Degradation and instinct

Xenophobia is a natural instinct in the human species, according to Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Hebrew 2011, English translation 2014). It was a matter of survival. Trust grows only from shared understanding. Incomers, even if not outright raiders, are always invaders, driven hither by a search for something you already possess. It's safest to assume that this involves dispossessing you.

Today we think of xenophobia chiefly as a hatred (suspicion, fear) of other nationals, but the idea of nations emerged only recently. At root we are talking about fear of strangers.

If we are honest we must recognize this ugly instinct as a loaded gun in our own mental arsenal. Just as (speaking of white men of my own generation), we would be unconscionably dim not to be aware of the racist and sexist attitudes lurking within us.

Like other instincts, fear of the stranger has an evolutionary basis but can be mastered, or over-ridden (not necessarily permanently) by other instincts, such as sexual attraction.

In the Life of Buonaparte, Ch LXXIX, Scott says of the poor (re the Allied seizure of Paris in 1814): "In the present circumstances the hatred to foreigners, proper to persons of their class, came to aid their admiration of Buonaparte."

Scott's unguarded views of the lower orders are always interesting. A few pages earlier, he notes this disturbing eruption on the streets of Paris, perhaps even more disturbing to the middle classes than the enemy at the gate:

At length, the numerous crowds which assembled in the Boulevards, and particularly in the streets near the Palais Royal, assumed a more active appearance. There began to emerge from the suburbs and lanes those degraded members of the community, whose slavish labour is only relieved by coarse debauchery, invisible for the most part to the more decent classes of society, but whom periods of public calamity or agitation bring into view, to add to the general confusion and terror. They gather in times of public danger, as birds of ill omen and noxious reptiles are said to do at the rising of a tropical hurricane; and their fellow citizens look with equal disgust and dread upon faces and figures, as strange to them as if they had issued from some distant and savage land. Paris, like every great metropolis, has her share, and more than her share, of this unwholesome population. It was the frantic convocations of this class which had at once instigated and carried into effect the principal horrors of the Revolution, and they seemed now resolved to signalize its conclusion by the destruction of the capital. Most of these banditti were under the influence of Buonaparte’s police, and were stimulated by the various arts which his emissaries employed. (Life of Buonaparte, Ch LXXVII).

This is a particularly negative vision and it doesn't represent Scott's overall view of the lower orders. Many of the finest characters in his novels are working folk portrayed with great sympathy. But here he's talking about a country not his own, about urban mobs rather than rural individuals, and of course in the context of Paris he wants to remind us of the all too recent Terror.

Besides, Scott's views on civil unrest had hardened after Peterloo. Interesting that he refers to the native underclass (from the point of view of the "decent classes of society") as strangers: "as strange to them as if they had issued from some distant and savage land". So the middle classes were xenophobic too: it's just that, for them, the strangers were the working classes of their own city. This was the exotic line crossed by Zola when he wrote L'Assommoir.