In 1879, the truly republican Third Republic, no longer dominated by the monarchists, further developed the cult of the wound by transferring the metaphor from the heroes of the nation to the nation itself. The wound the nation was duty-bound to avenge was the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been ripped from the national body, and the task and obligation facing France was to not let that wound heal. The nation, according to the revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, was to preserve its wound “intact and permanently …
