become fully-integrated citizens. There was a dark side to this patriotism. Exporting the principles of the French Revolution helped justify the aggressive imperialism, first of Napoleon Bonaparte and then of France’s overseas empire. More recently, the limits of assimilation have been severely strained by, among other things, shocking rates of youth unemployment, particularly among the descendants of immigrants. Yet it is a form of identity that retains its universalist appeal, allowing Mr Macron, in literally the same breath, to summon “patriots” while decrying “nationalism”, meaning the version touted by Ms Le Pen and the Front National (FN).

The FN’s brand of “patriotism” also has roots reaching to 1789, being grounded in similar ideas of national sovereignty. Yet there came a sinister twist in the last decades of the 19th century, then (as now) a time of disenchantment with “corruption” among the leadership of the then Third Republic, unease over French weakness in international politics, particularly vis-à-vis Germany, and fears of a restive working-class that was embracing socialism and anarchism. From this toxic brew sprang right-wing movements that claimed the Revolution’s legitimising appeal to “the people” and offered some social reform and progress, but also authoritarian, xenophobic and anti-Semitic solutions to popular anxieties.

This was the France of Maurice Barrès, who deployed a fusion of nationalism and socialism against traditional republican values and the era of the Dreyfus Affair, when a Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of passing secrets to the Germans. The ultra-nationalist turn – via the collaborationist Vichy regime of the Second World War and the trauma of the Algerian conflict in 1954-62 – is the ideological pedigree of the Front National. Whatever her attempts to “dediabolicise” her party, Ms Le Pen is invoking this exclusive, xenophobic form of identity when she appeals to ‘patriots’.

While, by contrast, the patriotism of 1789 can rally progressive parties against that of the Front National, it is fragile as a unifying force, because it can only temporarily soothe, not heal, the social challenges that helped make these elections so divisive. And with the two visions of patriotism as deeply rooted in France’s history as they are, it is likely that the new President’s republican greeting to his opponents will fall on stony ground.