Where does the word "chauvinism" come from?

Chauvinism is named after a man who probably never lived.

The legend says Nicolas Chauvin was born in Rochefort around 1780 and served in Napoleon's army with total devotion. In the usual telling he was wounded 17 times. Napoleon supposedly gave him a sabre of honor and a pension of 200 francs. Long after the emperor fell, Chauvin went on worshipping him.

That loyalty became a joke. According to Wordorigins.org, after Napoleon's exile in 1815 the name Chauvin was pinned on old soldiers who still idolized him. Songwriters and playwrights took up the figure.

The most influential were the Cogniard brothers. Their 1831 vaudeville La Cocarde tricolore (The Tricolour Cockade) put a Chauvin on stage. In their version he was a naive young soldier learning a blindly aggressive patriotism. His line "je suis français, je suis Chauvin" ("I am French, I am Chauvin") captured the type.

The word followed within a decade. Etymonline dates French chauvinisme to 1839 and English chauvinism to 1840. Its gloss is memorable: "patriotism degenerated into a vice."

So was there ever a real Chauvin? The historian Gérard de Puymège studied the question and concluded that there was not. He described Chauvin as a legend that took shape under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, "from the pen of songwriters, vaudeville and historians." Wordorigins.org calls it "a near certainty" that Chauvin was invented to mock jingoistic patriots. Etymonline notes one loose end. A Waterloo memoir published in Paris in 1822 mentions a man named Chauvin who had returned with Napoleon from Elba. Nobody has shown that he inspired the legend.

The meaning then spread beyond nations. In Communist usage it stretched to cover a belief in the superiority of one's own race, as in "white chauvinism." Etymonline says women in the Communist Party built "male chauvinism" on the same pattern. It named the belief that men are naturally superior to women.

Wordorigins.org finds a "Male Chauvinism" heading in the Daily Worker in 1932. The phrase went mainstream with the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The earliest "male chauvinist pig" that Wordorigins.org has found is from August of that year.

One more twist sits in the surname. Etymonline notes that Chauvin is related to the Latin name Calvinus. That makes chauvinism a distant cousin of Calvinism, two words that now have nothing else in common.